Release Notes
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.
Update today was just a hot-fix to smooth some CPU usage. Let us know if you have any questions or problems at [email protected]
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.
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 [email protected]
