The Sente Blog

Sente Available on Amazon.com

By Michael on November 19, 2008 1:08 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

We are pleased to announce that it is now possible to purchase Sente on CD-ROM through Amazon.com (at least in the US).

For many people, downloading and purchasing a license on-line will remain the best option, but we regularly receive requests for an actual physical package, and this option fills that need.

Here is the Sente p roduct page on Amazon.

Amazon's Sente page says that it has been available since September, but given that they only received the product from us two days ago, this is not really the case.

You will notice that as of today, no reviews have been posted. Existing customers, no matter how they purchased the product, can always post their thoughts on Amazon, should they be so inclined...

Improved Note Taking

By Michael on November 14, 2008 12:05 PM | 2 Comments | No TrackBacks

I would like to say a few words about our latest release, which includes a major update to Sente's note-taking features.

Since the release of version 5.0 in 2007, Sente has included the ability to attach multiple notes to each reference. (Earlier versions restricted you to a single note per reference.) Each note included a title, page range, quotation and comments.

For many users, this has been a valuable feature, and they mention it regularly in posts about Sente. But we have never been particularly fond of Sente's interface for creating and editing notes. It worked, but it was neither attractive nor terribly functional.

In Sente 5.7, we have completely rewritten the notes interface and we are much happier with the results. In the new interface, it is easy to see more than one note at a time, and we make better use of limited screen space. Also, it is now possible to copy one or more notes from within the Notes view, and then to paste them into most other applications.

We have also added a feature that makes it simple to create notes from selections in PDFs or web pages. You can select either text or any arbitrary region in either a PDF or a web page, and then, if you click on the Create Note button, Sente will automatically create a new note for the current reference using the selection as the quotation. Sente will also fill in the page numbers and add a placeholder title for you.

This ability to create notes from PDFs is not intended as a replacement for tools that let you mark-up a PDF, like Preview and Skim. If what you want to accomplish is to highlight portions of a PDF so that the next time you read the document you will see these annotations, then we would recommend that you use one of these other tools. (Annotations created in Preview, unlike those created in Skim, will show up in the Links view within Sente, so you will not need to return to Preview to view them.)

These changes should make Sente's notes feature more useful to many of our users. I would encourage you to watch the new video on our web site and then to download the latest version and give it a try.

User Interface Design: Inactive Controls

By Michael on November 2, 2008 11:23 AM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks

We are in the middle of implementing some new features in Sente and we are faced with a common design dilemma that I am surprised has not, at least as far as I am aware, been resolved in a standard way across all applications.

The issue is what to do about controls for operations when those operation cannot be performed.

The basic answer in Cocoa is that controls (menu items, buttons, etc.) for operations that cannot be performed should be disabled. Thus, when writing in a text editor, if there is no test selected, the Edit > Copy command is greyed out, meaning there is nothing that can be copied right now.

The problem with this approach is that it does not really help the user very much. They know that they cannot perform the operation, but they do not know why and what they need to do to be able to perform the operation. For me personally, this is one of the most common problems I face when trying out new software. It may be obvious to the developer why the greyed out operation is not available right now, but I am often at a complete loss as to why this would be the case.

I have heard people suggest that you leave the command active (i.e., not greyed out) and pop up an error sheet when the command is invoked inappropriately. The problem I have with this option is that you lose the quick feedback that an inactive control gives you -- you have to go down the blind alley to find out that it leads nowhere. Particularly after you understand when a particular command makes sense and when it does not, deactivating it when it is invalid is helpful.

Another approach I have heard of fakes the deactivation but leaves the command executable. For example, if Copy made no sense, it would appear grey in the menu, but it could still be selected. The developer would then open an error sheet (or something similar) to explain why the command can not be executed. While there is much that I like about this approach (immediate feedback of "deactivation"; simple, consistent method for getting more information) it also has some important problems. One, it is not standard, so most users will not know that they can select an inactive control. Two, it is not supported in the Cocoa frameworks, so it would require quite a bit of development on the part of every developer to make it work. Three, there is no visible indication that an explanation is available, so less experienced users would have to be told that this convention existed.

