WOW! This morning we got the news that Papers has won another design award! Ars technica, one of our favorite websites, decided to hold its own ADA (Ars Design Awards) ceremony when Apple announced it wouldn’t do one for Mac OS X apps this year. Ars asked its readers to nominate the best Mac OS X apps in 5 different categories and we were very happy to see Papers nominated for Best Education app. And then came the announcement on the Ars technica website this morning that we had actually won! We’re very honoured and happy that Papers has now got two design awards behind its name. A big thanks to anyone who nominated Papers!
This means we will soon receive a second shiny aluminum cube! Awesome!
We are very sad to announce that Matt Wood is leaving us, after an incredible year working with Mekentosj. We can’t show any of the things he has been working on (except the new web site design of course!), but we can tell you it’s awesome, and we will very much miss him. We will miss his fantastic expertise and his great insights, and we will miss his energy, humour, and his guidance.
The good news is that Matt is joining the legendary Amazon Web Services team, as Technology Evangelist for Europe. It would be hard not to be excited for him at this great opportunity. Matt will remain a great friend for all the Mekentosj crew, and we wish him all the best in this new job.
As an ‘au revoir’, we leave him with this little movie where Charles expresses how each of us felt upon hearing the news:
Things are moving very quickly here at Mekentosj, and we’re very pleased to welcome two new members to the team!
Constantine Nicolaou, a long time collaborator of Matt from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, is the newest member of the Mekentosj development team. Constantine is a software wizard, bringing with him a world of experience with scientific software, high quality tools and exquisite workflow designs.
Mark Bate joins as our new infrastructure guru and system architect. An expert in scientific distributed systems, Mark is responsible for designing, building and managing the largest Apple Xserve high performance cluster in the southern hemisphere. He joins us after a long stint at Monash University, and will be working from Melbourne, Australia.
You can read more about our new arrivals on the Mekentosj Profile pages.
The Mekentosj team is now distributed across 5 cities in 4 countries: a big thank you to everyone for all their support for Papers and Papers for iPhone. We love building software to help with your research, and look forward to even bigger things with our new team in the future.
Welcome to a new decade! It’s hard to believe what has all happened in the past 10 years; what has started completely from scratch as a very small hobby in 2001, culminated in an award winning and thriving software company. And what better way to finish the year than discovering that Papers for iPhone was choosen among the 30 best iPhone Apps of 2009 in the UK iTunes store! A big thanks to everybody for making this app such a success!
Papers for iPhone ranked among the 30 best iPhone apps of 2009
Speaking of which, we’re also very pleased to announce the immediate availability of Papers for iPhone 1.3, you can now download the update via iTunes. In version 1.3 we not only fixed the recently changed Google Scholar search engine*, but perhaps even more importantly, we significantly improved the PDF viewer inside Papers for iPhone. Text is rendered much sharper and the entire reading experience is more robust and speedier.
Best of all, Papers for iPhone 1.3 is just the beginning, we have a lot more exciting new releases lined up for 2010, we can’t wait to show you, stay tuned!
The Chemical Synthesis and Neuroscience group at the University of Munich recently received a guided tour of Papers, courtesy of 2nd year PhD student, Christian Kuttruff.
In this great introduction Christian covers the basics of PDF management with Papers, finding publications with the integrated search engines and (my favourite section), easily assigning article information.
This 7 minute video is the perfect way to get acquainted with Papers, and features some great tips and tricks for power users.
We’re happy to announce the immediate availability of Papers 1.9.3, a free update to our popular personal library of science. Most important this update brings full compatibility with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. That’s not all however, it brings over 50 bug fixes and improvements as well. Whether you’re on 10.4 Tiger, 10.5 Leopard or the brand new 10.6 Snow Leopard, this is a must-have update for Papers users!
Download Papers 1.9.3 now from here and update today…
After three years, we’ve added a new lick of paint to the news.mekentosj.com web site, as you can see.
Hopefully you’ll find it easier to learn more about Papers, our programs for science, dashboard widgets and iPhone apps, and be able to get in contact with us more easily. We really hope you like the new design: we’d love to hear any feedback you might have.
To celebrate the launch, join Alex, Matt and Charles as they discuss the new site from the banks of the river Cam in sunny Cambridge.
A fresh update to Papers for iPhone is now available on the iTunes App Store.
Papers for iPhone is now compliant with the new iPhone OS 3.0 (fixing the PDF viewing problems some people were experiencing), but also has a fantastic new feature: in-app emailing.
You can now email an article to a friend or group of colleagues without leaving Papers. Just select your article and go to ‘Share by email’ to compose and send a new message without skipping a beat.
This update is free to all existing users. Just check for updates from iTunes or visit the App Store from your iPhone or iPod Touch to update to version 1.2. Of course, just to be sure that everything goes smoothly, you can make use of the free library backup service.
When Matt Wood joined us a few weeks ago we mentioned there would be more news soon. We are very excited to announce today that Charles Parnot has now also joined the Mekentosj team!
You might know Charles from the Xgrid@Stanford widget we built together back in 2004. Charles at the time had managed to set up the world’s largest Xgrid cluster, which has now merged into the OpenMacGrid at MacResearch. Up until a few weeks ago Charles was chief scientist at a biotech startup in the Bay Area, but he has now decided to shift gears and like Matt has joined Mekentosj Inc., where he will be working on an exciting new project even more secret than that of Matt…
And what’s better than to let Charles introduce himself with a little movie.
We’re very pleased to tell that Matt Wood has joined Mekentosj Inc. to work on some really exciting new projects. Matt formerly headed the Production Software team at theWellcome Trust Sanger Institute, a genomic research facility in Cambridge, UK. At mekentosj he will focus on a top secret new project that is planned for release later this year and that will blow away anything you’ve seen before from us. Plus there will be some exciting more news soon. Keep an eye on our website and be sure to check out Matt’s personal webpage as well!
