Hi,
I am new to bookends. While I discovered it, I stumbled upon Sente as well. Although I have briefly tried both the Sente 4 and Bookends 9, I am still quite confused about which one I want to invest in. Has anyone done are aware of a feature by feature review of these two softwares?
I would very much like to hear suggestions and comments from someone who has used either or both quite extensively too.
Thanks!
Sypdr
Sente Vs Bookends
Well your not going to find anyone here that says, "go for Sente". Bookends is the one to use (you are on the Bookends forum!).
Having said that, Sente has a decent interface and is good at sorting.
Bookends formatting abilities slaughters Sente's currently, and the community support and tech support offered by Jon at Bookends is really good. It does its job very very well.
Sente will come into its own at some point though.
It depends what field you are in as well. Sente is really geared to science right now.
Having said that, Sente has a decent interface and is good at sorting.
Bookends formatting abilities slaughters Sente's currently, and the community support and tech support offered by Jon at Bookends is really good. It does its job very very well.
Sente will come into its own at some point though.
It depends what field you are in as well. Sente is really geared to science right now.
Last edited by danzac on Mon Dec 11, 2006 11:46 am, edited 2 times in total.
~I swore to myself that if I ever got to walk around the room as manager people would laugh as they saw me coming and applaud as I walked away~
This reply within half hour itself speaks so much for the community which I am glad to become a part of. I just want to know more I guess before getting married into a long term relationship!danzac wrote:Well your not going to find anyone here that says, "go for Sente". Bookends is the one to use hands down.
Having said that, Sente has a decent interface and is good at sorting. But that is about where its promise runs out.
Bookends formatting abilities slaughters Sente, as does the community support and tech support offered by Jon. It has fantastic customization and is just all around great.
Sente will come into its own at some point, but right now I just can't see why anyone would choose Sente over Bookends.
Hi,
This will be an interesting thread to watch. Note that there is no need to make a hasty or partially formed decision. Sente has a 30 day trial, I believe, and Bookends has a time-unlimited trial (limited to 50 references, though, which should be enough to actually use it to write a paper of modest length). Take 'em both (EndNote, too) for a spin and decide for yourself how they work for you in practice.
Jon
Sonny Software
This will be an interesting thread to watch. Note that there is no need to make a hasty or partially formed decision. Sente has a 30 day trial, I believe, and Bookends has a time-unlimited trial (limited to 50 references, though, which should be enough to actually use it to write a paper of modest length). Take 'em both (EndNote, too) for a spin and decide for yourself how they work for you in practice.
Jon
Sonny Software
I hope it becomes a watchworthy thread Jon! More opinions from more seasoned users would be a great little asset for this forum for future newbies like what I am here today.Jon wrote:Hi,
This will be an interesting thread to watch. Note that there is no need to make a hasty or partially formed decision. Sente has a 30 trial, I believe, and Bookends has a time-unlimited trial (limited to 50 references, though, which should be enough to actually use it to write a paper of modest length). Take 'em both (EndNote, too) for a spin and decide for yourself how they work for you in practice.
Jon
Sonny Software
The thing is, I am a long time endnote user and I am aware of its shortcomings and therefore the decision to ditch it for one the above two.
Of course, as per common sense would dictate I expect majority of opinions biased for Bookends and against Sente in this forum - but irrespective of their prejudice it would be useful for beginners to know what to look out for!
I've used Endnote and BibTex in addition to Bookends. I'm not sure why anyone would say that Bookends is far superior to Endnote? I myself bought Bookends because of the excellent support provided by Jon (Such good support is definitely worth my money!). But as far as the product goes I can't really see any difference between Bookends and Endnote.
*prepares to be stoned for heresy...*
*prepares to be stoned for heresy...*
Well, support is extremely important, as everyone on this forum acknowledges. The following comparison was posted on Macintouch about a year ago:Phil82 wrote:I've used Endnote and BibTex in addition to Bookends. I'm not sure why anyone would say that Bookends is far superior to Endnote? I myself bought Bookends because of the excellent support provided by Jon (Such good support is definitely worth my money!). But as far as the product goes I can't really see any difference between Bookends and Endnote.
