Variable Fragment

Papers is another “iTunes for PDFs” program, only it seems to be dripping with 10.4 programming magic. It’s aimed at mac using researchers (and the pre-release features are geared toward PubMed users), so the general audience won’t care, but for a small subset of people it’s really fantastic.

I think this thing incredible, but I’ll go ahead and start with the caveats:

• It’s a “preview release,” which means it’s far from done.
• It crashes periodically.
• The preference pane is completely empty.
• It only supports PubMed right now (but has a plugin architecture which will eventually allow for many search engines).

Now, even given the above, I still plan on using it as my main journal article program because it gets so much else so right.

Examples (beyond the expected features like smart folders)

• Very nice iPhoto-like full screen reading mode for PDFs. Pull up floating boxes to type notes in as you read. I normally print out all of my paper to read, but it’s nice to have a pleasant interface for quickly searching and skimming when I re-read later.
• Builds a list of Authors and Journals from your papers. For any author or journal you can see a list of all of their recent publications, and of course download any of them.
• Import your existing PDFs and use their nifty interface to match it to a PubMed entry. This works as follows: you selecting some text, then choose from the popup. if you selected an author, title text, etc. Papers auto-populates the PubMed search field based on the text you selected. Works great every time I’ve tried it. Then of course it downloads all of the metadata for that paper (keywords, authors, abstract, etc). Makes it very easy to import existing papers.
• Built-in web browser auto-imports PDFs you click on when you’re at pubmed.

It still looks like Sente is the way to go if you need the citation support (or something that’s actually finished), but it’s very cool to see something new with this much potential. Personally, I am a researcher in industry, and not publishing that much, I just need a good way to stay on top of things, and this looks perfect for me. Oh, and they are only asking $25 USD for it. These are the same two molecular biologists doctoral students who wrote 4Peaks and EnzymeX, by the way.

There was a longer mini-review on Ars Technica that originally turned me on to it. It’s definitely a little flakey, but I still enjoy using it.