The Mekentosj Newsroom

Good Things Come in Batches

April 24th, 2012

It has been over a year since the momentous Papers 2 release, and we have certainly been busy with many updates, new features, and bug fixes. Not to mention major updates made to Papers for iOS, and our latest addition to the Papers family: Papers for Windows. It has been a great journey, and we are excited to have major announcements for all versions of Papers, for Mac, iOS, and PC.

Ready for a close-up: Papers for iOS
Taking your articles on the road has also continued to become better with time. Papers for iOS has undergone several updates, and recently we buckled down to prepare Papers for the new iPad’s retina display. Text and images have never been this clear and crisp, and reading in Papers is better than ever. We have made strides in improving syncing between Papers on your Mac and iPad/iPhone, making sync faster and even more reliable.

Papers for iOS has seen a lot of development behind the scenes, but where you will have seen significant and very noticeable changes is in Papers2. We are proud to release our second major update since we first introduced you to Papers2 last year.

Loaded with features: Papers 2.2
When you thought Papers couldn’t get any better, it did! Papers 2.2 is loaded with new and improved features. We have made so many additions and improvements that we cannot fit everything into one blog post. To get an idea of everything that is different in Papers 2.2, you can read the release notes here.

Better yet, download Papers 2.2 and experience it for yourself. We have brought back all features you were used to in Papers 1, and added new features as well. Now you can merge authors, periodicals, and articles. Batch editing articles speeds up your work-flow even more, and you can hide the cover page, or rotate pages within PDFs in a non-destructive manner.

Annotations (highlights and notes) are displayed in the notes section of the inspector. To make this even better, you can now navigate to your highlighted paragraphs or notes in the PDF by simply clicking on them in the inspector window. In addition, you can copy them as citations.

Support for footnotes in Microsoft Word was another major milestone in the Papers 2.2 feature set. While we have improved aspects like this one in Magic Manuscripts, we also made it easier for you to stay on top of recent publications in your field. Select any author or periodical, and Papers can display the latest articles published in the Authors and Periodicals sections respectively. If you happen to come across duplicate authors, periodicals, or articles, you can now effortlessly merge them into one record.

Growing the family: Papers for Windows 1.0
Last, but certainly not least, we are ready to remove the pre-release banner from the Papers for Windows page. For the past two years we have worked in secret to develop Papers for Windows and we were very excited to introduce it to the world on February 14th. The pre-release has not slowed down our development for Windows. We have worked very hard on addressing the minor issues that have come up since and we are now ready to officially release this new member of the Papers family. You can import your library from Papers2, making it even easier to take it with you to or from work.

As with all new additions to a family (of products), Papers for Windows will continue to grow and develop. New features will continue to be added, and very soon we hope to support sync with Papers for iOS.

In whichever way you like to use Papers, you can enjoy your library now more often and across more devices.

On behalf of all of us at Mekentosj, enjoy using Papers!

The Mekentosj Team

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Papers on the big screen

March 16th, 2012

We’re absolutely thrilled with the arrival of the new iPad and its super high-resolution retina display. When we started Papers for iPhone back in the days we always secretly hoped that Apple would make a tablet, as that would be perfect for reading your articles. So when the iPad was introduced it was Christmas all over again for us and we couldn’t scramble fast enough to fully support it.

A few months ago the same feeling returned when the rumor-mill started to talk about a new iPad that would have a high-resolution retina display, just like the iPhone4. The secret hoping that this would be true started again as it would be nothing but spectacular for an app like Papers, having seen the difference on the iPhone already. When the rumors became more assertive over the last few weeks we knew it was time to start preparing for the big day.

We’re very pleased to announce that on this iPad launch day we also introduce an update for Papers for iOS that is full compatible with the new iPad, taking full advantage of the retina display. Seeing is believing, you will be blown away by the difference this makes in reading your articles, figures are much more vivid and text is razor sharp and much more pleasant to read. We’ve uploaded two screenshots that give you an idea of the sheer size of the Retina display.

To celebrate the launch of the new iPad you will be able to buy Papers for iOS for only $9.99 from the iTunes app store for the next 5 days. There’s no better time to join the revolution and download Papers for iPad. Enjoy!

Papers for iPhone, Uncategorized · 1 Comment »

Time flies… Papers2 1st anniversary!

March 8th, 2012

Time flies when you’re having fun they say. I just cannot believe it is 1 year ago already that we launched Papers2 for Mac on the 8th of March 2011. And what a ride it has been since!

In hindsight, and after having been fortunate to have had that experience as well last year, I often tell people that the launch of Papers2 was just like getting a baby. You think that all the work towards the due date is the hard bit, but you quickly discover that the hard work only starts when the baby is out. And the same was true for Papers2, we worked day and night for over 2 years towards the release, but after that 8th of March the hard work really started.