One more approach is to use the fly-over help on controls to explain when they can be used. This could be very helpful, but... One, it does not work for menu items (they do not have flyover help). And, two, because this is not a standard, many people will not find the messages even where they exist.

So, in the end, I don't think any of these options is good enough and I cannot think of anything better. What I really want is a solution that:

1) is genuinely standard, and this means that it is implemented in the Cocoa frameworks so that everyone gets it "for free" just by following the normal development process and experienced users expect it to be used

2) preserves the immediate feedback of inactive controls

3) is obvious (or at least visible) for users who do not yet know how to get this information

Anyone have any ideas about what such a mechanism might look like? Or do you think I am making too much of this problem and that the existing conventions/tools are adequate?

Michael

Sente Undergraduate Edition

By Michael on October 22, 2008 10:17 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

We have just released the Undergraduate Edition of Sente and I wanted to say a few words about this new version of Sente.

Since we first launched Sente back in 2004, our focus has been on providing the best reference manager for the most demanding users. This has lead to the development of features like standing searches, hierarchical libraries, targeted browsing and automatic PDF import, to name a few. During this time, the growth in the use of Sente by graduate students, professors and research professionals has been dramatic.

But we have heard from many undergraduates over the years who really like Sente's features and intuitive user interface, but who cannot justify the cost of the software because they will only use it to gather the references for a handful of papers each year. These users are not really interested in setting up standing searches or importing large collections of PDF files; they just want an alternative to EndNote.

To make Sente more affordable for this type of user, we are now offering Sente Undergraduate Edition, which has all of the features of Sente, but has a limit of 250 references per library. This limitation, while too restrictive for most graduate students and researchers, is more than enough for most undergraduate papers.

Sente Undergraduate Edition is not limited in any way other than the size of the library that can be created.

Sente Undergraduate Edition is available now from Kagi for $34.95. The Undergraduate Edition can be upgraded to the regular academic version for $64.95.

Sente 5.6 and the Release Process

By Michael on September 17, 2008 10:41 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

We are very pleased to have released the first official version of Sente 5.6 with all of the new features that you have seen during the prerelease period, if you were getting the incremental updates. I just thought I would write a few words about they way we developed and released this version of Sente and invite your feedback on the process.

We began posting preview versions of 5.6 back in mid-June. Rather than waiting until all of the features we wanted to put into this version were done, we decided to roll them out incrementally as previews. We did this for at least two reasons:

One, we really wanted user feedback on some of the new features before they were locked down as official. Specifically, we were concerned about the targeted browsing interface. Did we have the right interface? Would it actually work in the wide variety of contexts our customers operate in? We were concerned about waiting weeks or months before getting it out only to find that we had made some fundamental errors in our design. The feedback we received during the preview period was, indeed, very helpful to us as we refined our design, so I think we achieved our goal on this one.

Two, this was a very big release and we did not want to wait three months between major updates. By putting out preview releases, we were able to incorporate numerous bug fixes unrelated to the new features, and squeeze in quite a few smaller items that we heard about during the development cycle. Getting these fixes and features did mean jumping into the preview release cycle, but we tried hard to make sure that each release was tested enough not to break anything, and we were always standing ready to rush out a quick fix in case we missed something. Overall, I think we achieved this goal as well, although there were a few, relatively small glitches.

So, all told, I think I am satisfied with how this process went. We got good feedback throughout the process and were able to incorporate much of it into the product. And users benefitted from the new features as they became available. And I am aware of only a few cases where the preview-nature of the release caused people problems.

If you have thoughts on how this release was handled, please let us know.

Michael

Designing Formats to use Ibid.

By Michael on September 10, 2008 10:07 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

One of the recent changes to the Sente bibliography format editor was in the way Ibid is handled.

