README

Copyright 2010 Tim Miller

LICENSE
See file LICENSE for details, but this software is licensed under GPLv3.
For convenience purposes I have included in the distribution
a library called javabib for parsing bibtex files which was originally 
licensed under GPLv2 and written by Johannes Henkel.  Thanks Johannes for 
saving me a lot of time and effort.

STATUS
This program is under heavily development.  It is not ready for practical use.
There is no distribution yet.  The repository is formatted as an eclipse
project, and there is no configuration, everything is hardcoded and uses
a test file.

PURPOSE
This program is designed and written to solve the problem of tracking all
the scientific papers I've downloaded/read/toread'd, and combining those
different states into a single interface.   Rather than having downloads 
in my Downloads folder (with obscure names assigned by citeseer or sciencedirect
or whatever), cited files in .bib file (with no user metadata), and having
separate pdfs on every machine, they should be tracked like iTunes tracks songs,
with some improvements specific to scientific papers.

What separates this program from others with similar goals:
 * Allows for tagging and summarization of papers.
 * Intended to use Dropbox folder for storing pdfs across machines
 * Intended to open PDFs from interface (instead of searching with spotlight,
which is surprisingly bad at locating pdfs based on content)
 * Uses xml library file to track refs (also sync'd with Dropbox)
 * Tight integration with bibtex (import/export coming soon)


HELPING
If anyone is interested in contributing to this project, I would be thrilled.
I have the above goals in mind, and I think I can do those fairly quickly.

Where I could use help the most is:
 * Making the interface "pretty" as well as "standard" (e.g., in os x it should look like an os x program)
 * Organizing the code neatly
 * Cross-platform configuration (I can put .papermanager file in linux/mac with
directory information, but how to do it in windows/other smartly?)
 * Features I have not thought of but would be very useful to others.