We were ecstatic with the enthusiastic reactions and excitement of our users, and so happy to finally being able to show everybody what we had been cooking. But there was also the dark side of features still missing from Papers1, changes we made that not everybody liked, bugs and crashes we had missed, etc. We got swamped with feedback and comments, and the next 10 months resembled what can perhaps be best described as white water rafting: we knew we could not change the wild ride we were in, but we did know that we needed to paddle as hard as possible to improve the shortcomings and give it our everything to make all users happy. Over the last year we have delivered a total of 18 (!) updates, and addressed many of the initial problems and missing features [1]. And like after a successful white water rafting experience, it does feel awesome to look back and see where we have come from and the fun it has been.

Completely rewriting an app that is loved by so many users is hard, changing things because you feel it can be done better is risky. Did we make the right judgement? Were people not too used to the way it worked before? Did we pick the right technology? Which big new features should we have focussed on? Some of the decisions worked out really well, for example Magic Manuscripts, the revolutionary new way of citing articles, or the support for many new document types, but others we missed. A good example is the blue tokens to search your favorite repositories. I wrote this feature originally for Paper1 because I always thought that searching should work this way instead of using cryptic tags and codes. And while people seemed to like it, they rarely mentioned this very explicitly in their feedback. So we decided that the blue tokens could be delayed till after the 2.0 and we didn’t expect too many complaints. Boy were we wrong!

With the return of many of the missing parts in Papers 2.1 last december we finally arrived in calmer waters. That is not to say that we’re all done with bringing back missing Papers1 features or fixing bugs, but the time has arrived that we can start looking forward and also focus on adding those features that the new foundation of Papers2 will finally allow us to [2].

To end with a phrase stolen from Apple’s new iPad event yesterday: there’s a lot to look forward to this year.

On behalf of everybody here at Mekentosj.com, many thanks for your enthusiasm and excitement, critical feedback, great suggestions, helpful reports, necessary patience, but above all your relentless support!

Enjoy Papers!

~ Alex

PS. If you want to hear more about Papers, the ideas, the future, etc. Checkout this recent interview at literature review HQ.

[1] And not to forget, released a Windows version of Papers!

[2] If you would like us to build the next set of revolutionary features in Papers, we’re looking for talented Cocoa developers, make sure to contact us!

Mekentosj, Papers for Mac, Papers for Windows · No Comments »

Love is… contagious:
Announcing Papers for Windows

February 14th, 2012

We are very excited to be sharing our Papers love with even more people this Valentines day. For over two years we have secretly worked on a version of Papers for Windows. Now, the time has finally arrived that we are ready for a pre-release.

Papers has an award-winning, intuitive user interface, and we wanted to bring this same ease-of-use to Papers for Windows, while preserving a traditional Windows look. It also has much of the same core features as Papers2 for Mac, but there are some differences. Although we want to have both versions aligned as much as possible, some features are still under development in Papers for Windows. When first trying Papers for Windows, it is important to keep these differences in mind, and they are listed in more detail here.

A version of Papers for Windows has been the topic of many requests from both current users, and those who would like to become Papers users (but didn’t want to buy a Mac). After our Papers2 release, the requests for a Windows version kept pouring in, and we are happy that we can finally announce we have been working on this exciting new release for some time already in collaboration with Scimatic, which is based in Toronto, Canada.

Much like Papers2, Papers for Windows was built from the ground up. This brought with it the challenges you can expect from cross-platform development, as well as the occasional surprise. We made the decision to launch Papers for Windows as a public pre-release, after our beta trials, to make sure any bugs can be ironed out before our official release date in March. At this time, one feature that has not been sufficiently tested is Mac to Windows (and visa versa) compatibility, where a user can point both versions of Papers to the same library. Although this may seem relatively straightforward, from a programming perspective there are a number of difficulties with implementing this functionality and we want to make sure we can sufficiently test this internally, as well as expose it to ‘real world’ situations Papers users will face.

The Papers for Windows journey has been a long and exciting one. Recently, this included two smaller-scale beta releases and some intense in-house testing where we were able to streamline the program more, avoid some major bugs, and made some major updates and changes. However, the best part of the journey is starting now. We hope Papers for Windows will allow some of our current Papers users to take their libraries to work, or home, where this was previously not possible. We also hope to welcome new Papers users who will finally be able to enjoy Papers for the first time on their PC.

~ The Mekentosj Team

Mekentosj, Papers for Windows · 13 Comments »

A Serial for a Style

January 14th, 2012

You may or may not know it, but Papers relies on the fantastic styles provided by the Citation Style Language (CSL) repository to support formatting of your manuscript in hundreds of different styles (more than 1700 in Papers 2.1.8). Despite this large choice, your favorite journal may not be listed there. The best way to get this repository to grow further and cover more fields of research is to get more people to contribute new styles.

