Papers by ReadCube

No eraser functionality…. Really?

While the app is just fine for organizing your papers, it’s very useless when I comes to writing with Apple Pencil!! I need to transfer my papers to another app for annotating or marking. Needs a lot of improvement to be useful. .

I've used ReadCube since it was in Beta in 2011-2012. It has such a good possibility to be a fanatic app. Infuriatingly the developer isn't putting the resources needed to maintain the tablet version. I've submitted multiple bug reports, and unfortunately nothing ever sends to get fixed. Tech support will just day they can't reproduce the errors and their are many. It's really disappointing seeing a good research tool go downhill.

iPad app impossible to use. Cannot download pdf or sync pdf that’s already downloaded in desktop terminal

It used to work well but after some recent updates the hand-writing annotation becomes a total disaster. It over-smooths your handwriting without asking. Now it is even more frustrating that the things you write just disappear by themselves. Please fix these very fundamental issues!

Full crash.

This is a pretty good app. I wish that we could display page numbers on the main screen.

I tested about 8 different products and this was the only application that allowed me to work on a browser, Windows desktop, and iOS app. Unlike other apps it is easy to annotate documents and export the annotations. The free trainings and office hours are very useful and helped me understand the product more. Almost all the PDFs I imported were able to locate the sources and pull in the metadata allowing for easy citation. The searching is great as well letting me do database searches as well as in text searching. Clearly is the winner for academic research needs!

There are several good citation managers that allow importing and annotating article PDFs from a PC. My work flow is that I like to add citations wherever I learn about them, and that means entering my iPhone, while reading and making notes on my iPad. I was a happy user of Mendeley until they terminated the iOS mobile app. Papers is outstanding for this use. I can add references and PDFs instantly from a pc browser add on or directly from the app. While reading an article, it’s easy to highlight, annotate, take notes. A side bar instantly grabs any cited papers that I might want, and another tab finds related articles. It’s easy to organize my library by tags and hierarchical lists. I’m sure there are other fine features but I’ve been too busy doing great research to find about them.

I have been using Papers for years but I am surprised to find that some essential tools are still missing on the iPad client. Please implement erasers, undo/redo buttons for the writing tools. Also the pen stroke recognition can be improved, it feels very wired at the moment.