Paperpile development progress

I see that the admins have stopped answering here. I’ve seen this before (Papers, Manuscripts app), etc.

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Yeah it’s really disappointing

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I’ve already moved on to a much better service that does everything that Paperpile does (clip from web, docs plugin etc.) and has mobile apps and a MS Word plugin.

Edit: Since people are asking, I now use F1000 Workspace https://f1000.com/work/
The service also allows you to import references as PDFs from your computer or from Google Drive, making the transition from Paperpile straightforward.

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I’d be willing to hear more about this.

So sad I loved this service! What are the alternatives?

Which service

They answer my questions with reasonable speed. Plus I’m confused. If one moved onto another service why are they on this forum?

Because one still maintains a Paperpile subscription at the moment. And one may help others find a better service by answering questions like this one. And more simply because one is not barred from visitng the forum of a service one has stopped using.

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F1000 Workspace https://f1000.com/work/

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Thanks, never understood why one bothers to crap on a forum of something they dont use anymore. Now unconfused.

well, I don’t know about you, but I don’t write or research articles on my phone, so I won’t be needing that feature anytime soon. Also, i understand that PP was designed with GD in mind, so I don’t think we will see a word plugin, either. Any other complaints?

The issue occurs when staff guarantee that a Word plugin will happen, and then people assume that because it hasn’t, that it won’t. Obviously no one knows whether they are continuing to work on this or not, at this point, which is probably why folks are pinging the devs?

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For additional context, it seems they have just hired a community manager (https://blog.paperpile.com/welcome-dzemila/) a couple of months ago and they continue to have 9 employees, so they are not completely dead in the water yet. But of course that doesn’t say anything about the status of development. Still waiting for some kind of support for mobile devices.

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They actually add in this tidbit: “Luckily, Jason joined our team in 2016 helping out. But like Stefan and Andreas he is also very busy working on our product and all the new stuff you are waiting for.”

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Yes. This. I just renewed my Paperpile subscription thinking that eventually Word would come. I know one should never buy a product thinking about features it doesn’t yet have, but I wanted to support the development. Sigh.

They’ve always been very helpful and fast with my queries. I’m not going anywhere as long as the service keeps working as advertised.

Good grief, let’s keep collegial here. Paperpile is highly functional and stable, and the CHANGELOG hardly looks “dead” (https://paperpile.com/changelog). Its people don’t deserve to be dumped on. FYI it’s a holiday weekend here in the U.S., do you really need this question answered today.

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While I agree others may be overreacting in declaring Paperpile ‘dead’, to on the other hand describe ongoing development as ‘active’ seems hardly fitting - the changelog you linked to shows only the most minor of changes since March 2018, amounting to little more than style updates and minor bugfixes.

Communication from the developers has also been severely lacking - looking at Stefan’s activity on the forum shows only one comment in May, and before that just a handful of responses to queries in February. The Android private beta was begun in November 2016, and shows no signs of being released any time soon - Stefan commented in early February that major new versions of the mobile apps were on the way, but it’s now more than three months later and we are yet to hear anything further about this (ditto for the much-requested Word plugin). The brief amounts of communication we do receive from the dev team indicate development is ongoing, but the shear paucity of clear communication from them hardly instills confidence in the future of Paperpile.

I love Paperpile, and it’s so far the best reference manager I’ve found, but the total lack of adequate communication from the development team as to what, precisely, I’ve bought into here is certainly making me consider searching for greener pastures - I’ve continued my subscription to the service on the grounds that development would continue, and we would receive the long-awaited mobile apps that were promised. But they’ve still not arrived, and without any indication from the developers as to what the status of the app’s development is (and what their future plans are for Paperpile more broadly), it’s hard to continue giving them the benefit of the doubt.

A consistent trend throughout responses to forum posts is a frustration with the lack of adequate communication from the development team, and I count myself among those who feel this way. If this doesn’t change in the near future, I think it might be time to move on to another app.

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Hey guys. I’ve been busy and not following the forum daily for a while. I’m sorry for that and seeing this thread here is of course a shock.

Short answer: We invest more time and money on Paperpile development than ever before.

I apologize that our communication was not great here on the forum. I hope I can spend more time here again at some point but at the moment things are hectic (see below). Dzemila our new community manager will be here in the future to answer your questions. However, it took also some time for her to learn about the details of our product and our roadmap. That explains the window where this forum was not monitored as it should have been.

I spent the past months growing our team to implement your feature suggestions from this forum. Our goal is to get as much done as possible as fast as possible. Unfortunately that’s not always possible with small incremental updates. Better search, syncing with mobile apps and a Word plugin (and in the future a paperpile app) that works offline requires a new server infrastructure and a major new system architecture. That takes time but I’m sure it will pay off in the future as we can move faster once this transition is done.

I’ll ask my team to quickly introduce themselves and tell you what the have been working on for the past months. We have a distributed team and literally work around the clock on these features. There is no scenario whatsoever in which we will not ship those features on which we have invested so much time and effort.

All I can do is ask you once again for your patience. I’m really happy about the progress. Unfortunately it will take until we deploy the new architecture and servers that we can share this progress with you.

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Hi, I’m Aravind.
I’ve just started this week. I am working majorly on user interfaces. I initially started work on enabling notes and annotations from the PDF’s come to the main app. Currently, I am working on some UI for an improved Chrome popup to import papers. It will allow you to select folders and labels, and also to add notes directly when you import a paper. How cool is that! :smile:

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