Aziz, Lite! welcomes three daughter apps!

Ever wondered what the Lite! of Aziz, Lite! did stand for? Well, except for the movie reference, it is the mark of an ongoing project, Aziz, with much bigger ambitions. In the mean time, let's welcome (or welcome back) EZPaperz, MendEZ and ZotEZ...

Aziz, Lite! has grown a lot since its first steps in early 2016. Yet, our ambition is much bigger. In addition to the multi-cloud multi-reference-manager capabilities already present, we really want to integrate the possibility to access those multiple accounts at once. People can have multiple libraries, and sometimes they have to use different reference management software. If you're changing job or if you're joining a new team, you can have to adapt to whatever system is already in place. That does not mean you want to compromise and give up on your old library. For this very reason, we think it is important to provide people with the option to set up multiple accounts on the same device. It could be the same reference management software on different cloud systems, or different softwares on the same cloud, or even different libraries/accounts, or of course any combination of these.

Yet, Aziz, Lite! allows only one account to be set up at once. Since the app is curated by only one person (me, Yohan Farouz), it could take a long time before Aziz is released. In addition to the multi-account features, I really want to add editing options as well... So in the meantime, I am happy to announce the release of 3 separate apps, namely EZPaperz for Papers, MendEZ for Mendeley, and ZotEZ for Zotero.

         

Even though we're still far away from true multi-account apps, having them separate offers the opportunity to:

  • have a maximum of 4 accounts set up at once (one for Papers, one for Mendeley, one for Zotero, and one of your choice using Aziz, Lite!).
  • have less annoying updates that are not related to the Reference Manager that you are actually using. As an example, when a bug is diagnosed using Zotero as a Ref Manager, we won't have to issue an update on EZPaperz, but only on ZotEZ. Of course, all patches will always be applied to Aziz, Lite!

    And of course, our big 50% Christmas discount on all in-app purchases applies to all these new apps

    So let's go one more time over all the cool features available in this new Aziz Suite:

    Free features :

  • Syncing of your papers' library with Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive
  • Listing of papers / books and displaying their main information (title, authors, publisher, year published, ...).
  • Downloading the pdf of the paper when available
  • Sharing the pdf of the paper when available
  • Searching within references
  • Advanced filters: favorites (Mendeley/Zotero) or flags, color labels, ratings (Papers)
  • Advanced settings:
       - resetting library data and reference manager type
       - deleting local files
       - hiding advanced metadata (labels, flags, etc.)
  • (Beta) Altmetric scoring.
  • (Now in Production) Local libraries: if you cannot put your library in a cloud, you can copy it on your local Android storage and load it into Aziz, Lite! Read our tutorial for more information: http://azizlite.ezbio.net/index.php?p=blog&id=7
  • (Beta) Secondary storage: you can choose to store the downloaded PDFs either on the internal memory or an external SD card!
  • (Beta) Fast Loading of papers: if you have a large number of papers, you can choose to load them at the same time as they are displayed, so that you can access them while the others are still loading.

    Extra features:

  • Sorting options
  • Search filter for papers, authors and collections
  • Author’s tab
  • Collection’s tab

    Important Note: all the extra features are available for evaluation (for FREE) when selecting the option "Skip this step". You will be presented with a curated set of papers in order to get a glimpse at our cool features.

    Future updates :

  • Bookmark’s tab with flags, color labels, favorite articles and keywords
  • Broader Cloud compatibility (Mendeley Cloud, Zotero Cloud/WebDav)
  • Automatic downloading of entire collections.
  • New cool features based on your feedback

    To learn how to configure Mendeley or Zotero for third-part Cloud syncing on your computer, look at our tutorials and their YouTube videos

  • Configuring Mendeley + Mac (+ Google Drive)
  • Configuring Zotero + Mac/Windows (+ Google Drive)
  • Configuring Mendeley + Windows (+ OneDrive)

    Happy Holidays!

    Yohan.

  • Tutorials: Setting up Zotero on Mac (or Windows) for Google Drive syncing

    This video describes why and how to transfer the Zotero database and Pdf articles from the Zotero folder inside your favorite Cloud folder (here, Google Drive, for the example).

    Tutorials: Manual Setup of your library's database and folders

    This tutorial describes how to set up manually the library you want to connect to ZotEZ². With ZotEZ², you have the possibility to force the app to go to one specific folder on your Cloud.

    This means that you can have multiple library on one cloud (let's say Dropbox), and still be able to choose which one will be synchronized with ZotEZ²!

    It also means that you can have your database file (.sqlite) in one place, and your library folder in another place!

    Finally, it implies that you can use attachments rather than direct storage folder linking of the PDFs.