Thank you for your interest in OA Helper, in this release a lot has happened:
Improved DOI recognition
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Several enhancements have been made to make the recognition of Digital Object Identifiers on popular sites, such as PubMed.gov more accurate.
Improved handling of unpaywall.org response
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I had made a mistake in handling the unpaywall.org response, leading to valid Open Access alterntives not being displayed, due to the simple omission of a single questionmark.
Basic Statistics & Settings Page
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Ever wondered, how many Open Access Documents you found with the help of OA Helper? You need to wonder no more. Go to Settings > OA Helper and you’ll see a number of statistics, such as:
* OA Searches – the number of times a search was sent to core.ac.uk
* OA Found – the number of times you were shown a positive unpaywall.org response
* core.ac.uk PDF – the number of times you click to view a core.ac.uk PDF
* Bookmark Count – the number of bookmarks in your bookmark list
Additionally you will find some toggle switches to enable Bookmark Support, iCloud sync for Bookmakrs and the ability to share some basic data with me (the four variables listed above + a UUID). All these settings default to “off” and you can activate them from within the Onboarding Tutorial or the Settings App.
Why would I want to see any of those values? It helps me understand where there is value. If I see lots of OA Searches and core.ac.uk PDF numbers, I probably should invest more time there. If you have a lot of Bookmarks, maybe I need to put in time to help you organize / filter them better. That’s all, it will help make the app better, because without it, I can only guess, make assumptions and poke in the dark – however these values will not tell me anything about you and your privacy remains protected. On top of it, you decide whether you wish to share or not.
Bookmark Support
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Especially, when you are on the road, you might use your phone to quickly search for something, but then desire to look at it later. Bookmark support lets you add a “bookmark” to OA Helper to view a PDF or Document later. This is ideal, for anyone, who is very busy and if you combine it with iCloud Sync (see below) you can share this across your devices
iCloud Sync for Bookmarks
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iCloud Sync for Bookmarks will use your iCloud to sync bookmarks across your devices. Got an iPhone & an iPad, bookmark on one and view on the other. I look at bringing bookmark viewing to the macOS App as well.
Using iCloud protects your privacy, as I – as the developer – do not need to see any of your bookmarks. They’ll be stored in your iCloud (Private Database) and best of all, because Apple runs iCloud it is rather hassle free for me 🙂 Don’t worry about your storage space, a bookmark object is really small and contains the following values:
date (YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS); doi – string ;id – string (md5-checksum of the url); pdf – string; title – string; url – string
While it is hassle free, syncing is really hard and I am pretty sure you’ll find an edge case or two, when it doesn’t work great. If you run into trouble, go to the Settings app and set the “Reset Bookmarks from iCloud” switch on, go back to the app and hit the Sync button to delete all device bookmarks and then load from iCloud again, but maybe even more important, take a moment to send me an eMail… oahelper@otzberg.net
