Procrastadabbler

First let me say, I don’ t own stock in this company.

I just bought myself a solstice gift. It’s this nifty software program called “Papers” for Macs. It organizes your pdf files. I had so many floating around in various places on my harddrive, multiple copies, etc. Even with the Macs search function I often couldn’t easily find what I had or even remember what I had (and how can you search for something you don’t know you have.

I had played with an early version of the software when I bought my Mac a year ago and was unimpressed. I read about it this week in a NYTimes column by scientist Olivia Judson, checked it out, and fell in love. It’s not perfect. I had to go through and correct the titles/authors/years for a number of articles, but that’s minor compared to having no clue was different strings of numbers mean as so many pdfs from journals are named when you download them.

What’s really cool too is that you can click on an author, and it’ll bring up a list of publications by that author. Then you can click on that and gain at least portal access to the article.

The NYTimes article also said there’s Zotero which is a Firefox plug-in. I haven’t explored that yet. I’ll do so from my PC in the future.

It’s amazing what gets a geek excited.