Now that I've got the negative stuff out of the way, let's talk about why I'm writing this post. The bottom line is that Papers saves me time trying to find papers I want and allows me to effectively carry my entire library of journal articles with me wherever I take my laptop. On top of that, Papers can extract bibliographic information from PDF files and then export it in BibTex format, allowing me to easily create reference lists for papers. On top of all that, it provides a nice front-end portal to almost all of the major databases like NASA ADS, the arXiv, Google Scholar, and more to provide useful features. Let's say, for example, I want to know if one of the leading dynamo theorists and perhaps the most prodigious writers of journal articles in astrophysics (13 peer-reviewed journal articles so far this year) Axel Brandenburg has published anything new. Papers automatically interfaces with ADS (or another database of your choosing) and downloads the titles and bibliographic references to all of recent entries for all of the authors in my database. Here's a screen shot to illustrate my example and to generally show how spiffy Papers looks (click to embiggen):
The software is also easy to use as a PDF reader with note-taking feature. I regularly use it to read new articles on my bus rides to and from campus. They even have a new version for the iPad that allows you to read and annotate PDF's on Apple's latest wonder. If anyone would like to send me an iPad I'd be happy to write a review on that feature as well.
So if you hate piles of paper on your desk or trying to organized PDF's on your hard drive and happen to use a Mac, check it out. It's not a perfect solution, but it is the best thing I've found to alleviate my hatred of journal articles yet.
