Papers + Dropbox = love

Claudiu | 12 Ianuarie 2010 | 87035.34 | publicat în Starlog | Tags: dropbox, papers, sync, yey 8 Comentarii 

Papers is probably the greatest piece of software I have found in the last years. Unfortunately, it’s only for MacOS, but it completely changed the way I organize my electronic papers. I have hundreds of PDF with valuable information and usable information is organized information. No one does it better than Papers. Not only that it can let you copy, rename, index and sort your PDF files, but it has other useful features like Match Papers, which automagically searches Google Scholar or other repository for metadata of the article. Sometimes, based on the PDF checksum, it cam directly detect authors, journal details, but sometimes it needs a little help, like bits of the title, authors, and usually (99%) it gets the job done (and if not, you can always do it manually). Further more, creation of Collections is really helpful when you want to place your PDFs in stacks, but a really nice feature is Smart Collection where based upon a few keywords, Papers automatically searches your entire collection and place the files in their collection, all by itself. And if you buy one license, you can use your Papers on two Macs, which is great , since I currently use two computers, one at work and one at home. Did I mention it has a nice PDF viewer and a browser based on WebKit? If you want to change a Mac, just deactivate Papers on your old machine and activate it on the new one.

Papers still has some drawbacks, and I think the biggest one is that it cannot be used as a citation manager. It doesn’t integrate itself with Pages or Word and it cannot help you create citation, but this is not its purpose anyway. Another thing that bugs me is that is you do a backup of your entire collection (which is a nice archive of your PDF), although metadata is persevered, Smart Collections are lost. Too bad. But still I feel that this is one of the few software out there that worth every penny: you can use it for free up to 30 days, after that you have to pay 29 EUR, or less if you can prove you are a student. Take a look on their website.

Dropbox on the other hand is a free application that lets you securely synchronize your data over the Internet. It offers 2GB for free, which should be enough for daily important documents, and a few other options, where you have to pay for a little extra space (you can get up to 3GB if you invite four people who will use Dropbox). Dropbox works on Windows, Linux and MacOS and it let you manage your files via a webinterface, if you really need a file and you are in a place where you don’t have Dropbox installed. It creates a folder named Dropbox on your home user, that will have the same files on all your activated location. A major drawback is that if you accidentally erased a file, there is no way you can retrieve it, so be carefully, always backup, backup, backup your data.

Now, why did I choose to talk about these two application in the same post? Well, if you are both a Papers and a Dropbox user, you can use them to your advantage. If you have two machines using Papers and you want to have your library in sync all the time, just place it in the Dropbox folder. You can do that when you run Papers for the first time, or if you are already using it and want to switch to the library from your Dropbox, just go to Papers -> Preferences -> Library -> PDF Library Location and click Change and select the new location. After that, choose Switch and you are done, your home papers collection is sync with the one from work! Whenever you add something new from one location, it will be available in a matter of seconds on the other one (the time needed by Dropbox to upload the changes in its folder). You can download Dropbox from here.

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