Release Notes

Enhancements

We hope everyone is keeping safe during this time. If you are working on any research or development that has to do with COVID-19(Scientist, Researcher, Doctor, Journalist, etc.) we have a new resource for you to use. Please head to https://covid19.readcube.com/about to register for the COVID-19 Research Pass. The pass currently hosts over 26 million articles from leading publishers such as Springer Nature, Wiley, and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). We hope this resource helps anyone who is trying to find solutions to difficult problems during this difficult time.


For the desktop release, we have a few items which you hope make research easier. Before we start we overhauled our underlying network layer. While not very eye-grabbing as far as a feature this should allow our desktop app to work in more enterprise environments. VPN? Check. Corporate Firewall? Check. Custom Certificates? Check. Underwater Research Facility with Satellite Internet? We weren’t able to check but let us know so we can add it to our checklist. We also improved performance for bigger libraries!

First up is the new Paper Preview option. You can access this by clicking on the Eye in the bottom right corner. This is a watered-down preview of the PDF document. No annotations will show up but you can copy some text if you need it for somewhere else quickly.

PDF Preview can be disabled by clicking on the Eye again.

Another highly requested feature was getting the notes column. You can now see this by right-clicking on the top bar and clicking Notes.

Citekeys are here! Well, to be clear they were always here but now you can generate them for your whole library. If you go to file management(now renamed Paper Settings) you will see an option for Citekey Management. We also moved “Watch Folders” to a new tab. This is a desktop-only feature!

Citekey management will start disabled but you can enable it and select how you want your citekeys used.

When importing items into your library you can choose to use the citekey that the item came with or choose to overwrite the citekey with the options you specified. You can also choose to regenerate all the citekeys in your library or if you are happy with your current citekeys you can generate only missing ones. You can currently only generate citekeys for your library but we will be adding support for shared libraries in the future.

We also made some changes to the language used in the right-click menu. Instead of “Metadata”, we changed this to details. We have found that more and more people are importing other PDFs besides scholarly literature and were getting hung up on the “Metadata” part of this. “Details” actions are the same but more agnostic as to the reference you are editing. We also changed “Manually Resolve” to “Lookup Details” to help with our transition to supporting finding information on more types of literature.

If you were confused about what type of annotation you had on the notes menu before, fear not! as we tell you with an icon so you can easily distinguish between highlights, underlines, or a strike-through.

You can also now click on any of your notes or annotations and it will automatically open the PDF in question and scroll to the annotation for you! Once the PDF is open you can annotate or switch to our inverted theme like normal.

Did I say inverted theme? I did! Our brand new inverted theme is here! Easier on the eyes and synced between all your tabs. To switch just click on the dark theme icon at the top to choose this new theme.

Bug Fixes
Enhancements
  • On the recommendations tab, you can now select a shared library/list. These items when imported will still go into your personal library but we are working on a workflow to allow you to select a library/list for this as well.
Bug Fixes
  • We fixed some issues with ris / bibtex import.
  • Preview pane was removed for some accidentally. It has been added back in.
  • Tags no longer get a # sign when imported.
Enhancements

We hope everyone is safe and sound during this time. A new release today and we hope this makes researching where ever you may be a little easier.

EZproxy in the desktop:

We figured a lot of people are remote right now and might not have access to all the resources they are used to. One thing we added was automatic EZProxy to the desktop app. If you have a proxy configured on your account page we will automatically try and use it. First head to your account page on the web(www.readcube.com/account) and make sure you set up your “Institution”. You will know you have the settings correct if under your institution it says “Proxy content access enabled”

Then press “Locate PDF” on a reference in the app. If the Locate PDF fails we will automatically try and use your proxy tied to your account. You will only need to login once and we will save your proxy for concurrent requests.

We also updated the extension to use a new “GetFTR” technology. You can read more about GetFTR here and download our extension here. The short story of it is that GetFTR is a technology that works with your institution and participating publishers to streamline access to full-text content. Note, GetFTR is currently in a pilot phase and not all institutions and publishers have been enabled just yet.

Tag Improvements

This took some work on our end but we finally have given you the option to delete a tag fully or rename it.
Deleting a tag will remove it from all papers.
Renaming a tag will rename the tag on all papers that it is a part of.
Let us know other improvements we can make to managing your library. To access this new functionality you can right-click and tag in your library or hit the gear next to it.

Right panel improvements

We made two changes to the right panel to improve its use. We added an “Edit” button that will let you edit the details/metadata without having to right-click a reference or hit the gear.

We also added a badge to the notes panel to let you know if you have annotations or notes on that paper. But what use is a badge if I can’t see my annotations did you say? We are happy to release a built from scratch notes panel that will look the same in the reader as it does on the right pane of the main app. You can filter on that specific paper right on the main app using the filter. A lot of work went into this so we hope you enjoy the new functionality.

Last but not least we gave you the ability to leave shared libraries by yourself. Anyone who is part of a shared library knows that before you required the Owner to remove you. You can do this by right-clicking any shared library or hitting the gear. Note that you can’t leave a shared library if you are the only Owner on the shared library.

Bug Fixes
Enhancements

Update today was just a hot-fix to smooth some CPU usage. Let us know if you have any questions or problems at support@papersapp.com

Bug Fixes
Enhancements

Smaller release today as we are getting some things ready for a backend change.

Search Changes:

We have added the ability to search for first_author and/or last_author. There are some caveats to this search. You can only search by last name and there isn’t any fuzzy searching with this. You can combine this with any other search term as well.

Back to Page:

For any PDF that has in links within the PDF you can now jump back to the page you were at before. So if a PDF links to the last page you can hit the “Back to Page x” to bring you right back to your original reading spot.

Search notes:

You can now search your notes on the left hand pane. We hopes this helps you filter for keywords you are looking for or narrow in on a piece of text you know you have highlighted previously.

That wraps up this release. We are already working on the next one! Please email our support team if you have any questions or concerns.

Bug Fixes
Enhancements

We love our users, and to that end, we thought we would release this update a little earlier than we had planned. This update brings a few new features and polish to some other things.

Watch Folders

For those of you that used the old apps, this should be a welcome feature! We have added “Watch Folders” into the desktop app. Watch folders allow you to select a folder on your local computer to “watch.” Anytime a PDF is put into that folder, it automatically adds it to the library of your choosing. This means you can have your Downloads folder automatically add any PDFs you put there to be uploaded into your library. You can access the watch folder settings from the file management tab and scroll all the way to the bottom.

You can add multiple watch folders and each one can go to a separate library.

Citation Panel V2

We received a lot of positive feedback from the citation panel that we added last time. A lot of people were hoping we could add it to the right-hand panel of the library and so we did!

This also allows you to quickly scroll down the library list and grab some handy citations in the format you want. Keep the feedback coming and let us know!

Tag Search

Some people have a lot of tags, and they were having trouble keeping track of all of them. We went through a couple of ways to make this easier and landed on one that we think will work for everyone. Instead of scrolling through all of your tags, when you click on the button we will only load 10 at a time so your library sidebar doesn’t fall off of the earth. We also added the ability to search your keywords – just in case you can’t remember the exact cat tag you are searching for.

Enhanced PDF Dark Mode

Last but not least we added Dark Mode to the Enhanced PDF. To switch, just click the toggle at the top and you can easily switch between the default and the new dark mode.

That’s it for this week. Our developers are already getting ready for the next release. If you have any questions or concerns please reach out to us at support@readcube.com