Why, on Earth, would you release an upgrade from a popular software, only for a limited number of users because your new, improved, released software supports only the last operative system? Why the people behind Papers released the long-long-long time awaited Papers2 only for Snow Leopard Users?
I was recently reading a post regarding why Mac users still use Leopard instead of Snow Leopard. Lack of time to make the upgrade, the sense of the upgrade being unnecessary, specially considering that you have to pay for the upgrade, and reports about several bugs and incompatibilities, lead users so use Leopard even today. Most of my scientists friends are Leopard users, and also Papers1.x users, and I believe that they are happy. Despite the lack of features awaited for a long time. Even considering that Mendeley is free and always improving. And considering that, for example, Mendeley Lite for iPad is free, in contrast to Papers for iPad (which, by the way, still lacks many features).
But I have been a strong supporter of Papers. I truly believed that, somehow, old Papers1.x users were going to be awarded because of their loyalty. But the upgrade price seems to be a barrier for many, specially for students (and I believe that the new Mac-Student users will turn undoubtedly to Mendeley and Endnote), and to me (and I am pretty sure that for many others too), the need of having Snow Leopard puts another big issue to deal with.
Also, some reports about missing features, bugs and others (see http://support.mekentosj.com/discussions/problems/3118-papers-2-going-back-to-papers-1). The only explanation I found regarding this “hard” decision is:
Unfortunately Papers2 requires 10.6. This was a hard decision, because we know we still have a small percentage of Papers1 users running OS X Leopard 10.5. However, supporting 10.5 had also a lot of technical consequences. In particular, with OS X Lion 10.7 coming soon, we might have had to cut 10.5 support later, which would have been much more difficult to do on paying costumers.
Note of course that your copy of Papers1 will still work the exact same way as it does today on 10.5 for as long as needed.
I believe that the company does not care about loyal, old users of Papers. They say the percentage of Leopard users is small. In my experience, this percentage is pretty close to 100% (maybe because I am in a small, less-developed country, I don’t know), but this only decision is enough to me to decide not to upgrade to Papers2, and I recommend to you to do the same.
In the future, I will be featuring new softwares and tools for scientists, to compensate somehow this huge turn-off.
Astu's science blog 
papers2 is pretty good, but unfortunately it’s full of bugs. I loved it until I tried to sync my iPhone – hey presto, sync is “not operational” and there is no time set on when this will be fixed. Tech support have gone awkwardly quiet on the issue.
They released this way too early, and should have put a huge fat “BETA” on it. It’s really going to hurt their brand image to put out a half-finished product like this, which is a pity because I was a massive fan of Papers1.
Things can only get better from here…
Could you please enable full-text feeds for your blog?
I often download RSS feeds for later offline reading and that doesn’t work with your blog due to the truncated feeds.
I’ve read about your comparisons of Papers to Mendeley, but have you ever checked out Sente? I came across it myself only recently, but it seems to have excellent management, annotation, and syncing capabilities (the iPad version stays in sync with your computer over the web through Sente’s servers). It is pretty expensive (I’ve just been using the trial), but I was wondering if you had any thoughts?
Thank you for your comments.
Dan: the brand image of PAPERS is already hurted by the wrong, nad decision of making Papers2 available only to Snow Leopard users. Many people is still using Leopard, and I am not willing to spent US$29 for the upgrade and then spent more for Papers2. I would pay happy for Papers2, but only for that and not for also having to upgrade my OS (specially when it works flawlessly). But I agree with you: bugs are annoying.
Martin: fixed. Thank you for the interest.
EJ: I haven’t. Sente is too much expensive, and since I already paid for Papers… the only move I am willing to do is to a free program, as Mendeley.
@pabloastudillo: Thank you, I appreciate it! 🙂
Great post. I upgraded to Papers2 and have not enjoyed it at all. It’s extremely slow and unresponsive, is missing many simple features from Papers1 (such as merging two authors that are the same person), the Papers Livfe is not ready for use as of May 2011, and there is STILL no annotation. It’s a shame they released a beta version well before it should be considered 2.0.
