[OS X TeX] Papers or BibDesk?

[Oliver Buerschaper]

I've been trying out Papers for a few weeks now and at present I can  
only strongly discourage you from entrusting your papers to this  
program.

Although I find its concept nice (and probably superior to BibDesk  
for organizing your electornic papers) the database engine of Papers  
resembles an early alpha maturity rather than the stability that you  
would expect from an official release. At the moment it's extremely  
shaggy and eats up your data on a regular basis.

On the other hand BibDesk is rather stable and for my purposes it  
does a good job keeping all my references together. However, I miss a  
few things like being able to group papers into subcategories of  
first level groups. But still BibDesk has been my number one choice  
for quite some time (and will probably remain so for a little while ;-)

Hope that'll help,
Oliver



> Are some people here familiar with Papers:
>
> <http://mekentosj.com/papers/>
>
> I heard about it for the first time today, through its mention at  
> MacNN:
>
> <http://www.macnn.com/articles/07/04/26/papers.reaches.version.10/>
>
> The first paragraph of its presentation rings a bell, as it  
> describes exactly the situation I'm in:
>
>> Do you have dozens of PDF files from your favorite scientific  
>> articles scattered on your harddrive? Do you also try to  
>> desperately organize them by renaming and archiving them in  
>> folders? But like the piles of printed articles on your desk, you  
>> can't keep up with all the new papers you download, and despite  
>> all your efforts it has become impossible to find that one article.
>
> However, from what I had read here I had understood BibDesk offers  
> already, for free and in a BibTeX-compatible way, the functionality  
> provided by Papers. Is this statement correct (I'm not using  
> Bibdesk yet)? Are there users of BibDesk and/or Papers, who could  
> clarify this.
>
> Bruno Voisin

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