papers posts

Filed under: Software

Back to School: Papers updated for the new term

by Giles Turnbull (RSS feed) on Aug 26th, 2008

TUAW's going Back to School! We'll be bringing you tips and reviews for students, parents and teachers right up until the bell rings in September. Read on for a timely app update useful for students.

PDF management app Papers has been bumped to version 1.8.5, bringing what the developers claim are 100 improvements. Top on the list is a new sharing feature called Papers Archives, which lets you share a PDF file and its associated metadata with a colleague.

Papers isn't for everyone. Instead, it's specifically designed for students and academics, particularly those who deal with a lot of scientific periodicals in the course of their research. It lets you search them, sort them (manually or using Smart Folders), find them on any one of 14 different online repositories, rate them, browse your library in tabs, and much more.

Papers costs $42 for a single-user license, but students qualify for a 40 per cent discount.

Tags: back to school, BackToSchool, learning, mac, papers, pdf, students

Filed under: Freeware, Open Source

Skim 0.7 update

by Mat Lu (RSS feed) on Aug 29th, 2007

Since we last mentioned the Skim PDF reader and annotating application it has grown considerably and the newly released version 0.7 adds bevy of new features. Since that early release back in April they've added considerably to the markup and searching tools (including live search of the document with context in addition to searching just the annotations). There's also greatly expanded AppleScript support and a presentation mode. The crazy keyboard shortcut system we complained about before has also been simplified and improved. In short, Skim is getting better by leaps and bounds and is definitely worth another look if you regularly need to read and markup PDFs. While you can still only highlight PDFs with selectable text (i.e. PDFs that are not just scans), the anchored note and box features make marking up even image PDFs easier.

Skim remains open source and thus a free download from SourceForge.

[via MacUser]

Tags: papers, PDF, Skim

Filed under: Software, Freeware, Open Source

Skim PDF reader

by Mat Lu (RSS feed) on Apr 2nd, 2007

In a comment to our recent PDF review, Gary let us know about about Skim, a new open source project to produce a tool for reading and marking up PDFs. Skim already has a number of interesting tools, allowing you to:

embed notes (both shorter notes that appear over the PDF, and anchored notes which are marked by a speech bubble icon that leads to a separate window)
add circles and boxes
if the text in the PDF is selectable, highlight, strike-through, and underline.

Skim even has a full screen mode, as is popular with the kids these days. For a version 0.2 release there's already a lot of functionality here, which bodes well for the future (though I have to say the keyboard shortcuts for notes and markup are insane). Unlike Papers, which we mentioned before, Skim doesn't seem to be intended as a PDF library manager, but rather an individual PDF markup tool. It is available now as a free download from SourceForge.

Tags: papers, PDF, Skim

Filed under: Software, Education, Beta Beat

Papers: Scientific Papers PDF Manager

by Mat Lu (RSS feed) on Mar 20th, 2007

Papers appears to be an interesting application for those in the scientific community who need to read and manage a large number of papers as PDFs. It integrates with the online NIH database PubMed for searching and downloading. It allows you to organize articles not only by title but by author and journal. It even includes a full screen reading mode. There is nice review over at Infinite Loop by Jonathan Gitlin discussing how Papers has improved his own researching workflow.

The idea behind Papers, basically an iTunes or iPhoto for PDF journal articles, is a really good one, but I really wish it could be expanded in several areas. First of all, it clearly needs to support more online bibliographic databases and journal archives. As a humanist, for instance, I'd love a front end for JSTOR and the Philosophers Index (though perhaps I should not hold my breath since the developer calls Papers: "your personal library of science"). Secondly, and more importantly, I'd like to see Papers or a similar application offer a robust system for highlighting, comments, annotations, cross-linking etc. That's what I really need: a good tool to help me read articles (including and especially saving my notes), not just allow me to organize them.

In any case, if you need to manage professional journal articles Papers looks like a good start, though I did run into some bugs. It is presently available as a "Public Preview" and can be downloaded from mekentosj.com. It will eventually sell for €19 (~$25).

Thanks Tim!

Tags: papers, pdf, pubmed

Tip of the Day

F11 moves all your windows off the screen so you can quickly glance at your desktop. F10 shows you every open window in an application. F9 shows every open window for every application that isn't hidden or in the dock.

Learn More

TUAW flickr Pool

www.flickr.com

Featured Galleries

TUAW bloggers (30 days)

#	Blogger	Posts	Cmts
1	Steven Sande	50	4
2	Mike Schramm	32	0
3	Dave Caolo	32	1
4	Mel Martin	29	0
5	TJ Luoma	23	26
6	Joachim Bean	19	2
7	Victor Agreda, Jr.	16	7
8	Erica Sadun	16	2
9	Michael Rose	15	14
10	Josh Carr	13	22
11	David Winograd	12	17
12	Sang Tang	11	1
13	Ken Ray	11	2
14	Brett Terpstra	9	8
15	Chris Ullrich	4	1
16	Megan Lavey	4	8
17	Tim Wasson	4	1
18	John Burke	4	3
19	Kent Pribbernow	4	0
20	TUAW Blogger	3	0

More Apple Analysis

AAPL on BloggingStocks The Apple category feed from BloggingStocks.com
AAPL Quote, News & Summary The AAPL financials page from AOL Money and Finance
iPhone analysis from BloggingStocks iPhone tag feed from BloggingStocks
Macintosh news and reviews on Download Squad The Macintosh category feed from Download Squad

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)