We are happy to announce yet another addition to our web team:

——

Pankaj Naug is yet another strong addition to the Mendeley web team. It took him more than a month to write this text since he likes writing code more than writing about himself.

On Saturday, October 11th, 2008 between 12:01AM and 6:00AM (BST) our hosting provider will be moving our servers to a new data centre, so Mendeley Servers will be down for a couple of hours during this time. It shouldn’t take longer than 3 or 4 hours. Apologies!

Long time no blog, indeed. I had wanted to write more about the numerous workshops and conferences I attended, but I didn’t get around to it because we’ve been very busy here at Mendeley HQ. Among other things, we’re planning a new release of Mendeley Desktop soon. Without giving too much away, it will include a few long-awaited and highly-requested new features. Stay tuned!

So I’ve been looking for a way to sum up my recent travels. With total disregard for Blaise Pascal’s famous quote “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time”, I concluded that Haikus might be a solution. Here goes:

In Soton I sleep
on Ben’s futon which fails, my
talk is all woozy

Said futon

Listening to Yaroslav’s talk

Moving on - my Science in the 21st Century haiku:

Waterloo WiFi
breaks during the demo yet
enthusiasm wins

Chad Orzel on Newtonian vs. Galileian science - our former landlord Michael Palin making another unexpected appearance

Collective mind-mapping exercise devised by Alex Pang

Panel with Steve Weinstein, Harry Collins, David Kaiser, Lee Smolin and impressively bescribbled blackboards

In short, I had a marvelous week at the Perimeter Institute. Thanks to Sabine for organizing such a great conference, to Mark and Eva for the many inspiring conversations, to Jen and Michael for inviting me over to dinner, to Chad, Simeon, John and Cameron for the nice evening at the brewery, to Katy for offering to help us develop data visualizations, to David and Paul for sharing their insights into the current US presidential election (and Paul giving me one of his Analog SF magazines so I’d have something to read on the plane), to Gerry for sharing his thoughts on social networking (and looking like Albert Einstein), and to Hassan for inviting me to contribute an essay about reputation systems in science to his upcoming book.

Firstly, thanks to all of you who have filed feature requests or flagged up bugs on our bug tracker, your feedback has been really useful.

After thinking about how to best accommodate your needs we’ve deciding to do a rewrite of some of the internal Mendeley code in order to get it running snappier and work better with larger libraries.

As a result of some work Fred has done on his music player we’ve decided that using Qt’s MVC framework maps extremely well to our needs and should bring us far greater performance when dealing with large libraries as well as keeping the code cleaner, better separated and making it much easier to write unit tests with decent coverage levels.

So where are we with this at the moment? Currently we have implemented most of the new non-GUI code with just our local/remote database code to finish. For those interested in this sort of thing, we are 100% documented with Doxygen (both private and public members) and have every class’s method unit-tested with around 85% test coverage.

Without revealing too much you should be excited about this and some of the new features that will see the light of day around the same time as the new, better-performing internal code. This will hopefully mean we can feasible support much larger collections than currently with a slimmer/faster application and quicker bug turnaround with less regressions than our previous releases.

Get excited, I am!

This release mainly includes bugfixes and interface changes pointed out and requested by our members. You can download Mendeley Desktop 0.5.8 here.

Current issues on Windows only

• Mendeley Desktop on Windows will claim to be the latest version. If it is version 0.5.7 or below, the message is a lie. We told it to tell the truth from now on.

So what has been fixed exactly since version 0.5.6?

• Fixed order of authors for an article
• Fixed high CPU usage on Windows when shared groups are visible
• Fixed several crashes which could occur in the client when responding to notification of upload/download errors from server
• Fixed authors edit field in Edit Metadata dialog being very small if there were a large number of authors
• Fixed auto-update on Windows XP/Vista if Mendeley was installed with administrator priviledges but run without them (mainly affects Vista users)
• Fixed several possible crashes in shared groups synchronisation
• Fixed problem where documents uploaded to both shared groups and ‘Publications I’ve Authored’ would appear twice in ‘Publications I’ve Authored’
• Fixed ‘Edit Metadata’ and ‘Remove Metadata’ buttons not being disabled if an article was selected and then hidden as a result of changing the filter
• Fixed articles deleted by a non-admin user in a shared group not appearing as ’suggested for deletion’ (with strike-through text) in other group members’ clients
• Fixed possible problem where wrong documents would be downloaded when syncing from online library
• Fixed documents uploaded to ‘Publications I’ve Authored’ not appearing if the document was already in the user’s Online Library
• Fixed grey text in Tags and Notes edit fields not disappearing immediately when clicking in them
• Fixed appearance problems with inverted themes (esp. under Linux)
• Fixed tags and notes emblem being shown next to articles which have no tags or notes after editing an article on the server
• Fixed Edit Metadata dialog prompting the user to save changes even if no changes had been made

What’s new?

