The Mekentosj Newsroom

Spring Cleaning: 30% off this week

April 15th, 2013

This week we are doing something we have never done before. We are offering 30% off on Papers for Mac, Win, and iOS.

There is a lot to celebrate!

We have never before discounted the Papers desktop app, so why now? We are celebrating the new Papers for Windows release, now including full annotations support. We also have a Papers for Mac update with bug fixes and improvements. Aside from now being able to highlight, underline, and take notes right on the PDF, Papers for Windows is much faster than it was before. This is thanks to the performance updates included in this new release.

Papers is now even more equipped to help you do some spring cleaning, and get your library of research in order for next term. The special discount is a one-time discount and available for a limited time only, from Monday April 15th until the end of the day on Friday April 19th 2013.

As you can see, we have been busy behind the scenes to make Papers even better. In addition to bringing annotations to the Windows version, we have added more annotations options on the Mac version as well. On both Mac and Windows versions you can also underline and strikethrough, in addition to the other annotations options you were used to on Papers for Mac. If you are syncing your library between your Mac and PC, your annotations will sync between the two as well. To showcase the new features on Papers for Windows, we also created a short video.

Enjoy the new improvements to Papers!

~ The Papers Team

Papers for Mac, Papers for Windows · No Comments »

Springing Forward: 1350 New Citation Styles

March 13th, 2013

When Papers joined Springer recently, we promised this would enable us to move Papers forward. While we have been working hard behind the scenes to keep this promise, we are also proud to announce that Papers now added 1350 new citation styles to the existing CSL list. This means that Papers now also supports all Springer citation styles, in addition to the thousands of other styles already supported.

Whether you are preparing a manuscript to be submitted to any Springer journal, or a journal from another publisher, Papers is only getting better at helping you prepare those final steps before submission. While Papers can’t write the manuscript for you, it certainly can format it for you, in more than 4100 different styles.

More Magic from Magic Citations

Magic Citations has become far more powerful and… magical with the additional 1350 new citation styles, but there are a few other things you may not yet know about Magic Citations. Did you know you can:

See all resources cited in a manuscript

By navigating to the Manuscripts section in Papers, and selecting a manuscript followed by clicking on ‘Citations’ in the inspector window. You can now view each of the resources cited in the selected manuscript.

Generate a collection from the resources cited in a manuscript

Did you decide you would have liked to create a collection of the articles cited in your latest manuscript after you finished writing it? Don’t worry, you do not need to add the resources to a collection one by one as you are writing. When you are finished writing, create a manual collection first. Then you can select all the resources cited in the manuscript in the inspector window. Use the description above to find where all the citations are kept together. Once selected, drag and drop them all at once into the manual collection.

Enjoy the improved and expanded Magic Citations!

~ The Papers Team

Papers for Mac, Papers for Windows · No Comments »

Happy Holidays from Papers!

December 18th, 2012

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, the Papers team is putting together a Xmas promo for Papers for iOS.

Buy Papers for your iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch for $9.99 between December 20th until December 26th this year. If Santa surprised you with a new iPad mini or iPhone, or perhaps even an iTunes gift card, what better way to start the new year off right than with a copy of Papers for iOS?

Sync your articles between your iOS device with Papers for Mac (syncing with Papers for Windows is in development), but you can also use Papers for iOS as a standalone app.

If you are in the gift-giving spirit, you might consider giving a Papers2 for Mac or PC to a friend. Papers complements New Years resolutions to finally put some order in anyone’s research library, making it an excellent gift for collaborators.

When you decide to surprise someone with a Papers2 license as a gift this Christmas, we will send you your gift-serial with a digital postcard to pass on to the lucky recipient (making it more ‘gift-like’).

Papers2 is the gift that keeps on giving, with a more organized research library, the power of annotations, and Magic Citations. Now that you will both be using Papers, you can also collaborate more easily using Papers Livfe. Even better, Papers is the gift that doesn’t require any gift wrap!

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.

