Sonny Software

Having been a Sente user for quite a while, I've given up on the product and decided to make use of my Bookends licence and make the switch. The inflexible citation/bibliogaphy management, lack of integration with the OS X platform, lack of export functionality, missing cross-reference linking features, instability, and not the least abysmal support has driven me to the other side (which other independent OS X developer would leave support requests for more than three months, and still not reply?). Even the UI, which at the first glance looks very slick, quickly gets messy and unwieldy. To me, Sente is the iApp of reference management. Good, if you have 30 pdfs to organise and an undergrad essay to write, but useless for serious scholarship. Bookends, to me, looks a lot more like a proper research tool.

So I've had it with Sente, enough ranting. The next question, how do I migrate? Have anyone else made the switch, and are able to give a bit of advice on transferring all of my data to Bookends. Any export/import format working better than others? All of my attachments (mainly pdfs) are stuck in one big database file, so if anyone have a trick or two reattach these in a quick and easy manner I would really appreciate it. Also, is there any good way to transfer Sente notes over to Bookends notecards?

Any help is warmly appreciated!

There is an article on the Sente user guide pages that deals with exporting data:

http://www.thirdstreetsoftware.com/Sent ... =exporting

I would guess that exporting to xml would be best for re-importing into Bookends, but Jon would give a better answer to that than I could.

Your summary of the faults of Sente chimes with my own experience. I hope you find Bookends more to your taste. It has certainly worked for me so far. It may not be as pretty as Sente, but I think it is more functional.

Best wishes,

Martin BB.

I just hope that the Sente export is better than their abysmal import. Good luck...

Hi,

Bookends and Sente both can export/import EndNote XML, which I think should be the best way to have the two apps exchange information. As for pdf attachments, you can leave them where Sente put them (in the app bundle itself?) and then reattach just one of them to Bookends manually. That will tell Bookends that that particular folder is a place to look for pdfs and it should find all of them thereafter. Alternatively, you can move them to the default Bookends attachment folder yourself. Bookends notecards are created from the Notes field, so as long as the Sente Notes are correctly exported to Bookends you should see them as notecards (a notecard is separated form another by two carriage returns in the Notes field). If there is a problem with this, please followup directly to tech support and we'll see what we can do (support@sonnysoftware.com).



Jon
Sonny Software