August 6, 2009
Spires
If you’re like me, you have a folder on your HD filled with thousands of PDF files that you’ve downloaded, over the years, from the arXivs.
Yuji Tachikawa has written a neat little application, called spires, to manage those PDFs. It serves as a Site-Specific Browser for Spires and for the latest papers on hep-th/hep-ph. It keeps a database of those files you’ve already downloaded. If the paper you want is already downloaded, it will open the local copy. If you don’t have it, or if there’s an updated version at the arXivs, it will prompt you to download the arXiv version.
Here’s a movie of the application in operation. If you want to play with the source code, Yuji’s put it in BZR, which you can browse here.
Hopefully, there will be a few people, in our community, who’ll be interested in developing it further (I’m looking at you, Wolfgang!).