Just recently rediscovered the must see documentary Cosmos: 13 episodes of 1 hour each, all available for free here.
“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Having a PDF management system, which allows in-app citation (e.g. WORD, Pages, Mellel, …), is a necessity for scientists and researchers. On OSX, we have the chance of having the choice between extremely well-design and efficient applications such as Sente, Mendeley and yes, Papers (there are of course free options, as always it depends how much time you want to spend working with your tools relative to working on your tools!).
In the past I have used Endnote, Zotero, Sente and finally settled for Papers starting at version 2.0.8 for its extremely well thought-of citation mechanisms, PF editing options and nice interface. A review is available here in the e-office series.
Zoom to the latest version (still a beta) of Papers. Yes the interface changed quite a lot, both on OSX and iOS. Mekentosj seems to have adopted the design element of iOS 7 as a reference across the board. Quite frankly, the only thing I do not like in iOS 7 is the color scheme used for certain icons. Otherwise, I like it very much: it is clean, simple, introduced great new stuffs and does not get in the way.
Below are the screen captures for iOS version of Papers and Papers3.
So, you say great this guy love Papers 3. Not at all. Design change you can get use to it (assuming it is for the better) but key missing feature is a problem.
Papers 3 allow syncing via DropBox or import/export of the whole library…Gone is the great WiFi sync of the previous version. Why it is this important? My library is large, closing in 5 Gb. I do not want to put that on DropBox (or on any servers for that matter) nor do I need to have all of that in the Cloud. The DropxBox options look interesting for a small library but for large libraries I am not convince and I feel it is unnecessary to pay for cloud storage space to store my library (this is why I do not like Mendeley for example). Even my library at close to 5 Gb is not that large and only contains over 4000 entries.
When I ask Mekentosj about it, I received the following from the support staff:
Hi there
Thank you for your feedback regarding this. I’m afraid that Dropbox is the only solution at the moment. However, we hope to include a possibility to sync via Wi-Fi in some point as well. However, depending on the technical aspects and Papers release cycle, it’s hard to know yet when that’s going to happen, so please be patient
So it might or might not happen in the future. For now, I would think that this is a big deal for users with large libraries. I reverted back to Papers2 like a number of my colleagues.
Overall, very disappointing first contact with Papers 3
NOTE: Academic workflow on Mac also has a coverage of Papers 3 which describes other important issues
An optimist will tell you the glass is half-full; the pessimist, half-empty; and the engineer will tell you the glass is twice the size it needs to be. – Anonymous
The half-full, half-empty type of recurring arguments are counter-productive but too often occuring, even in science. Maybe like the quote above, it is simply a question of considering things differently. Interestingly as scientists we are suppose to be really good at this…
Wired is running an interesting piece about the latest operating system from Apple. In part past, Apple provided free or very low cost upgrade for its “minor” version of OSX but paying upgrade for significant new version. 10.9 is a significant upgrade but will be free: Apple Just Ended the Era of Paid Operating Systems | Wired Business | Wired.com.
In a related news, iWork (Numbers, Keynote and Page) will be free with each new Apple computing devices, Mac or iDevices! Office productivity and MS Office compatibility out of the box. That should be interesting…
This great TEDGlobal talk will allow you to test how attentive you really are. Only need 8 min 47 sec of your time, much less than your typical graduate courses 😉
Link is here(!): http://www.ted.com/talks/apollo_robbins_the_art_of_misdirection.html
Rarely has the Sakharov Prize caught more the attention than the Nobel Peace Prize, and the Sakharov prize winner got more press than the Nobel Peace prize winner. Of course both prize target different cause. However, rarely did a single young individual which such strong convictions ever touch some many for a cause that should concerns us all: education.
Education is the only solution
– Malala Yousafzai
Ruminating... 