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ADA07Application Log in to Edit

Mike Johnson Michael McCracken

I want to submit my contest entry in:

  • <del>Best Mac OS X Leopard Application</del>
  • Best Mac OS X User Experience
  • <del>Best Mac OS X Developer Tool</del>
  • <del>Best Mac OS X Game</del>
  • Best Mac OS X Scientific Computing Solution
  • <del>Best Mac OS X Dashboard Widget</del>
  • Best Mac OS X Student Product

(Note: we have to pick just one.)

Explain why your entry is competitive and best suited within the category you have chosen from the above question:*

Product Name:*

BibDesk

Product Version:*

1.3.3

Indicate when and how you publicly announced the release/availability of your contest entry.

(Provide URLs to announcements and press releases, if applicable. If you are submitting into the Leopard category, please indicate Leopard product – release pending:*)

Released on April 5th 2007, it was announced to a few relevant mailing lists and was updated on sourceforge's site, as well as several mac software update sites.

Describe what your contest entry does and the type(s) of customer who might use it:*

BibDesk is a bibliography manager that helps you search for, gather, organize, search through, and use papers and other material gathered in the course of research. The typical user is an academic who uses it to keep track of papers she has found during literature searches on the web, make notes about them, and find them later to cite in her own papers. BibDesk uses the BibTeX file format, and as such is best suited to being used with LaTeX, but several features allow it to be used with other publication methods, and some people do find it useful without BibTeX and LaTeX.

List the outstanding, unique, and/or noteworthy design features of your contest entry:*

A three-pane interface with a single, flexible search field gives a great deal of power to help manage and find papers without exposing overwhelming complexity to the user.

Search groups

Dynamic groups

Managing local copies of papers

There are also many features to ease common pains in gathering and entering bibliography data. For example, it is easy to work around a web site's lack of downloadable citation data by using drag and drop if it displays structured data like RIS or BibTeX. The "New publications from clipboard" and "new publications from web" commands open a sheet that makes creating new entries from unstructured text or web pages much easier, avoiding many steps of copy and paste, and even smoothly downloading a PDF from the web if a link is available.

List the key Mac OS X technologies you've used in your contest entry and explain how you take advantage of each of them. See Section 4 of the Official Rules for a list of criteria used to judge your product:*

BibDesk uses SearchKit to let you search the contents of local PDF copies of papers in your database. It cooperates with a PDF viewer app like Preview or Skim to highlight the matching word when you view a paper after finding it using such a search.

BibDesk integrates with Spotlight to support indexing your papers database with Spotlight, allowing many ways to search the metadata you have built up.

BibDesk has extensive AppleScript support, including hooks around common operations to implement new functionality. A few very useful extensions have been developed using AppleScript. Examples are on this page: http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/BibDesk_Applescripts

We use WebKit for the import-from-web functionality that makes entering citations from a website easy.

BibDesk also provides several System Services to let you search and use your references database without leaving the current app.

Uses PDFKit to preview linked PDF files and preview of generated references.

Uses Bonjour to share bibliography information.

Uses Distributed Objects for Bonjour support, for interaction with other apps, and for background processing.

List the names and versions of additional software or hardware required for your contest entry to function properly. If no additional software or hardware is needed, please enter N/A:*

N/A

List all serial numbers, access codes, or registration information required for your entry to function properly on multiple installations:

None. BibDesk is free software.