There is now a format-wide setting (in the General tab in the format editor) that indicates that the format uses the term "Ibid." or some variation when the same reference is cited twice in a row in a document. This flag can also be used in cases where citing the same reference twice in a row does not use Ibid, but most of the details of the reference are to be omitted. More on this below.

In the simple case, you might want something like this:

4. Perry, Gillian, and Michael Rossington. Femininity and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture. Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press, 1994, pp. 37-38.

5. Ibid., pp. 82-84.

To achieve this, you need only check the Use Ibid box in the General tab in the format editor, and enter "Ibid." into the text box found there.

In this case, everything will just work as one would hope. Specifically, when a citation is repeated, Sente will automatically suppress every element in the selected format except for Cited Pages.

If you need the format of the Cited Pages element to vary depending on whether the citation has been repeated, you can add more than one Cited Pages element to the format, and make one apply in the context of "Ibid" and the other appear in the context of "not Ibid". For example, if you needed a preceding comma normally, but not one in the case of Ibid, you would need to create two Cited Pages elements and apply the correct conditions.

Chicago 15 N (Notes) is a good example of using Ibid in this way.

A variation on this can be found in Chicago 15 AD (Author-Date). Here is a portion of a document with the temporary citation tags in place:

and {Perry 1994@32} now is the time {Perry 1994@56}

Note that different pages are being cited, but the reference is the same. After scanning in Chicago 15 AD, the result is:

and (Perry and Rossington 1994, 32) now is the time (56)

In this format, repeated citations do not actually use the string "Ibid." but everything other than cited pages is left off the second citation. In this case, the text box after the Use Ibid box is left empty to indicate that the citation details (other than cited pages) should be replaced with nothing.

The New Bibliography Fields View

By Michael on September 10, 2008 12:54 PM | 2 Comments | No TrackBacks

I would like to say a few words introducing a new feature in Sente: the Bibliography Fields view in the reference editor. Here is a screen shot of the new view:

The new view has three major sections.

The top section is where you select one of your favorite bibliography formats. I would normally recommend that you select the style that you use most often. Here, the selected style is "APA 5."

The first field in the next section is the reference type. The value selected in this pop-up determines which fields are displayed in the rest of this section. In the screen shot above, the selected type is "journal article" so the fields relevant to journal articles are displayed. There may be data in fields that are not shown here, but fields that are not shown have no effect on the bibliography entry for the selected reference type.

For many reference type / bibliography format combinations, there are fields that are not used in the selected format, but are used in some other common format. These fields appear below a label that begins "Items below this point..." While you may want to enter values for one or more of these fields, the data will not appear in the bibliography entry for this reference in the selected format.

The bottom section of the Bibliography Fields view is the preview of the selected reference in the selected format. This preview is kept up-to-date with changes to the fields above as you leave each field after making a change. This lets you see just how each reference will appear in the final output in your documents. (Obviously, the final results may differ slightly if, for example, the selected style calls for repeated authors to be replaced with three dashes. The preview here is how the reference would appear if it were the only reference in the bibliography.)

The important point to remember about this new view is that the fields that are displayed are based entirely on the reference type. This list of fields is then prioritized based on the selected bibliography format to place at the bottom any of the fields that are not actually used in the format for the selected reference type.

If you are a Sente user who gets most of your references from PubMed, this new feature will not make a big difference to you. On the other hand, if you are in the humanities or any field where you regularly deal with many different types of references, and you regularly deal with complex bibliography formats, you should find this new view very helpful as you add references to your library.

Screencast from a Sente User

By Michael on September 1, 2008 12:05 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

One of our users, Dr. Kerim Friedman, has put together a nice screencast demonstrating the use of Sente to acquire references from Google Scholar and related PDFs from AnthroSource. The video is included in one of his posts at Savage Minds, a site dedicated to topics in anthropology.

You can view the screencast here:

http://savageminds.org/2008/08/30/how-to-import-google-search-results-into-sente/

The basic flow works in many other fields, as well, so even if you are not an anthropologist, you might find the information valuable.

