So SyncUThink is a tool to synchronize all the papers that you have on CiteUlike with the one that you have on your computer.
The developer is one of my friend and I manage to get an interview for this blog. So enjoy.
Mattions: Hi Greg, Why you don’t introduce yourself to our readers?
Greg: Hi, my name is Greg Jordan, and I’m a new Ph.D. student at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, Cambridge. I’ll be working in the area of biological sequence analysis, though I’ve just started, so who knows where I’ll end up.Mattions: So, why did you start to write SyncUThink?
Greg: I’ve always been a bit frustrated by the process of finding, organizing, and exporting citations when writing papers while at University. So when a friend recently showed me CiteULike, I sure liked!But I also like to save paper and read things on my computer. So, this tool simply automates what I got tired of doing: finding PDFs for articles stored in my CiteULike library. I’m also a bit of a nut for user interfaces, so I used this program as a test to see how quickly I could “whip something together” as a Java applet.
Mattions: That’s pretty clever and useful to keep everything on sync. So how long did it take to get out the v 0.1?
Greg: I started on Monday afternoon, and by Wednesday I had something working fairly well.
Mattions: Wow, that’s really fast :). Do you want to develop it further?
Greg: Not really. I created the program because I wanted something to automate a very specific and simple task that found myself doing lots of recently (finding and downloading PDFs for reading journal articles), and if I spend too much time trying to satisfy everybody’s very last suggestion or wish for the program, it will nullify the time I tried to save by writing the thing in the first place!However, I would love to see someone take the original code and develop it further, perhaps making it compatible with a more open reference manager platform such as Connotea.
Mattions: Do you choose any type of license or are you not interested on it?
Greg: Yes, I’m licensing it under the GNU GPLv2.Mattions: Is the code available or do you think to make it available some day?
Greg: I find Google Code really easy to work with, so it’s available at http://syncuthink.googlecode.com/ .Mattions: Ok, Greg thanks for the interview and for your time.
Greg: No problem, thanks for the chance to chat about the program. Hopefully some people will find it useful!