We hope everyone is keeping safe during this time. If you are working on any research or development that has to do with COVID-19(Scientist, Researcher, Doctor, Journalist, etc.) we have a new resource for you to use. Please head to https://covid19.readcube.com/about to register for the COVID-19 Research Pass. The pass currently hosts over 26 million articles from leading publishers such as Springer Nature, Wiley, and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). We hope this resource helps anyone who is trying to find solutions to difficult problems during this difficult time.
For the desktop release, we have a few items which you hope make research easier. Before we start we overhauled our underlying network layer. While not very eye-grabbing as far as a feature this should allow our desktop app to work in more enterprise environments. VPN? Check. Corporate Firewall? Check. Custom Certificates? Check. Underwater Research Facility with Satellite Internet? We weren't able to check but let us know so we can add it to our checklist. We also improved performance for bigger libraries!
First up is the new Paper Preview option. You can access this by clicking on the Eye in the bottom right corner. This is a watered-down preview of the PDF document. No annotations will show up but you can copy some text if you need it for somewhere else quickly.
PDF Preview can be disabled by clicking on the Eye again.
Another highly requested feature was getting the notes column. You can now see this by right-clicking on the top bar and clicking Notes.
Citekeys are here! Well, to be clear they were always here but now you can generate them for your whole library. If you go to file management(now renamed Paper Settings) you will see an option for Citekey Management. We also moved "Watch Folders" to a new tab. This is a desktop-only feature!
Citekey management will start disabled but you can enable it and select how you want your citekeys used.
When importing items into your library you can choose to use the citekey that the item came with or choose to overwrite the citekey with the options you specified. You can also choose to regenerate all the citekeys in your library or if you are happy with your current citekeys you can generate only missing ones. You can currently only generate citekeys for your library but we will be adding support for shared libraries in the future.
We also made some changes to the language used in the right-click menu. Instead of "Metadata", we changed this to details. We have found that more and more people are importing other PDFs besides scholarly literature and were getting hung up on the "Metadata" part of this. "Details" actions are the same but more agnostic as to the reference you are editing. We also changed "Manually Resolve" to "Lookup Details" to help with our transition to supporting finding information on more types of literature.
If you were confused about what type of annotation you had on the notes menu before, fear not! as we tell you with an icon so you can easily distinguish between highlights, underlines, or a strike-through.
You can also now click on any of your notes or annotations and it will automatically open the PDF in question and scroll to the annotation for you! Once the PDF is open you can annotate or switch to our inverted theme like normal.
Did I say inverted theme? I did! Our brand new inverted theme is here! Easier on the eyes and synced between all your tabs. To switch just click on the dark theme icon at the top to choose this new theme.
This will also invert all of your annotations in colors that work better with this theme: 
You will also notice it defaults to these colors when you highlight or annotate. Don't worry though! Switch back to the normal theme will show your highlights in their standard color.
Whew! I hope this release makes you excited to get back into the app. As always if you problems please reach out to us at support@readcube.com