Amazing news! Droideley made it to Top 10+1 the Binary Battle. It's really great because all the entries that made it to Top 10+1 are really cool and for Droideley it is honor to be in a company of such great apps. Moreover Droideley and the other apps will be judged by utlimate panel of judges including names like Werner Vogels, Tim O'Reilly, James Powell, Juan Enriquez or John Wilbanks. It would be great for Driodeley to get any feedback from them.

If you want to support Droideley in this final stage of Mendeley/PLoS Binary Battle, you can vote for it in a public vote! But do check the other apps and then decide which one should win ;)

First of all, sorry for the silence mode that this blog has been in for the last two months or so. This post is a bit of a summary of Droideley's past and bit of a future plans. Today, Droideley is in version 0.43 and is still far away from the 1.0 but I think that is quite stable and can be usefull already.

The original purpose, that I started to make droideley for (the ability to read my Mendeley pdfs on a phone and a tablet), was already fulfilled. It took longer time than I had thought in the beginning but I believe that I can say that Droideley does help researches in their work now. I would like to thank you, testers and users, for your kind feedback that was driving my effort in releasing new and new versions. Today, Droideley crossed the threshold of 2000 active installations.

• Synchronizing your whole Mendeley library with your android device
• Ability to download files attached to the documents
• Browse the library through folders
• Filter documents by author or tag
• Quick keyword search in the presented lists (document titles, authors, tags etc.)
• Share documents through all the sharing options provided by your device
• Browse groups and their documents
• Download files associated with documents within groups
• Search the global Mendeley Web database for new papers (voice search option included)

I am looking forward to extending this list by releasing new versions of Droideley in the future.

And what are the ideas for the future? Mendeley Binary Battle has shown that there are lots of cool approaches on how to use science related public APIs and resources. Let's mention visualizations like Vyzkumap and CollabGraph, or projects like PaperCritic which tries to open up the peer review process. Another promising idea is KLEENK, a platform for connecting scientific content.

I have a similar idea to that behind the Vyzkumap app, but I would like to see cited papers, not only related (but there is no Mendeley API call to get cited papers yet). Another idea is very similar to the one behind the PaperCritic. I would like to provide the possiblity to discuss papers globally and to connect researchers and authors of the papers in the discussion that could be seen to any Mendeley users. The ability to rate papers and their content would help researchers to quickly find good papers and dismiss the bad ones (again, visualization through an interactive graph would be a great tool in this process). Users would be notified about new comments on the papers in their library and so on and so on. I think that this feature would really "socialize" the research.

I have already started some experiments with Amazon Web Services that should lead to the implementation of such features (paper discussions, rating papers, notifications) but I guess that it will take serious bunch of time to finish it. But hey, I am looking forward to it! :)

PS: Have you tried the other Mendeley Android client? No? You should! Competition is a good thing :) (Scholarley)

Finally, Droideley has been uploaded to the Android Market. It doesn't pack all the features mentioned in the previous post, but it should contain less bugs and the synchronization process should be faster. Here, I would like to say thank you to all the tester who really helped me to find and fix many bugs. I hope that you will like the app ;)

The release of the Droideley public beta is comming! My plan is to release it on the Android Market on the 6th Sepetember. I have also decided to participate with Droideley in the Mendeley/PLoS Binary Battle so wish me good luck :). In the future, I would like to spent more time on the development of version tailored for tablets but due to the lack of a free time I can't promise anything ;). I have some more ideas about what to do with Mendeley OAPI (including some webapps) that I will share later.

The public beta version should include better possibilities for downloading and caching files attached to the Mendeley articles. The options should be:

• Cache files on a local storage
• Cache files on an external storage (SD cards)
• No cahing (current state)

Maybe some new functionality like storing articles in folders or faster sync will be included. Another plan is to use Amazon AWS for some new features (like comments and ratings for articles). I will share some details on this in some future blogposts.

I plan at least one more private beta release for 125 registered testers (thank you guys) where some new functionality should be tested. Stay tuned guys!

I admit that the development slowed down a lot during last month but now I can finally say that the next testing version is out. It has been sent to the 100 testers so I am really looking forward to the feedback.

During the last testing the main cause of the crashes was the synchronizing process. I was not able to reproduce all those crashes on the emulator nor on my HTC Desire, so the main new feature in this release is the new bug reporting system. Whenever the app crashes than the detailed info about the crash will be sent to me so I would be able to analyze it properly and hopefully to fix the sync process once and forever ;).

Another key feature is the ability to download the files attached to the Mendeley documents. It is implemented in a silly way so far (no caching options), but I am working on better version.

And finally new icon :D

My new Asus Eee Pad Transformer arrived about two weeks ago and yes it is cool :). But...there is really only small number of applications that are programmed with Honeycomb SDK and tailored for tablet hi-res screens. Even such a famous internet services like twitter does not have an official app for tablets (I am using Plume now). The vast majority of apps is still designed only with the 'ordinary' phone screen in mind. I hope that this will change in a time (at least we will have droideley for tablets, won't we? :)). I am really looking forward to start working on a tablet version of Droideley. The Honeycomb SDK offers lot of new concepts so I will need to learn things first but I already have plenty of ideas for the tablet version ;). Will share them in some of the next posts.

(download)

Click here to download:

tablet-experience-snyfazzCrbwupncklljb.zip (784 KB)

I am sory for the silence mode that I have been in for couple of weeks. Had some personal stuff to do (moving to the new flat, holidays ;), so I am a bit behind with the droideley work. But now I have time to spare on droideley development so you can expect some new testing versions and I hope that sooner or later the release on the android market ;). Till now, I have obtained over 60 requests from people willing to test the droideley app which is really awesome! I didn't expect such an interest. Thanks! I will do my best not to dissapoint your expectations ;)

First of all I would like to thank to all testers (now about 50 people) for their time and their support. Secondly, I would like to apologize for a bit hasty and clumsy release. From the responses of the testers I have learned several things:

• The most bugy part is the synchronizing process. I admit that it has to be done in a better way. Interesting thing is, that you reported more crashes on Cyanogenmod devices.
• There is some problem in authentication step when using Opera Mini browser (thanks Lukas). I am not sure whether it is a bug in Droideley or a problem of Opera Mini.
• You guys have lots of tablets :) My first plan, when I started with the development, was to release Droideley generally for android devices and than to start with seperate Droideley project for tablets, but maybe I reconsider that and pay more attention to tablets in this early stage of development.
• There was one more bug in syncing mechanism. I forgot to change one boolean value in the code before release and it caused that the maximum of synced documents was 100. That was a limitation only for my testing purposes and I just forgot to remove this limitation (#ShameOnMe :)).
• You posted me plenty of small improvements for the app. Thank you ;)

Once again I would like to say THANK YOU to all those who tested the app. You really helped me a lot. I promise that the next version will be better ;). You can expect better syncing, online pdf download from mendeley (@LoveMendeley for adding "Download file" method to their API ;)), function for moving documents into folders and few other improvements.

You can expect the next version to be released at the end of the next week.

The time of the first testing release is approaching quickly! The First Droideley will pack the very basic functionality but it would be great to get feedback in such an early stage of development. So I ask for your help! I will be gratefull for anyone who will be willing to put her hands on the first version and give me some feedback. The only thing you have to do is to send me an email to droideley [at] gmail *dot* com with the subject "Droideley Tester". Inside the email please describe your android phone specs (manufacturer, model, Android OS version).

If you do so, you can expect reply in few days with the application .apk file attached. This means that you will need to install the application "manually". You can find many how-to articles on this topic on the web like this one.

Thanks for your time and your support ;)