• Faster startup
• Faster handling of library lists containing many articles
• More responsive user interface during login and up/download
• Faster synchronisation between Mendeley Desktop and Mendeley Web after clicking ‘login’ button
• Faster upload and download of articles from Mendeley Web
• Faster re-drawing of library list
• Faster document deletion from server
• Added ‘Sync’ button to refresh contents of Mendeley Web groups and Shared Groups documents instantly
• Added ‘Tutorial’ dialog which appears on first start to provide a simple introduction to using Mendeley
• Highlight document group under mouse when dragging an article from one group to another via the library tree
• Show progress during PDF upload
• Smooth per-pixel scrolling of library list
• Display list of changes when an update for the client has been found (available from version 0.5.8 onwards)
• More responsive user interface during document deletion
• Prevent duplicate imports of PDFs into My Library
• And many more minor changes…

So quite a bit has improved in the last three weeks but there is a lot left to be done. Even though Mendeley Desktop has become more responsive and quicker - speed is still our main priority. In the coming weeks major refactoring work is taking place which will allow much faster handling of thousands of library entries and faster communication to the Mendeley server. While doing this we will try to keep on fixing major bugs and implementing features.

Thank you to everyone who has been testing Mendeley and reported bugs and requested features. It has been a great help.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 13, 2008

Mendeley develops software for managing and sharing research papers as well as a website for discovering research trends and connecting to like-minded academics. The founders’ vision to create a “Last.fm for research” excited Skype’s former founding engineers, who became investors, and former Last.fm executive chairman Stefan Glänzer, who is now executive chairman of the company.

London, UK - When Mendeley’s founders started writing their PhDs, they wondered why there wasn’t a more convenient way of managing and sharing their collection of research papers. So they set out to develop a free research tool themselves, which is launching into public beta today.

Mendeley Desktop, a software client application available for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms, automatically extracts metadata, full-text and cited references from PDF files, builds up a personal research library, and offers sophisticated searching, tagging, and filtering functionality. It lets researchers share, synchronize and annotate their digital libraries collaboratively. Data from Mendeley Desktop is exchanged with Mendeley Web, an online research network where users can back up and access their library database, discover the most widely read papers in their academic discipline, and connect to like-minded scientists and researchers. “As the database of Mendeley Web grows, you will be able to view statistics about emerging research topics in every academic discipline, and readership statistics for each individual paper” explains Victor Henning, one of Mendeley’s co-founders. “Soon we will also include a recommendation engine. Basically, it’s like a Last.fm for research.”

This caught Stefan Glänzer’s attention. As seed investor and executive chairman, he helped Last.fm grow into the world’s largest social music network with over 20 million users. A few years earlier, he himself had been in academia, having financed his PhD through work as a DJ. “I wish I’d had a tool like Mendeley back then” says Mr. Glänzer. “There are striking similarities between the concepts: Based on its Audioscrobbler software, which helps users share and discover music, Last.fm was able to create the world’s largest open music database. Based on Mendeley Desktop, which helps users manage, share and discover research papers, Mendeley could achieve the same for academia.”

After joining Mendeley as executive chairman, Mr. Glänzer brought the team in touch with the former founding engineers of Skype, who had recently invested in academic publisher Versita through their investment fund ASI. Mendeley’s software won them over. “There are plenty of websites that want to become ‘the Facebook for researchers’” explains Eileen Broch, ASI’s investment director. “Mendeley, however, is not just another social network. It’s a truly valuable integration of software and web technologies that solves some of researchers’ day-to-day problems – which is why we decided to invest.”

About Mendeley: Mendeley develops software for managing and sharing research papers as well as a website for discovering research trends and connecting to like-minded academics. The company was founded in 2007 by Paul Föckler, Victor Henning and Jan Reichelt and is based in London, UK.

Screenshot 1: Mendeley Desktop is free academic software for managing and sharing research papers.

Screenshot 2: Mendeley Web lets researchers access their papers online, discover research trends and connect to like-minded scholars and academics.

For further information contact Victor Henning (victor.henning@mendeley.com), Tel: +44-207-2531595, or visit www.mendeley.com.
###

The last couple of weeks have been pretty exciting. We moved offices just in time to have enough space for all the new people who have started working for Mendeley recently. They have been working hard to optimize the software architecture, databases, interfaces, integration and usability of Mendeley Web and Mendeley Desktop.

Some of you are probably wondering why you haven’t received an invitation code yet. Well we have been working non-stop on many new features and we can’t wait to release them; so we’d rather hold off the invitations until we can present you our shiny new version. Also some major refactoring work has been done in the last weeks so we want to ensure that the version we give out is working as perfectly as possible.

Just to give you a short teaser of stuff to come…

• Linux and MAC versions of Mendeley Desktop
• Auto-installer of updates
• Shared Groups (working on tags and notes of articles collaboratively)
• Improved synchronization interface of Mendeley Desktop
• Publication handling in Mendeley Web
• Re-design and usability improvements of various areas of Mendeley Web
• Personal statistics of your library
• Speed improvements

Although there is still a reasonable amount of bugfixing left, we are trying our best to not keep you waiting too long…  as you can see, there is a lot to look forward to!

