On 05.03.2009, at 16:07, Michael McCracken wrote: > The startup is called mendeley.com, and is apparently associated with > last.fm somehow (through funding maybe) > > They have a cross-platform (QT I think) reference manager that uses a > SQLite backend and syncs with a web site that has social aspects, > including anonymized stats gathering about people's papers ratings, > etc. > > This is interesting. I really like the idea of using the internet to > make finding, commenting on, and updating research publications > easier, and it's just as important to be able to keep some section of > your data private (I think they let you do this.) and local for use in > generating publications. > > Also, they've announced a deal to sync with citeulike: > > http://www.mendeley.com/blog/2009/02/citeulike-and-mendeley-collaborate/ > > That's particularly interesting, as it's possible they'd open up an > API for other clients. Since I didn't see any OS X screenshots of > their app, I can't say for sure but I have my prejudices about > cross-platform UI design...
Certainly an interesting project, but it seems to be a curse of all newly released bibliographic apps, that they offer much too limited entry types, at least for everyone who is not in English speaking hard sciences (I just say 'bookauthor' … ). What is interesting is that they use, like Zotero, CSL for formatting. CSL (Citation Style Language) is an open language (open as in the specs are available to everyone) for formatting citations which has been designed with much attention for the areas traditional formats fail to address (humanities, internationalisation, portability etc). At the moment, Mendeley's CSL integration is not so obvious, but I guess we will soon be able to use the many CSL styles that already exist for Zotero (http://www.zotero.org/styles ). Talking about Zotero: Not only has version 1.5beta been recently released which offers syncing among multiple clients, they also offer web access to your data. This is still a bit rudimentary, but it works and is geared in a similar direction like Zotero. BTW, the UI of Mendely's OSX is ok. It wont win a beauty price, but there's also nothing fundamentally wrong or ugly. Simon -- Simon Spiegel Steinhaldenstr. 50 8002 Zürich Telephon: ++41 44 451 5334 Mobophon: ++41 76 459 60 39 http://www.simifilm.ch „It will take time to restore chaos.“ George W. Bush ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San Francisco, CA -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the Enterprise -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source participation -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source code: SFAD http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H _______________________________________________ Bibdesk-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users