As a loyal Papers fan, I hope these and the many other bugs are resolved before my trial ends, else I may start reconsidering Mendeley.
I was such an avid user of Papers1. I tested out the trial for Papers2, and couldn’t believe the POS. Sync did not work and PDF’s have doubled in number. And despite all the complaints everyone had, they still want to charge $79? Really? Papers1 was not even half that price, and those who purchased Papers1 for the Mac AND iPhone before 2011 are supposed to pay full price for this? No thanks. In fact, I’ll stick with Papers1, as Papers2 is just not worth the headache, heck – it’s not even worth pirating!
equally dissappointed… was looking forward to papers2 hoping it would allow me to insert citations without a round trip via endnote (which i find very clunky). Version2 finally comes out – with a steep price even for student upgrade, and a citation feature that is falls well short of endnote or mendelay.
Now that mendelay has hit 1.0, its become my manager of choice.
Agree with above. Running Papers1 on os 4.11 – works beautifully. Upgraded to 2 so I could synch with mobile media that was a mistake. Ditched it all gone back to using Papers1 only.
Dear Pablo.
I am a PhD student from UCLA. We have developed a software dedicated to foster article sharing by scientists within their research group and their collaborators’ research groups. The goal is to get scientists to share articles with their peers in their departments and connect those departments with their collaborators. We think that by mimicking how scientists share articles in real life (with the people in their lab) and allowing different labs to share articles together and take advantage of collective intelligence we could actually get scientists to share. The system is still in early beta: http://www.koomel.com but I would like you to check it and give me your comments/opinions. Regards, Gilmer
I thought that I actually needed to explain the system a little bit further so here I go:
The system is not a reference management system but rather is intended to mimic the way scientists share articles:
1. With few colleagues (1 or two people).
2. With their whole department or lab.
3. With their lab and the labs of their collaborators.
In that way scientists are part of our system only if they are members of a research group. At Koomel (the name of our system) groups could be connected with other research groups. If two groups are connected, all the people in those groups are connected and have a venue where they could share the articles that they find interesting on the web with everybody but at the same time they also have a venue to share with the members of their groups. Our system gives the power to the administrators of the research groups to connect their members with others groups without each scientist having to establish that connection (this save a lot of clicks and in fact allow those connections to be established that otherwise wouldn’t.)
For instance, Let us say in your blog you have different groups associated with different scientific topics. Each group has its members, administrators etc and each group could be sharing articles with each other about their specific topics but in our system at the same time once someone sees something of interest to everybody (the whole blog) they could share it with all the groups that are connected or collaborating. In that sense, , all the people at your blog would be still receiving information that matters to them but also be connected to other groups in case they wanted to share more general topics.
The way this would work for labs would be: Labs have a private venue to share the articles they find interesting within the people of their lab but also a venue to share things with other collaborators’ labs or the public in general and take advantage of collective intelligence.
Regards, Gilmer Valdes
Radiation Oncology Department, UCLA
Los Angeles, CA
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I see a lot of good-willed people trying to restrain themselves from facing the truth. Papers, as it is, is a useless piece of junk. It does NOTHING right.
I was mac user of Papers 1 program. Now I moved to Windows and bought upgrade license for Papers2 and what a disappointment. As you said, its super buggy (and they take pride in total rewriting of the program). The support is pathetic and almost all the question you ask them are made PRIVATE so that you have no clue what other users are asking or complaining. I have 4 questions open within last 2 months and no answers. I agree the questions are critical (i.e. not applauding their program but very civil).
I use laptop with i3 processor with 4GB RAM on 64-bit Windows 7 and the program uses upto 1GB of RAM at a times. I can work with photoshop much faster than Papers2. Its very very slow. I have about 1000 articles in my library and its frustrating. I never had this problem with with Papers1 on Mac.
Now that they are acquired by a big scientific articles publisher, I don’t think they give a hoot to your complaints. Keep an eye on open source program Qiqqa. Its not as polished but I hope they too get their act together and make it a pretty good program.
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