My name is Mike and I’m a software engineer. No, I won’t fix your computer. However I will get Mendeley running on it because you’re such a nice person.

I’m hard at work at the moment making Mendeley work on Linux. For those who care this involves moving from a Visual Studio based build-system to one using CMake and also fixing some of the inane rubbish that the the MSVC++ compiler seems to think should be valid C++.

At the moment you can use WINE on Linux/FreeBSD, Darwine on Apple OS X and Mendeley-shaped bread in your toaster to fulfil all your unsated academic document management needs.

Running Mendeley on Apple OS X

• Install Darwine from http://www.kronenberg.org/darwine/ into the Applications directory.
• Install TRiX from http://mike.kronenberg.org/?p=69 into the Applications directory.
• Run TRiX from Applications.
• Make sure the following options are selected: In the “General” tab: “MS Arial, Courier, Times fonts“, “MS Tahoma font (not part of corefonts)”. In the “Libraries & Runtimes” tab: “vc6redist from VS6sp4 (mfc42, msvcp60, msvcrt)”
• Press the “Install” button.
• When done (i.e. Terminal displays “All done, no errors”) install Mendeley (double click on .exe file - Darwine will do the rest. Allow it to install into the default directory: i.e. “C:\Program Files\Mendeley Beta”). If “All done, no errors” did not appear then try and click “Install” again until it does.
• Open a new Terminal.
• Run the following commands: “cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Mendeley\ Beta/; /Applications/Darwine/Wine.bundle/Contents/bin/wine Mendeley.exe“
• The last command should have launched Mendeley! If it didn’t or you are having any other problems then post them here and we’ll try and help.
• KNOWN Problems: Depending on your language, “Program Files” may be something like “Programme” instead. If the above command doesn’t work then try to run “ls ~/.wine/drive_c/” and use the results to see where you should “cd” to.

Running Mendeley on Linux/FreeBSD/BeardOS

• Install Wine from your package manager.
• Download Winetricks from http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks.
• When downloaded run “sh winetricks” from a terminal, when in the same directory as Winetricks.
• Select “allfonts” and “vcrun6” and press “OK“. Press “OK” when the VC6 installer pops up.
• When done (i.e. the terminal displays “All done, no errors”) run “wine Mendeley-0.5.4.0.exe” when pointing at the correct downloaded installer and change the version number to be correct. Allow it to install into the default directory: i.e. “C:\Program Files\Mendeley Beta”).
• Run the following commands: “cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Mendeley\ Beta/; wine Mendeley.exe“
• The last command should have launched Mendeley! If it didn’t or you are having any other problems then post them here and we’ll try and help.
• KNOWN Problems: Depending on your language, “Program Files” may be something like “Programme” instead. If the above command doesn’t work then try to run “ls ~/.wine/drive_c/” and use the results to see where you should “cd” to.

Running Mendeley on your Toaster

• Get a piece of Bread.
• Cut the piece of Bread into the shape of the Mendeley logo.
• Insert into Toaster and set heat to at least 5.
• Wait patiently for the Toast (toasted bread) to pop out of the toaster.
• Optional step: Use a Knife and a Spread (any bread-compatible spread will do) and combine them on the toast.
• Consume the toast.
• The last command should have launched Mendeley made you less hungry! If it didn’t or you are having any other problems then post them here and we’ll try and help.

We had a very distinguished visitor at our office yesterday! Prof. Bill Fitzgerald, who heads the Signal Processing Lab at the University of Cambridge, dropped by. For me, that’s one of the nicest things about working for Mendeley - we get to meet brilliant people who do research on the most fascinating of topics.

Bill, for instance, applies his data modelling expertise to a wide range of fields, from audio processing (e.g. automatically transcribing a piece of music to musical notation) to medical imaging and the diagnosis of schizophrenia. Later, during our lunch at Sapori (an Italian restaurant around the corner), he briefly spoke about his PhD research on the statistical properties of quantum mechanics. This prompted Mike to tell a Heisenberg joke I didn’t know yet: Heisenberg is speeding down the highway. A traffic cop pulls him over and asks: “Dr. Heisenberg, do you know how fast you were going?”. Heisenberg: “No, but I know exactly where I am!”

Yet, since Bill has been one of our earliest beta testers, we mainly spoke about his and our ideas on how to improve Mendeley and in which direction to take it. Such discussions are extremely valuable to us, so if you have any suggestions, requests, or ideas, please always feel free to contact us!

I just wanted to give you a short update on our beta test. First of all, we’d like to say thank you to our existing testers (your feedback was very encouraging!) and also to all the new testers who’ve signed up. We are expecting to roll out a new version for testing next week, so please stay tuned…