The things I liked about 'Papers'

[kga1978]

Hi All,

Just moved university and people suggested me to have a look at 'Papers' - they said it had improved a lot since it came out..... Oh well, I thought I would give it a try and compare it to my good old trustworthy and fully featured Bookends! Suffice to say, 'Papers' was quickly uninstalled as I didn't find it to be a serious competitor to Bookends. However, there were a few things that I really liked and I thought I would share it with you in the hope that some of these features might creep into BE over time.

1. Aesthetically pleasing
- There is no doubt that Papers is pretty - the icons are nice and clear and the text is crisp, which makes the whole user-experience more pleasant (and being Mac users, we all know that we are suckers for this!).

2. Built-in help-viewer and direct access to the online forum - I found this to be quite helpful! (mostly because the included documentation such - especially compared to BEs!).

3. TABS - yes please! This is a very good idea - I loved the fact that you could have multiple tabs open with several references, articles or whatever open. I would love to see this in BE.

4.Match function - when you have a pdf file with missing information, I found the match function in Papers to be extremely useful. I know a similar function is already present in BE, but I find it really hard to use.

5. Buil-in pdf viewer. I found this to be better than the one in BE and I really liked the fact that it would open in a new tab - very useful, very sleek. I also liked the 'view full screen' option and note-taking - however, why can't I highlight the text?? Surely this is the most useful thing to do when reading a paper (which you can do in BE via Preview).

6. When doing a pubmed search you can go directly from the search to reading the full .pdf article and everything would have been imported as well - nice touch (as long as it can be disabled as well!).

7. The 'last read' column - it is quite nice that I can see when I last access the attached .pdf file.

8. iPhone option - nice extra that I might need in future - for now I'm not really sure.


However, as I mentioned I will be staying with BE because it is superior in pretty much every other aspect, just to mention a few: it is brilliant as a bibliography software (it's main function!), it's online search is much better and directly represents the pubmed search done via the NCBI website, drag-n-drop of Pubmed-searches and online pdf files, automatic import of pdf files from online or offline sources, automatic update of multiple files via pubmed, color labeling of references, vastly superior search of references and attached files and so on and so on ad infinitum. Oh and not to forget - Jon - a brilliant developer!

And then there's all the stuff that I don't like about 'Papers' - but that really isn't useful to this forum I guess .

So overall, Papers is quite nice - pretty and with some nifty features that I would love to see in BE (better graphics, tabs and 'match' function especially), but it is not a worthy contestant (at this stage). It appears to me that Papers is quite good at handling and matching pdfs that you already have on your hard drive, but it is pretty bad at taking the next step of organising the continues flow of information (which BE does very well - although it isn't its main focus!).

Just my 2c.

Cheers,
Kristian

[Jon]

Hi,

Thanks for the nicely detailed list of features you'd like to see in Bookends. We're always looking to improve, and welcome feedback like this.

There are a few points I wanted to mention that are in the current Bookends that perhaps work better than you think:

1. The match function in Bookends is very similar to Papers. You may not realize that you do NOT have to fill in all the fields to get a match. Assuming Bookends didn't find an embedded doi, filling in a few words for one field is often enough. For example, just the first 5-10 words from the title is often sufficient to get the unique hit from PubMed or GS. The action gear has a copy function, too, so you just select some of the title and Bookends will insert it for you. Try it. If you find it's not working with just a few bits of information, please contact me for tech support.

2. In the PubMed search in Bookends you can go right from the search to the full text (not pdf, though, that requires a click). And Bookends won't import until you tell it to, but that is a single click.

3. iPhone. Did you check out PubMed On Tap? (See the bottom of our web site home page: http://www.sonnysoftware.com/). We are working closely with the developer on improving it, and its links to Bookends (you can already email references to Bookends for import). The app is being improved at a rapid pace, and there's lots more to come.

Again, thanks a lot for the suggestions.

Jon
Sonny Software

[kga1978]

Strike one . Yes, I think I have been using the 'match' function the wrong way - it is indeed very similar to the one seen in Papers. One thing though - would it be possible to resize the 'autocomplete' window so one could see more of the article at the same time?

Also, I seem to have a bug - I sort my list by 'Ref #' and whenever I import a new reference it goes to the bottom of the list, rather than the top - which means that the reference selected for 'Autocomplete' is the second newest reference I have imported - not the one I want to autocomplete.

I'll have a look at PubMed on Tap - it looks interesting!!

[Jon]

The autocomplete window is sized to maximize the view of the pdf. Do you have something else in mind?

As for the other -- please report that to tech support so we can explore it.

Thanks,

Jon
Sonny Software

[kga1978]

I thought it would be nice if I could see the whole first page of the article - mostly because most journals would write the date of publication in the bottom of the first page. So it would be nice if the window could be resized downwards - the width of the window is just fine.

I have emailed you with the other problem.

[mkhabbaz]

I have also been a Papers user. I agree with you the BE is great. though I miss two features
1. Authors: automatically search for authors, with authors note cards etc. BE has a feature similar bu limited (Extra > term lists> Authors).
2. Automatic attachment sorting : automatically building folder structure of attachment files. (Probably because of my paranoia of loosing pdfs)

Of course no bibliography what so ever, slow (especially with large documents) and the fact that entry types are designed for journals (mostly).. are all good reasons not to use Papers. However, there is another reason that makes me stick with BE: steady & consistent updates. A visit to (versiontracker.com) would show you what I mean.

[Jon]

Hi,

In case you don't know (or others reading this don't), Bookends now allows unlimited attachment folders/subfolders. This gives you the freedom to organize them any way you like when attaching. It's not quite automatic (because Bookends can't guess if a pdf being attached belongs to "twenty century literature" or "Database 1 attachments" or whatever) but selecting where you want it to go with the pop-up menu isn't that hard.

Jon
Sonny Software