Papers for iOS will be available at the promotional price for a limited time only, and is available from the iTunes store.

~ Happy Holiday from the entire Papers team!

Mekentosj · No Comments »

Papers Springing into the Future

November 5th, 2012

A little more than 5 years ago Papers was born in between Alex’s PhD and postdoc. It was a simple application designed to do one thing very well: organize your scientific PDFs, in a way very similar to how iTunes organizes your music files. But like iTunes, we have steadily grown Papers to do much more. And with each new version of the program, we realize how much more we could do, and what potential Papers has to help researchers even more.

But there is only so much a small team like ours can do, and a day really only has 24 hours. It hurts having to say no to really good ideas, or having to delay new releases when other things demand priority.

With the increasing user base, the demands on our small team continue to grow. We have been committed to excellence in development and support for Papers, and we have many ambitious plans for the future. The reality is that the enthusiasm for Papers from the community at times catches up with us, forcing us to look for ways to improve the way we handle support and develop new features.

While we were not looking for a partner, an opportunity arose where we could get the support we need to continue to meet the high expectations we have for Papers. We embraced this opportunity, and we are very excited to announce that Papers is taking a big leap into the future!

We are becoming part of the Springer family.

The fit was a natural one, and we believe that by becoming part of Springer we will be able to offer our users so much more: we can take Papers to the next level, but much faster than on our own. Backed by the second largest scientific publisher we will be able to add features quicker, react faster, provide better support, and open up a realm of new possibilities.

The Mekentosj team will remain in charge of Papers, and continue to develop Papers for each of the platforms we currently support: Mac, PC, and iOS. We will continue to bring you updates, new features, and support. All with the same dedication and excitement you are used to getting from us.

You may still have some questions after reading this news. We are happy to answer them at any time, and you email us. However, your question may already be answered in this Q&A we prepared related to this news.

We are excited about the future of Papers, and we believe that with this new chapter we are able to bring you an even better experience.

~ The Mekentosj Team

Mekentosj, Papers for iPhone, Papers for Mac, Papers for Windows, Team · 8 Comments »

Back to school with Papers for iOS

September 2nd, 2012

We get it, being a student is tough. To help you out a little bit in the new school year, we are offering Papers for iOS at a reduced price, for one week only. Starting tomorrow, September 3^rd, you can purchase Papers for only $9.99. The back to school sale is in effect until September 9^th, so make sure you do not miss it! Of course, even if you are not a student you can still make use of the sale to get Papers on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch.

Papers for iOS makes your journal articles and other PDFs mobile. You can install Papers on all your iOS devices. Wherever life takes you, your library can come with you. Next time you attend a conference and want to share an article with a colleague, it will be right at your fingertips. Read on the train or bus, highlight important sections in class, take notes, you name it! Papers makes it easy to catch up on your reading anywhere, anytime. When reading becomes more accessible, it is also more fun.

Reading is really just the beginning. Papers for iOS features an elaborate set of professional tools to annotate, expand, and organize your library. You can work on your iPad, sync your library with your Mac, and continue working. All your notes and highlights, or the organizing you have done on your iPad is transferred to your Mac and your libraries stay up to date. At this time, Papers for iOS does not yet sync with Papers for Windows, but we are working on it. Regardless, many users choose Papers for iOS as a standalone app and it is not necessary to have the desktop version to make use of all the features in Papers for iOS.

Whether you are reading for fun or work, your articles and PDFs appear crystal clear on the retina displays on the new iPad. Papers is fully compatible and provides you with high resolution, laser sharp, full screen reading.

Want to see Papers for iOS in action first? Take a look at the introduction video below. It introduces you to some of the features in Papers for iOS, and we invite you to explore all the other features yourself.

Papers for iOS is available from the iTunes store.

Enjoy using Papers!

Papers for iPhone · No Comments »

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

Uncategorized · 4 Comments »

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 · 3 Comments »

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/) – that’s the only allowed license in the repository, so that all software can freely use the styles, including Papers
- 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, 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 · 10 Comments »

The Newsroom