Show HN: Jendeley – JSON-based document organizing software | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Jendeley – JSON-based document organizing software

akawashiro.github.io

85 pointsa_kawashiro14 comments

I created jendeley to help organize documents for programmers.

- jendeley is JSON-based. You can see and edit your database quickly.

- jendeley works locally. Your important database is owned only by you. No cloud.

- jendeley is browser-based. You can run it anywhere node.js runs.

Repository: https://github.com/akawashiro/jendeley

Open articleView on HN

This looks great to me. I used to use Mendeley (until Elsevier bought it and locked me out - I forgot my Mendeley password but telling the app this just takes you to the Elsevier signup page?) and though Zotero is good, I have never liked it in terms of look and feel.

One nitpick:

Why jendeley?

As programmers, we require various documents in different formats, such as recent machine learning papers, classic compiler books, CPU and accelerator specification documents, programming language documents, and [...]

This is true for any researcher. I have an absolutely huge document library...and it has nothing to do with programming. I do keep a small repository of useful texts and articles in my development directory, but I'm not a computer scientist; I write code as a means to an end and have no ambitions to run a team or publish a library.

Thank you for your comments.

I am trying to improve jendeley so that it can replace your huge document library.

I am really looking forward to trying it out. Being able to manage my library through my IDE would make me enormously happy.

Glad that there's more choice, but I couldn't find any features that I don't already have in zotero.

I had the same question. That said, Zotero's sync story is pitiful and that looks like probably never changing; something like this might easily improve on that owing to the stack it's built on.

edit: I may very well give it a try on that basis. I've got a large collection in Zotero on one of my machines, and a partially overlapping large collection in the Zotero app on my phone, and they are partially overlapping precisely because Zotero sucks at sync. It'd scratch a years-long itch to have my collection unified and easily available for both use and new accession, and Jendeley looks like it may well make that comfortably achievable.

I have not experienced sync issues with zotero, but if your goal is to have a text based database system that is easier to sync just switch to a bibtex system and one of the many GUIs (I found jabref the best)

As typical for recommendations beginning with "just", this entirely ignores a critical concern of the problem domain - in this case, the phone sync use case I explicitly called out in my prior comment. Jabref looks worse than Zotero in this regard; where the latter fails but at least makes the attempt, the former shows no sign of bothering to try at all.

I'm a hobbyist student of hymenopterology, not a professional researcher; this is an interest that needs to fit into a life with many competing concerns, rather than the work my professional life is built around. It should not be a great surprise when tools built for and by professional researchers fail to meet my needs - to say nothing of those tools being built to a typical academic standard of software quality, something in the implication of whose existence I am being quite generous.

I don't yet know whether Jendeley is any better, but it could hardly be any worse, and having been built with modern tooling and in a modern HCI paradigm offers significant promise of justifying my time and interest. (And as I do find things about it I don't like, it won't require software archaeology to fix them!)

Thank you for your comments.

Although there are many applications to organize documents, almost all of them are for only researchers. At least, all of them are not for me.

When you are tired of Zotero, please try jendeley. I'm waiting for you while improving jendeley.

I'm already tired of Zotero! :D Jendeley is most certainly on my project list. And thank you for investing such effort in so promising an application!

I will probably stick to JabRef, which is bibtex-driven.

But the pdf-folder scanning feature sounds pretty cool!

Thank you for your comment! I am considering how to deal with BibTeX in jendeley.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com