I agree: Bookends' strength is the static and smart groups, which are wholly absent from EndNote.The discussion about bibliographic software seems to overlook important differences between the three major contenders: Sente, Bookends, and EndNote. Having tried all three writing my dissertation, I thought I'd share my experiences:
While Sente is clearly the best in terms of maintaining a database in terms of GUI, speed, and ease of use, it is completely unsuitable for academic work in the humanities. It simply doesn't understand how in-text citations or bibliographies are supposed to be formatted. I've discussed this with the developer, and I hope it will eventually improve, but as of now it is unusable if you are writing an academic paper and expect the software to take care of formatting as both Bookends and EndNote do well.
EndNote is the most robust in terms of bibliography formatting, and supposedly the latest version irons out a lot of bugs that plagued earlier OS X versions. EndNote's strength lies in the large number of pre-set fields it has, each of which can have its own formatting rules depending on the type of bibliography you are producing. For instance, EndNote has special fields dedicated to the original language title and author of a book, which is great if you are working with foreign language texts and need to provide both the original (i.e. Chinese) and transliterated title. EndNote suffers, however, from lack of any good tools to easily manage your database into useful collections. Nor does it offer integration with Mellel (my word processor of choice).
For both of these reasons I find Bookends to be the best option currently out there. Bookends can handle bibliographies and in-text citations well. Not as well as EndNote, but much better than Sente. It works with Mellel (and I believe we can expect great improvements in this in the near future). And, best of all, it offers wonderful tools for managing your database into an iTunes like list of groups, smart groups, etc. Not as good as Sente in this regard, but again, good enough.
Ideally, I'd like to see Sente's database back-end and GUI front end combined with EndNote's bibliography formatting abilities. Bookends doesn't shine in either of these areas, but it has done a very good job, and it works. Moreover, the developer is incredibly responsive and helpful - I almost always get an immediate reply to any question, no matter what day or time it might be.
I don't have a lot to add, except that the ability to show all authors in list view in Bookends is huge for me. The addition of colours for list display is also great (Sente has this, and in fact does it a little better, because you can add as many different colours as you like, all user-defined). Groups are now so well implemented in Bookends that I can very effectively maintain what are essentially unrelated databases in one file.
When this thread was first posted, it inspired to to take Sente for a whirl again just to see where it's gotten to. I was in general very impressed and I agree with all the opinions about its lovely Cocoa slickness. However, I was really surprised to find that when I exported my entire large reference database (nearly 8,000 references) and loaded it into Sente, Sente's navigation crawled compared to Bookends. Now, this may not be a fair comparison for any number of reasons - I may have done something silly on the export/import, but everything seemed to be where it should be and working as advertised, it was just that getting around the database was very sluggish. Despite that (and again, I didn't take a lot of time to try to sort it out and get it running properly, it may be my fault) Sente has come a long way with basic formatting. Having not tried to actually use it, my opinion doesn't count for much. Bookends does almost everything I need close to perfectly.
As for EndNote, at this point I frankly don't care if Thomson has finally taken out the bugs. Thomson for years treated Mac customers with, basically, contempt. No bug fixes, period, until a year or more passed and the fixes were released as a new version number at full upgrade price. Essentially no new features except for internet searching between versions 5 and 9. I used EndNote for around ten years. Niles was a great company. With viable alternatives now, nothing would make me give another cent to a lame, monopolistic company like Thomson.
When this thread was first posted, it inspired to to take Sente for a whirl again just to see where it's gotten to. I was in general very impressed and I agree with all the opinions about its lovely Cocoa slickness. However, I was really surprised to find that when I exported my entire large reference database (nearly 8,000 references) and loaded it into Sente, Sente's navigation crawled compared to Bookends. Now, this may not be a fair comparison for any number of reasons - I may have done something silly on the export/import, but everything seemed to be where it should be and working as advertised, it was just that getting around the database was very sluggish. Despite that (and again, I didn't take a lot of time to try to sort it out and get it running properly, it may be my fault) Sente has come a long way with basic formatting. Having not tried to actually use it, my opinion doesn't count for much. Bookends does almost everything I need close to perfectly.
