Scholarley (Beta)

Description

Scholarley is an Android client for Mendeley; using Mendeley's Open API. Mendeley is a free and convenient application for managing academic papers (see: http://www.mendeley.com/). Scholarley has been designed to run smoothly on both Android phones and tablets.

WARNING: Scholarley has not yet reached its first official stable release of 1.0.0; but it is almost ready for such a release. As the API offered by Mendeley is still limited and in its infancy, Scholarley is also limited in which Mendeley functions that it can provide. In particular, it is not possible presently to retrieve document metadata such as read-status; nor to edit document metadata like tags. Scholarley has a built in mechanism for storing and persisting local changes to these properties; but they cannot be synced to Mendeley until such time as the Open API is extended.

Current Features
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Scholarley's current features include the ability to:
- Authenticate with Mendeley's services using OAuth.
- Download your entire Mendeley library for offline use onto your phone or tablet (including, at your option, all of your PDFs).
- Browse your library even while it synchronises using the attractive and asynchronous user interface.
- Showing your document list:
- by folder/subfolder/group.
- sorted by author/title/citation_key (with more options coming).
- by author (with smart deduplication).
- by tag.
- with quick filters.
- Viewing document details and metadata in an attractive format.
- Opening PDFs (or indeed any type of file) using the applications on your phone that are specially designed for that purpose. For PDFs, ezPDF comes highly recommended.
- Make local changes to the tags on the documents that are persistent (they survive a resynchronisation). Unfortunately, as noted above, they cannot yet be uploaded to Mendeley.

Proposed Features
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Scholarley's upcoming and proposed features for 1.0.0 include:
- Local changes to folders (adding, deleting, and moving documents into and out of them); with the ability to synchronise those changes to Mendeley.
- Show the "Unsorted" folder.
- Further refinement of the user interface.
- PDF upload to Mendeley support.
- Undo support for local changes to the library.
- Detect when PDFs are modified on disk, and then synchronise the changed PDFs with Mendeley. [Note that the Mendeley desktop client does not support editing annotations that were created outside of itself].

Roadmap
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Features are added to Scholarley as and when the developer feels motivated to do so. Tweaks to the themeing will occur throughout the development. As a general guide, however, the development of Scholarley will follow the roadmap below.
- 0.9.7.x releases will be focussed on polishing the *viewing* experience.
- 0.9.8.x releases will be focussed on extending the abilities to locally modify your library.
- 0.9.9.x releases will be focussed on adding support for pushing local changes to Mendeley.
- 1.0.0 RC x releases will be focussed on bugfixing and (potentially) translations, if people are interested in having Scholarley available in their native tongue.
- 1.0.0 will mark the first official stable release of Scholarley.

Feedback Requested
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Scholarley has taken many hours of development time; and I am considering ways in which the development of Scholarley might be subsidised by donations and/or by making parts of Scholarley for premium users only. Please get in touch with your thoughts :).

If Scholarley does not satisfy your needs, then do consider trying out the other Android clients for Mendeley such as Droideley and Referey.

As a gentle request, I ask that you do not be too harsh when you evaluate this software. I am a full time PhD student, and Scholarley is written in my spare time; originally just for myself. Reading overly critical reviews is not at all motivating.