In a post on our support pages we show you how to create your own CSL style. A few of you have been adventurous enough to give it a try and have produced new CSL styles for their own use. We helped a few of you as well in the process, and for the first time in Papers 2.1.8, have added new styles that were the fruit of that labor. But there were only a handful of these, and we know there must be dozens more out there, ready to be added to the list.

To boost the process, and provide more incentives to the CSL creators out there, we have decided to start a new initiative, “A Serial for a Style”. The idea is very simple: if you create a CSL style and contribute it to the CSL style repository, we’ll give you a free Papers2 serial number. That’s one of the way we also want to give back to the CSL community.

Here are the specific rules:

- The style must be new – not a duplicate of an existing style
- Your name and email must be in the author or contributor field of the style – we want you to take full ownership (with great power, comes great responsibility, yada, yada)
- The style must use the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) – Papers2 needs a commercial-friendly license, and that’s also the most popular license in the repository
- The style must contain a URL that links back to instructions to authors, or some other authoritative document
- The style must have been submitted to the official CSL repository – please follow the [instructions on the CSL wiki](https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/wiki), as we want you to make it as easy as possible to the CSL folks that maintain the repository. This means among other things that the style needs to be written in valid CSL version 1.0.
- 1 serial maximum awarded per style – thus, only one contributor per style will get the serial

We also recognize some of you might want to contribute more than one style. We also want to encourage that, but we have to be reasonable in the number of serials we can give away, so here is the rule we will apply:

-1 style –> 1 serial
- 5 styles –> 2 serials
- 10 styles –> 3 serials
- 15 styles –> 4 serials
- …_etc_… with each additional 5 styles corresponding to one additional serial

The above rules are informal, not a binding contract. We just make here a promise that we will award the serials based on contributions to the CSL repository. You just have to trust we will honor our promise. In return, please do not abuse the system and the rules. Finally, note that we don’t know yet for how long we will run this initiative: it might be limited in time.

Papers for Mac · 3 Comments »

Happy Holidays from Mekentosj, and a little gift

December 22nd, 2011

From everyone at Mekentosj we would like to wish you a very Happy Holiday Season and a wonderful and productive new year!

To help along with some of your New Year’s resolutions, we are giving you a little gift for the Holidays: a discount on Papers for iPhone and iPad.

Whether Santa brought your an iPhone or iPad this Christmas or you already had one, there is no better time to get Papers for iOS. It is on sale now in the App store for $9.99 (reg. price $14.99).

With the new Papers 2.1 for Mac update, you can now sync annotations and highlights between your iPad and iPhone with your Mac. You never need to go anywhere without your library; whether you are at a conference or in a meeting, when you want to access information in a paper or share a publication with your peers, your articles are at your fingertips. Read and take notes anywhere: on the road, on the couch, or at a conference on your mobile device, and sync them with your computer later. Papers for iOS is not only a great App to organize your library, with highlighting and annotation support it is a phenomenal reader. Expand on your knowledge by searching databases right inside the app, and download articles directly to your Papers library on your device. You can use Papers for iOS as a stand alone app, or if you are also using Papers on your Mac you can keep your libraries in sync.

Papers for iOS is on sale in the iTunes App store from today until Dec 26th only! Get yourself a copy, and a great start to a productive 2012.

From all of us at Mekentosj, thank you for using Papers, and Happy New Year!

~ The Mekentosj Team

Papers for iPhone · No Comments »

Give the gift of Productivity: Papers2 for Xmas

December 16th, 2011

Papers Xmas gift
It’s the time of the year when we start thinking about stocking stuffers and silly reindeer sweaters. While whipping up some holiday cheer this month, consider giving a family member or friend a Papers2 license for Christmas. Papers2 compliments New Years resolutions to finally put some order in anyone’s research library.

A Papers2 serial can also be a gentle hint to your office-mate that it is time to start the new year with a more organized desk, especially if you are confronted with a scene like the one on the right.

There are several advantages to giving someone a Papers2 license as a gift this Christmas; aside from giving award winning software, you don’t need to wrap anything. When we send you your gift-serial we will include a digital postcard you can pass on to your friend, to make it ‘gift-like’.

Papers2 is the gift that keeps on giving, with a more organized research library, the power of annotations, and Magic Manuscripts and Citations. Now that you will both be using Papers, you can also collaborate more easily using Papers Livfe.

