30-second screencast on PDFs and metadata

The new version 1.5 of OS X literature management tool Papers has lots of new and improved features, but one of the most immediately useful is the ability to parse the DOI string out of a PDF and use it to look up the metadata for that file from PubMed. As the metadata that publishers put in PDF files is generally pitiful and basically unreliable for any practical use, this is a very welcome feature.  Read more

Comparing Google Reader’s plans with Scintilla

According to reports of a video accidentally leaked from inside Google, the Google Reader developers have interesting plans for the future. While Scintilla works on a different scale from Google Reader (which is said to store “10 terabytes of raw data from 8 million feeds”) and also doesn’t aim for the same niche of general-purpose feed reader, there are proposals reported that would help aggregation sites like Scintilla, as well as several features that we’ve already implemented. Here’s a selection of the most interesting:  … Read more