Sente in the Kleper Report on Digital Publishing

By Michael on August 31, 2008 12:26 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

A review of Sente has just appeared in the Kleper Report on Digital Publishing, a newsletter for the publishing industry. Current issues are available only to subscribers, but here are some excerpts:

Sente 5 is an application that supports the management of academic references by enabling access to hundreds of worldwide on-line databases. Users simply input keywords into a search field and are returned a listing of matching references, some of which contain notes, full text, or PDF files of the reference content. PDFs can be downloaded and managed locally, on the user's computer. It is the ultimate tool for maintaining daily updates on new contributions to the literature in a given field or on a given subject. [...]

A series of informative videos (http://www.thirdstreetsoftware.com/site/videos.html) show how easily and quickly the program can gather valuable research references and content. Sente is the complete solution for scholarly and everyday research needs.

[Reprinted with permission from The Kleper Report on Digital Publishing <http://www.printerport.com/kdp>, copyright 2008, Graphic Dimensions, Lauderdale by the Sea, FL.]

Unlearning "occurrences"

By Michael on August 23, 2008 8:51 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

People who either created or modified bibliography formats in older versions of Sente had to understand what we called "occurrences" in order to accomplish many goals. Unfortunately, this concept now needs to be "unlearned" to use the new version of the bibliography format editor. This article is intended to help people make the transition from the concept of "occurrences" to the ideas that replace it.

One of the problems that both the old and new approaches are addressing is the fact that the more complicated formats (like APA, Chicago, etc.) require that references be formatted differently depending on the context in which they appear. For example, some formats call for a complete version of the reference the first time it appears in a document, and an abbreviated version everywhere else. Some formats want the in-text citation to use only the author name, but in contexts where this is not sufficient to identify the correct reference, they include the title (or a portion thereof).

Prior versions of Sente supported this by allowing you to specify exactly which contexts, or occurrences, a style cared about (most only cared about a few) and then it allowed / required you to create completely different formats for each one. For example, if a format required different contents for the first vs. subsequent occurrences of a reference, one would add the "subsequent" occurrence to the format definition, and then specify exactly how references should appear in this case. Often the definitions for many occurrences were very similar, differing in only a few details.

We have now changed this approach fundamentally. Now, instead of a potentially large number of "occurrences," a bibliography format in Sente only includes one in-text and one bibliography format for each reference type. And the format definition for each of these can contain elements whose appearance is conditional, based on the context in which the reference appears. That is, there is one in-text format for journal articles in each bibliography format definition. This single format might include, say, two versions of the author list: one for the first appearance and the second for all other appearances, but all of the other details are specified only once. This approach eliminates a lot of redundant work, and I know from experience just how hard it was to keep this redundant information in sync.

Here is another way to look at it. If you read my last post (about customizing the preview display), you will see that it is possible to set things up so that there are two different versions of the in-text format displayed. (My example in that post was first and subsequent appearances.) In the old version of Sente, these would have been specified completely independently. In the new version, they are each a version of the single, in-text format specification. Because this specification contains some elements that appear and disappear based on the context conditions, the specification can result in two or more very different outputs for any one reference, thus the need for two different previews.

Now when you want to modify a format to behave slightly differently in a different context, you can leave untouched all of the elements that stay the same, and only apply conditions to those elements that should be different from one context to the next.

While it may take some time to adjust to this new approach, having personally recreated the most complex formats using the new approach, I can say that I think the new approach is much better than the old one. This change, along with all of the other recent changes to the bibliography format editor, makes creating and maintaining complex formats much easier than it has even been before.

The Sente Blog

Discussions of Sente, academic reference management, on-line research, bibliographies and related topics.

Sente Available on Amazon.com

Improved Note Taking

User Interface Design: Inactive Controls

Sente Undergraduate Edition

Sente 5.6 and the Release Process

Designing Formats to use Ibid.

The New Bibliography Fields View

Screencast from a Sente User

Sente in the Kleper Report on Digital Publishing

Unlearning "occurrences"

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