Zotero 1.5 Sync preview is an update to the mostly excellent Zotero reference collection and management software. The big change here is that your references can now be synchronised across machines via the Zotero server. I haven’t experimented very much with it since the launch yesterday but after a quick look it seems excellent, a very helpful addition. Another big change that was mentioned is the ability to use more than 3000 Endnote bibliographic styles to format your citations. I couldn’t quite see how to implement this, but I only really played with Zotero1.5 for about 10 minutes last night so it might be in there. It requires Firefox3. Now if they could only get Microsoft to fix MS Word 2008 to accomodate bibliography tool bars again we would be there. I saw a blog recently (forgotten where) with someone saying that an institutional licence for RefWorks is around $10k. Zotero is free, and does all the same things, often much better, than RefWorks. It is also a community driven open-source project and needs supporting for that reason alone.
July 9, 2008
June 18, 2008
Firefox 3 and Add-ons
I really love the new Firefox3 release. I’ve had beta version before but just updated and all my add-ons are also updated and are working nicely. The firefox Add-ons page can be found here. I previously managed to seriously confuse my bookmarks by upgrading and then downgrading to Firefox2. Don’t try this.
I have also now swapped to using del.icio.us the social bookmarking site. This has really nice integration with Firefox3, adding buttons to quickly bookmark a site. The best thing for me is that the left panel where bookmarks are typically listed in a browser can now toggle to display del.icio.us bookmarks complete with a searchable listing of tags. It is really slick. Very quick, well designed and much much more useful than tradiational bookmarks. I had got to the stage with Firefox2 where I was Google searching for sites that I knew were in my bookmarks because it would be faster to find them that way! The tag-based approach to data is so powerful I just groan when I see programmes not supporting tags.
Also in my add-ons is Zotero. This is an extension to help collect, manage and use bibliographic information. I’m an academic and spend a lot of time collecting journal articles. Zotero deserves a post by itself, soon I hope.
Lastly is Google Notebook. I don’t really use this as a notebook for manually typing information (I use Journler). But Google Notebook has a great web-clipping function. OK this is also found in other software too but Google’s implementation is pretty fool-proof.
