In previous articles I've looked at how various apps display scientific articles. The apps I looked at were: PLoS Reader Nature Papers Mendeley So, where next? As Ian Mulvany noted in a comment on an earlier post, I haven't attempted to summarise the best user interface metaphors for navigation. Rather than try and do that in the abstract, I'd like to create some prototypes to play with various ideas.

Apple's iBooks app is an ePub and PDF reader, and one could write a lengthy article about its interface. However, in the context of these posts on visualising the scientific article there's one feature that has particularly struck me. When reading a book that cited other literature the citations are hyper-links: click on one and iBooks forwards you (via the page turning effect) to the reference in the book's bibliography.

Previously I've looked at the Nature, PLoS, and Papers apps, now it's the turn of the Mendeley iPad app. As before, this isn't a review of the app as such, I'm more interested in documenting how the app interface works, with a view to discovering if there are consistent metaphors we can use for navigating bibliographic databases.

Continuing the series of posts about reading scientific articles on the iPad, here are some quick notes on perhaps the most polished app I've seen, Papers for iPad. As with earlier posts on the Nature and PLoS apps, I'm not writing an in-depth review - rather I'm interested in the basic interface design. Papers is available for the Mac, as well as the iPhone and iPad.

This week seems to be API week. The Encyclopedia of Life API Beta Test has been out since August 12th. By comparison with the Mendeley API that I've spent rather too much time trying to get to grips with, the EOL API release seems rather understated.

Continuing on from my previous post Viewing scientific articles on the iPad: towards a universal article reader, here are some brief notes on the PLoS iPad app that I've previously been critical of. There are two key things to note about this app. The first is that it uses the page turning metaphor. The article is displayed as a PDF, a page at a time, and the user swipes the page to turn it over.

There are a growing number of applications for viewing scientific articles coming out for the iPhone and iPad. I'm toying with extending the experiments described in an earlier post when I took the PLoS iPad app to task for being essentially a PDF page-turner, so I thought I should take a more detailed look at the currently available apps.

PLoS recently announced a dedicated iPad app, that covers all the PLoS Journals, and which is available from the App Store. Given the statement that "PLoS is committed to continue pushing the boundaries of scientific communication" I was expecting something special.

OK, first of all, I want one, I want one real bad. There's been a general sense of disappointment about the iPad, which I suspect is only natural given the enormous hype leading up to the announcement, as well as the fact that the applications shown were fairly conventional.