As for EndNote, at this point I frankly don't care if Thomson has finally taken out the bugs. Thomson for years treated Mac customers with, basically, contempt. No bug fixes, period, until a year or more passed and the fixes were released as a new version number at full upgrade price. Essentially no new features except for internet searching between versions 5 and 9. I used EndNote for around ten years. Niles was a great company. With viable alternatives now, nothing would make me give another cent to a lame, monopolistic company like Thomson.
I agree in general with the bug fix comment (although 10.0.2 with bug fixes was just released for free), but not with "essentially no new features between versions 5 and 9." Unicode support, introduced in version 8, is a new feature. It has vastly improved attachment support. Version 10 was released as a universal binary last summer, no mean feat.jadrain wrote:As for EndNote [snip] No bug fixes, period, until a year or more passed and the fixes were released as a new version number at full upgrade price. Essentially no new features except for internet searching between versions 5 and 9.
I've actually found the company -- admittedly a behemoth -- to be somewhat responsive. They explain that development is slower than we would like because it is a cross-platform program.
Whoop de do. No serious program can now not have Unicode support. This is maintenance, not improvement (though admittedly EndNote was one of the first to market with it; pity EndNote 8 was so bugged it was otherwise unusable). As soon as I realized the search bug in version 8 made it literally unusable for me I just switched to Bookends. As far as I know, this bug and many others were never fixed in version 8 - there was no patch issued for Mac version 8, EVER. They just, true to form, waited until they charged full upgrade money for 9.thecritic wrote:I agree in general with the bug fix comment (although 10.0.2 with bug fixes was just released for free), but not with "essentially no new features between versions 5 and 9." Unicode support, introduced in version 8, is a new feature. It has vastly improved attachment support. Version 10 was released as a universal binary last summer, no mean feat.
But, gosh, Thomson has issued one Mac patch, X.0.2. For FREE, even! Wow! This is the first patch for a Macintosh version of the product issued since Version 6 in early 2003 (!!). Every SINGLE bug in that interim period was not fixed except via a full paid upgrade which took around a year in each case to appear.
Explaining why they won't do something is responsive? Well...I guess that's technically true. There were no Mac patches issued for version 9, either. There were no Mac patches for version 7. Just a joke.I've actually found the company -- admittedly a behemoth -- to be somewhat responsive. They explain that development is slower than we would like because it is a cross-platform program.
I can not offer a well-founded opinion on Sente but as for Endnote: for me there are two major advantages of BE:
- groups: i am a former Procite user and it had groups> Endnote does not which makes viewing records pretty unpractical. Additional advantage of groups is that one is not forced to synchronize keywords in order to view similar records (different scholarly dbs use different keyword systems); you just throw them into a group.
- interface: BE offers a much better view of a record IMHO
All i wish for now is the ability to put groups in folders in the group pane
Gerben
- groups: i am a former Procite user and it had groups> Endnote does not which makes viewing records pretty unpractical. Additional advantage of groups is that one is not forced to synchronize keywords in order to view similar records (different scholarly dbs use different keyword systems); you just throw them into a group.
- interface: BE offers a much better view of a record IMHO
All i wish for now is the ability to put groups in folders in the group pane
Gerben
This thread has kind of wandered, so I thought I'd bring it back a little towards the initial question. But given the comment by Phil82 that he couldn't see the difference between Bookends and EndNote, I wanted to give my 2 cents.
All reference managers perform most of the same major tasks, but how they do it is of course what distinguishes them (Macs and PCs do most of the same things, but many of us choose Macs because of the ways they differ in operation).
