Hopefully if you’ve got an iPhone you’ve already had a chance to check out the new nature.com app, available now from an App Store near you.
Some of the app’s features aren’t immediately obvious which is something we’re aiming to fix in later releases (we’re also working on a video walkthrough).
In the meantime here are a couple of things I think are pretty cool:
Saving for later and syncing to the desktop
- tap on an article, then on the “actions” button in the top right of the screen.
- Choose “save for later”.
- The article has now been saved to your phone and you can read it offline. Just tap the “Saved” tab to see a list of your saved articles.
- It has also been synced to your account on the nature.com/mobileapps website. Go there and log in if you haven’t already, then click on the “Saved” tab just underneath the header.
- On the website you can export citations for the articles you’ve saved. This uses Connotea so can be slow sometimes (we’re working on this too).
- If you log on with the same account on a different iPhone (or Android device) your saved articles will follow you.
PubMed searches
- in the iPhone app tap on the Search tab.
- enter a search term in the search bar at the top of the screen.
- before hitting the Search button on the keyboard press the “pubmed” button that has appeared underneath the search bar.
- hit search – you should see results from PubMed that match your query.
- tap on a result to read the abstract and to visit the full text version via the link at the bottom of the page.
- on the search results page use the “save” button in the top right to save the search.
- now whenever any new abstracts are added to PubMed matching your saved search they’ll appear in the Recent Articles view mixed in with the content from Nature.
We’re improving both of these things in the next version of the app – right now the PubMed search doesn’t work well for articles without a DOI and the offline experience leaves something to be desired. 🙂 As before if you have any bug reports or feature requests just let us know.