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Rejoice! Papers, Please will get pixelated nudity after all
Papers, Please -- the hit PC game that launched on iPad today sans the not-at-all graphic nudity of the original game -- will be getting a patch to restore the low-res boobs and butts to their former glory. Developer Lucas Pope has announced that Apple contacted him and explained that the original rejection for "pornographic content" was a simple misunderstanding, and that he should submit an update to bring the sexy back, so to speak. For those who would rather avoid the nudity anyway, the game includes the option to turn it off, but as the nudity itself is barely there to begin with, it's probably not going to ruffle many feathers anyway. As far as the update's availability, Pope says it should go live sometime next week.
Papers 2 and Papers for the iPad: the ultimate journal reading combination
It's that time of year again: time to head back to college, grab those books and kickstart the academic term. This year, why not cut out paper from your scientific journal research workflow with the ultimate in journal management and reading for the Mac and iPad? Management Papers 2 takes journal management to the max on your Mac. Across academia and industry, Endnote is pretty much the gold standard as far as referencing goes. Yes, there are apps like Bookends, Refworks and BibTex, as well as a plethora of others including the new cross-platform offering from Mendeley, but none of them, including Thomson Reuters' offering, come close to Papers 2 when it comes to actually managing those hundreds of PDF files, importing them, sorting them, reading them, and most importantly, searching them. Papers 2 creates a database of references, grabbing their metadata from Pubmed, Google Scholar and directly from science repositories like Science Direct, and attaching the PDF files. If you have a PDF, but no citation to import, you can just import the PDF into Papers 2 by simple drag and drop. From there Papers 2 can scan your file for a match, but if it can't find it automatically, it's just a case of manually editing the reference and hitting "Match." That'll kick you into a search form where you can just drag to select text and search for the reference with it, whether it's the title, author or journal, it'll scan the science directories for the matching reference and bind all the metadata accordingly.
Judge unseals documents in Gizmodo case, finder offered extra $3500 and bonus for lost iPhone
After multiple requests from media like Wired.com and the Los Angeles Times, a judge has unsealed the search warrant in the Gizmodo case. According to California law, search papers must be made public within 10 days of a search being completed, unless there are extenuating circumstances in the case. In this one, the prosecutors were arguing that the identities (presumably of the Apple employee who originally lost the iPhone purchased by Gizmodo's editor, as well as the person who found it and sold it to Gizmodo) could be revealed. But that information had already reached the Web -- Gizmodo identified the Apple employee as an iPhone engineer, and Wired identified the phone seller, so San Mateo County Superior Court Judge Clifford V. Cretan decided that since the information was already out there, there was no point in keeping the papers sealed up. Judge Cretan made note of the irony that the papers were originally sealed to hide "possible intrusion into media sources," and now it was media institutions asking to have the papers opened up. Wired has the papers now -- they say (not surprisingly) that the iPhone seller's roommate led police to Brian Hogan (who found the phone), but there's also news that Hogan had allegedly spread evidence around Redwood City. The papers also confirm that Gizmodo paid $5000 for the iPhone, but there was also a bonus promised to Hogan when Apple officially announced the phone, and an additional $3500 payment from "another source." Interesting. Maybe there is more to this case than we had originally heard. Keep in mind that this is only the initial investigation -- no charges have yet been filed. [via The Loop]
Back to School: Papers updated for the new term
TUAW's going Back to School! We'll be bringing you tips and reviews for students, parents and teachers right up until the bell rings in September. Read on for a timely app update useful for students. PDF management app Papers has been bumped to version 1.8.5, bringing what the developers claim are 100 improvements. Top on the list is a new sharing feature called Papers Archives, which lets you share a PDF file and its associated metadata with a colleague. Papers isn't for everyone. Instead, it's specifically designed for students and academics, particularly those who deal with a lot of scientific periodicals in the course of their research. It lets you search them, sort them (manually or using Smart Folders), find them on any one of 14 different online repositories, rate them, browse your library in tabs, and much more. Papers costs $42 for a single-user license, but students qualify for a 40 per cent discount.
Skim 0.7 update
Since we last mentioned the Skim PDF reader and annotating application it has grown considerably and the newly released version 0.7 adds bevy of new features. Since that early release back in April they've added considerably to the markup and searching tools (including live search of the document with context in addition to searching just the annotations). There's also greatly expanded AppleScript support and a presentation mode. The crazy keyboard shortcut system we complained about before has also been simplified and improved. In short, Skim is getting better by leaps and bounds and is definitely worth another look if you regularly need to read and markup PDFs. While you can still only highlight PDFs with selectable text (i.e. PDFs that are not just scans), the anchored note and box features make marking up even image PDFs easier. Skim remains open source and thus a free download from SourceForge.[via MacUser]
Skim PDF reader
In a comment to our recent PDF review, Gary let us know about about Skim, a new open source project to produce a tool for reading and marking up PDFs. Skim already has a number of interesting tools, allowing you to: embed notes (both shorter notes that appear over the PDF, and anchored notes which are marked by a speech bubble icon that leads to a separate window) add circles and boxes if the text in the PDF is selectable, highlight, strike-through, and underline. Skim even has a full screen mode, as is popular with the kids these days. For a version 0.2 release there's already a lot of functionality here, which bodes well for the future (though I have to say the keyboard shortcuts for notes and markup are insane). Unlike Papers, which we mentioned before, Skim doesn't seem to be intended as a PDF library manager, but rather an individual PDF markup tool. It is available now as a free download from SourceForge.
Papers: Scientific Papers PDF Manager
Papers appears to be an interesting application for those in the scientific community who need to read and manage a large number of papers as PDFs. It integrates with the online NIH database PubMed for searching and downloading. It allows you to organize articles not only by title but by author and journal. It even includes a full screen reading mode. There is nice review over at Infinite Loop by Jonathan Gitlin discussing how Papers has improved his own researching workflow.The idea behind Papers, basically an iTunes or iPhoto for PDF journal articles, is a really good one, but I really wish it could be expanded in several areas. First of all, it clearly needs to support more online bibliographic databases and journal archives. As a humanist, for instance, I'd love a front end for JSTOR and the Philosophers Index (though perhaps I should not hold my breath since the developer calls Papers: "your personal library of science"). Secondly, and more importantly, I'd like to see Papers or a similar application offer a robust system for highlighting, comments, annotations, cross-linking etc. That's what I really need: a good tool to help me read articles (including and especially saving my notes), not just allow me to organize them.In any case, if you need to manage professional journal articles Papers looks like a good start, though I did run into some bugs. It is presently available as a "Public Preview" and can be downloaded from mekentosj.com. It will eventually sell for €19 (~$25).Thanks Tim!