I'll just focus on one aspect of reference managers, the list view, which is where many of us spend most of our time.
EndNote's list view has changed very little over the years, offering two panes (list of references and formatted output), configurable columns in the reference list, and an indicator of whether there is an attachment. Although I may have missed something, I think that's about it.
Bookends has that, of course, and the following:
1. Info Drawer with a formatted summary view, editable Notes view, and image view.
2. Groups (static, smart (two kinds) and virtual).
3. Live Search.
4. Spotlight search of attached pdfs.
5. Color labels that you can search on.
6. Right-click on attachment icon to see the names of the file and access them in the Attachments Inspector for viewing, etc.
7. Configurable author listings.
There are many other small things, too, like enlarging the formatted output for easier viewing, opening URLs from the list view, downloading pdfs from PubMed, finding local pdfs with Spotlight, sending formatted references directly to your email client, and more.
If you don't use any of these features, then of course you may not think there is a difference between Bookends and EndNote (at least in this aspect of the applications). But I suspect almost everyone who uses reference managers seriously will find many of them useful.
There are many other areas in which the applications differ considerably, but for now I'll confine my comments to this. Regardless of which application you prefer, it is easy to see major differences in the way that Bookends and EndNote deal with reference management.
Jon
Sonny Software
All reference managers perform most of the same major tasks, but how they do it is of course what distinguishes them (Macs and PCs do most of the same things, but many of us choose Macs because of the ways they differ in operation).
I'll just focus on one aspect of reference managers, the list view, which is where many of us spend most of our time.
EndNote's list view has changed very little over the years, offering two panes (list of references and formatted output), configurable columns in the reference list, and an indicator of whether there is an attachment. Although I may have missed something, I think that's about it.
Bookends has that, of course, and the following:
1. Info Drawer with a formatted summary view, editable Notes view, and image view.
2. Groups (static, smart (two kinds) and virtual).
3. Live Search.
4. Spotlight search of attached pdfs.
5. Color labels that you can search on.
6. Right-click on attachment icon to see the names of the file and access them in the Attachments Inspector for viewing, etc.
7. Configurable author listings.
There are many other small things, too, like enlarging the formatted output for easier viewing, opening URLs from the list view, downloading pdfs from PubMed, finding local pdfs with Spotlight, sending formatted references directly to your email client, and more.
If you don't use any of these features, then of course you may not think there is a difference between Bookends and EndNote (at least in this aspect of the applications). But I suspect almost everyone who uses reference managers seriously will find many of them useful.
There are many other areas in which the applications differ considerably, but for now I'll confine my comments to this. Regardless of which application you prefer, it is easy to see major differences in the way that Bookends and EndNote deal with reference management.
Jon
Sonny Software
Bookend's improvements are undeniable, but for the sake of accuracy, like Bookends, EndNote X has a search field (although you can't specify which one), and a configurable toolbarJon wrote:EndNote's list view has changed very little over the years, offering two panes (list of references and formatted output), configurable columns in the reference list, and an indicator of whether there is an attachment. Although I may have missed something, I think that's about it.
EndNote offers Spotlight searching of *all references*, and this was improved in EndNote XJon wrote: Bookends has that, of course, and the following:
4. Spotlight search of attached pdfs.
These are great.Jon wrote: 5. Color labels that you can search on.
6. Right-click on attachment icon to see the names of the file and access them in the Attachments Inspector for viewing, etc.
7. Configurable author listings.
Very nice, as well.Jon wrote: There are many other small things, too, like enlarging the formatted output for easier viewing, opening URLs from the list view, downloading pdfs from PubMed, finding local pdfs with Spotlight, sending formatted references directly to your email client, and more.
Another improvement in EndNote X is that in reference view, you can toggle the display of empty fields -- distracting empty fields disappear! I find this display slightly more convenient than Bookends', because in BE one must manually display a drawer in to see the additional fields.
In any case, it should be obvious from what I've detailed here that EndNote continues to incorporate new features, but not as quickly and innovatively as Jon.