design research tools

Our first iPhone app has Arrived!

Ian Mulvany34 Comments

I’m thrilled to announce that we have launched our first iPhone app, and it’s free Yay!  You can head over to the app store and grab it here. This is our first app for the iPhone, and we have decided to start with a free ‘lite’ version app so that you can get the benefits right now of being able to read your papers on the go.  With that said let’s take a quick tour of the new app !

In order to use the app you will need to sign up for an account with Mendeley.  You can get build up your digital library either through the web or by using the free desktop client.  Once you have created an online digital library you can then sync that library to the iPhone app.  In order to get the sync to work you just need to install the app via iTunes, and fire it up.  You will be asked to sign in to your Mendeley account and as soon as you login the app will sync your library’s metadata.  You will be able to see all of your collections, your list of favourites, your recent items and also any shared collections that you are a member of.

Once you have your library in your pocket your can search within your collections.  In addition you can also share a citation for any item in your library via email. If you have the Pdf of a paper in your library, then there will be a ‘download’ icon to the left of the paper. You can download the Pdf straight to your device, and from there you can read it any time you like when you are offline.

You can also share the citation of a paper via email, straight from within the app.

Obviously at the moment the biggest limitation with the new app is that you can’t edit any of the metadata for your papers, but don’t worry, we will be releasing a full version of  Mendeley for iPhone in the near future, and we are also working hard on an iPad version too.  We think Mendeley is perfect for the iPad and we want to make sure that you have the best experience available for managing the information that is important to you.  We are really keen to get feedback on the app that we are releasing today so that we can make some rapid improvements.  We really hope that you enjoy the Lite version!

34 thoughts on “Our first iPhone app has Arrived!”

  2. Hi Matteo,

    We are planning on building for Android too. At the moment we are looking for motivated mobile developers, so it will be a little while yet before we get to Android, but it is definitely our intention to create something that works well on that platform.

  3. A feature for the wish-list: bump-like sharing references between phones, so that if you’re in a meeting everyone can quickly (and literally) get on the same page when referring to a reference. (bump: http://bu.mp )

  4. Supercool – though I have had a couple of crashes, it seems pretty stable, and it has a nice interface.

    The biggest improvement you could make (besides the iPad version) is to allow PDFs to be viewed in other viewers, something provided for in iOS4. Good Reader is a really great PDF viewer for academic papers, and it would be nice to use that to actually read documents, or to use iAnnotate to mark up papers.

  6. Thanks for the suggestions, Mike and Ethan. Annotation is definitely something which we’re planning to have in the Mendeley app itself (and being able to view/edit your Mendeley Desktop annotations).

    Sophie: Yes, the iPad app is on its way!

  7. hooray, long awaited 🙂
    one little thing i noticed: it seems, the citations don’t show the journal the paper was published in, or am i missing something?

  8. you guys at Mendeley are great, big thanks and applause. I definitely will switch over from zotero…
    Can’t really wait for the android app, but I have to.
    Good to read that you are working on that as well!

  10. Before the iPad version is ready, it would help a lot if there’s an option to open a PDF externally via a choice of installed apps. Thanks for the great work!

  11. There is no PDF download icon right next to the icon. I am using this on a iPod touch first generation device. View PDF is greyed out. I did upload PDFs for all my papers to the online site. What gives ? Right now, the app is useless to me. Disappointed.

  13. Are there any plans for supporting Samsung Bada in the future as well? As said above, with mendeley on my wave my life will be complete 🙂

  14. Wow! Please speed up the Android app! There are loads of Android tablets coming, and some of them will have a proper e-paper screen – perfect for reading.

  15. This is great news!
    With the new iPhone app, I’m going to start switching from Zotero to Mendeley.

    Thanks.

  17. @M Singh Click Edit Settings from the topbar in Mendeley Desktop and and choose syncronize attached pdfs. This will upload the files to your web space from your computer and make them viewable in iPhone. Took a while to figure this out but the pdf aren’t grayed out anymore in app.

    There is no PDF download icon right next to the icon. I am using this on a iPod touch first generation device. View PDF is greyed out. I did upload PDFs for all my papers to the online site. What gives ? Right now, the app is useless to me. Disappointed.

  19. I love the idea of the Mendeley iPhone app – however I just can’t get it to work. It downloads my list of collections, but they’re all empty, and when I try to update it downloads a few Mb and then the app just crashes. Is anyone else having this problem? Very frustrating!

    I have just over 2000 references in my library, am using an iphone 3G and iOS v. 4.1. Possibly an out-of-memory problem because of the iphone 3G’s limited RAM?

  21. Mendeley is just what I was looking for. One feature that would make this a complete app for me is ‘citing while you write’, on the ipad that is. With multitasking soon to be released I think it would be a great addition for those of us that want to type on the go…will this be coming in the full app version?

  22. Also, would there be a way to reference within the text of pages on the ipad as well as making a bibliography?

  23. I have started using the app on my ipad and it works very smoothly. My entire literature is literally at my fingertips and it is extremely easy to share citations as I speak. No more am I going to be promising to share papers in the corridor to colleagues and forgetting it later!

    Great going guys! Hope the Android app comes out soon too.

  25. Is there any thoughts of adding annotation capabilities to the iPhone and iPad applications?

  27. Hi Ian,

    I am very much looking forward for the read/write version of the Mendeley app with annotations o iPad.
    Will we Mendeley users be notified when this app will be available? Is it possible to sign up somewhere so I can be notified?

    Thanks,
    Katarina

  30. Thank you so much for all of your hard work! I’m looking forward to the Android app!

  33. Thanks for the app.

    Would be great to have some kind of scanning function or a photo function so could take a photo of a reference in a book or something and for it to come up in your list so you can find the paper.

    I have NO idea if that’s even possible though.

  34. This app, even in the most current version, crashes so much that it’s completely unusable. I purchased Papers to have a solution that works. I would also pay for a stable version of Mendeley.
    (iOS 4.3, Ipad2, Mendeley Version 1.3.1 (build19)

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