Papers by ReadCube

It's sleek design has made it fun to use. I use it to read all my papers and highlight text and take notes. This works really well now. The paper view has many features such as continuous scroll, color options (though blue is too dark), dark mode and the usual tools such as highlight, underline, strikethrough and undo button. Apple Pencil support could be better (tap and click are not useful at all in the app).

Still no proper pen support. I have been waiting for years. This is ridiculous. The Zotero app is much much better.

… and having a synched state between multiple devices. The reader does what it should, and it supports iPencil input. I love the feature that you can jump to the references by clicking on one.

Overall I like the design of the app and i think the synchronization between the app and the desktop app/ cloud works pretty good. I‘m mainly concerned with the reading mode on IPad, which makes it barely workable. 1. When you make handwritten side notes, the app often makes a „jump“ with the pencil, which leaves a long random black line. If you don‘t want these lines, you have to delete everything you just wrote and write it again, hoping that the pencil doesn‘t jump again. 2. Why is the annotation tool box in left upper corner instead of at the bottom as before? I think this is normally a space where people want to write, if the are to make notes. Now one has to manually zoom in and write around to tool box. Which is really annoying, unpractical and costs unnecessary time. 3. When you are in annotation mode, you can‘t select other annotations. So if you by accident highlight a passage, you have to switch off annotation mode, select the passage, delete it, then switch on annotation mode again, highlight again. This is annoying, disrupts reading flow and concentration. 4. on a more personal note: why did the colors from papers 3 to ReadCube papers change. Especially the colors of the underlining mode seem random. If you develop your own coloring systems for papers 3 you can‘t use it anymore, because the colors changed! This is unfortunate. Finally, the overall scope of service is poor considering that the ReadCube papers app came out over 2 years ago. It by far hasn‘t reached the scope of its predecessor.

I have tried different reference managers, and all are for from perfect, specially on the iPad. ReadCube Papers is my favorite reference manager, and is the one I use on my Mac. The experience is better there, but misses the Apple Pencil, that I can use in the iPad. Still clancky sometimes, and the the fact that the eraser is not a simple eraser, but the whole work on everything done it’s annoying, but still is the best one for iPad

Den teilweise sehr negativen Wertungen kann ich mich als sehr langer (10 Jahre?) Nutzer der vorherigen Papers-App von Mekentosj nicht anschließen. Die Synchronisation funktioniert bei mir problemlos. Und auch die Migration von der Papers-App lief völlig einwandfrei. Wirklich gut auch, dass man nun alle Artikel online über eine ziemlich gute Browser-App im Zugriff hat. Eine **Zumutung allerdings ist die iOS App** (iPhone und iPadOS)! Diese verdient wirklich nur einen Stern! Zum ersten ist sie einfach hässlich! Und dann nahezu unbedienbar vor allem, wenn man eine Hülle am iPhone hat. Das Ziehen vom linken Bildschirmrand zum Zugriff auf die Ordnerstruktur und gleichzeitig fast identisch zum Auswählen einzelner Listeneinträge ist eine Zu-mu-tung!!! Liebe Macher bitte, bitte ändern! Diese Bedienbarkeit ist wirklich unterirdisch! Und auch das Markieren und Kommentieren von Texten auf dem iPad (Pro) ist wirklich sehr krumpelig, schlecht machbar und auch häss-lich! Auch da war das alte Papers – schon optisch - deutlich besser. → komplettes Redesing der App. Please! Außerdem ist aus der iOS App, im Gegensatz zur Web-App kein Export von PDFs möglich. Auch das ist sehr ärgerlich!

I enjoy papers on the mac, and reading on the iPhone workes fine. But you can‘t email a pdf, you can‘t open it in another application. The developer says, this is planned, so I hope this will come soon. Apart from this limitation the service and the research-functionallity is excellent, and now that you can cite in your chosen reference-style it is really good. And the Mac-App looks slightly better than Mendeley.

My nested lists were ignored. Modifications in reference metadata made on iPad were also ignored. References deleted on the web app were not removed from the iPad. Bottom line: not good enough for professional research.

Useful app if you use the “new” papers on a laptop. It still has some way to go until it will support as many features as the old Papers app, but hey, that one wasn’t without fault either. The slow sync is an issue however, especially since it blocks all modification of the library until the sync is done. That means, when I want to add a paper that I just found in the browser to my library, I need to wait some dozens of seconds until sync is finished. Kills the flow.

Simply unusable. Nothing works