Papers recognizes over 85 different document types, which means you can take your library beyond your research life. Organize your recipes, music scores, or knitting patterns. Highlight and annotate your articles in multiple colors, and take your library mobile by syncing to iPad and iPhone. Insert citations into your manuscripts effortlessly, and change the citation style with the click of a button if you are submitting to different journal than anticipated. Papers gives you the freedom to focus on what matters to you, by everything else involved with organizing, reading, writing, and citing a whole lot easier than it has ever been.

If you are already using and loving Papers2, why not share the love and gift Papers as a Christmas present this year? You can do so by following this link.

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We’re hiring! Take your development skills Livfe

December 2nd, 2011

We are looking for a new addition to our dynamic team! If you love Papers and have kick-ass web development skills, we’d love to work with you.

The Mekentosj team is a group of passionate people who are, despite the fact we don’t work in a central office or even in the same country, a tight-knit bunch. Each of us is very unique, but we share a common passion: creating amazing software for science, and making the Papers experience more awesome.

When we launched Papers2, we also launched Papers Livfe. Now, we are looking for that talented individual who can help us take Livfe to the next level.

If you think you might have what it takes, we look forward to hearing from you! Send us an email at feedback@mekentosj.com from wherever you are, tell us why you want to join us, and tell us three things you’d add into Papers Livfe.

Mekentosj · No Comments »

Papers like you’ve never seen before: Papers 2.1

November 30th, 2011

Papers 2.1 release

When we launched Papers2 in March we knew we still had quite a bit of ground to cover. In March you saw the results of two years of hard work by an amazing team of people.

Although Papers2 might have looked familiar, it was built completely from scratch.

The reason for doing this was so we would be able to make Papers even better in the future, laying the groundwork for some awesome features like the new annotation support in Papers 2.1 and many others that are still to come. The downside is that some of the Papers1 features you were used to, did not make it for the release deadline in March.

We could not just move around some code to bring all Papers1 features to Papers2. Because we were working from the ground up, the foundation that had to be build to accommodate some technically challenging features was very different from Papers1. You can’t build a Cadillac on the framework for a Beetle, and we could not create the features we wanted on top of the Papers1 foundation.

Although there were some technical challenges to be overcome, we promised it was just a matter of time before we brought back all the Papers1 features to Papers2. We knew the blue search tokens were sorely missed, and when we build unified search we also had to do some more work to bring back the search tokens.

Now, it is time for a new Papers2 experience: Papers 2.1

If you were waiting to switch from Papers1 to Papers2 because you could not imagine your workflow without the blue search tokens, then we’d love to welcome you to a new and improved Papers experience. Searching multiple repositories at once with unified search, and using search tokens to refine your query, guarantees you will find the exact papers you want, faster.

When libraries grow, duplications are a common occurrence. We made it easy to bring organization to your library with author merging in Papers1, and now this feature is back again in Papers2.1. Some Papers1 features are still missing, such as journal merging, papers archives, and recent papers for authors and journals. These are still on their way, and will make their Papers2 debut in Papers2.2. You can stay on top of what is coming next on our roadmap.

Aside from bringing familiar features back, we have worked on expanding the number of features in Papers2.

Annotation support was high on the wish list. If it was on your wish list as well, then Santa came early this year because we’ve made annotations a reality for Papers2.1. Not only can you highlight (in different colors!) and add notes anywhere in the text, but your annotations sync with Papers for iPad and iPhone. We believe highlighting and annotating in Papers should be faster than grabbing a highlighter and taking it to a printed article. That is why any text you select with your mouse while holding the command key is automatically highlighted. You can, but do not have to, right-click to select the “highlight” option. Equally simple is note taking: hold the command key and double click anywhere in the article to add a note.

We could go on and on about all the great features we have brought back, and the new ones we have created, but instead we would like to invite you to testdrive them yourself. Download a free 30-day trial of Papers 2.1.

Enjoy Papers2.1!
the mekentosj team

Papers for Mac · 3 Comments »

A Papers2 Makeover

July 20th, 2011

Academia can be a treacherous environment, but the promise of unexpected discoveries and groundbreaking research make it only ever more exciting.

Usually we know where we can expect complications to come from; contaminated samples, unexpectedly fast grant-proposal deadline, or uncooperative university administrators. However, sometimes the most shocking dangers surface from unexpected places. One such place can be the weight and magnitude of our library. Yes, knowledge does get heavy, and at times too heavy for office furniture.

Here is a picture of one prominent researcher’s desk as he encountered it one fine morning this week, collapsed under the weight of his library of articles.

Pre-Papers2 chaos & destruction

Of course the obvious solution was a Papers2 makeover. Now, office furniture remains in tact, notes can be searched and found within seconds, the library can be shared with colleagues across the hall, and organization prevails.

The Papers2 makeover 'after' picture

Papers for Mac · 1 Comment »

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