Sente

Discontinued.

its discontinued

Sente no longer recognises references on Google Scholar. No response to my email to support. I really regret Sente's demise, and the app having become abandonware. Once again, if only the developers would communicate to their (loyal) customers what is going on.

I cannot believe they updated this as I've already left and gone to Mendeley. However, I am happy to see that there's still a heartbeat left. The iOS app hasn't been updated since 2014. Let's see if the updates and support come back online. In my opinion, Sente was the best when it was still chugging on all cylinders. Let's see what happens from here.

I migrated to Bookends from Sente, with considerable regret. Sente is far superior to Bookends and Papers 3 for doing online research. Indeed I continue to use it for this purpose and then import the references to Bookends. Sente puts online search results into Sente's own internal database. This allows one to interrogate large found data sets in far more detail than other apps allow. It also allows for automatic updates to search results based on any number of variables. Bookends and Papers merely display the results found in PubMed, etc. They are not downloaded into a database. So one cannot even do further searches, to narrow down the found data set, without re-running the entire search again. Sente can. This makes further ad hoc analyses of the found data set extremely quick and easy. I do hope Sente can come to life with a successful business model ...

Sente is a terrific app, especially for research purposes. However, it no longer seems to be supported (as of Mar 2016). I converted my Sente library (n>10,000) for use in Bookends. After two weeks with Bookends, I really do miss Sente for research. Plus I am finding Bookends quite buggy - I had to rebuild the database three times today already. Though - I am learning - its database rebuild capability works well. Bookends has some nice features, like searching for duplicates, that Sente lacks - though not for technical reasons. The apparent loss of Sente is a huge blow as far as I am concerned. I will continue to use it for research and import the results into Bookends. Bookends support has been excellent so far. But it does seem to be a one-man shop with very limited resources ... a concern. I will also look at Papers 3 in a few weeks.

Abandoned - unsupported - developers do not respond to support requests from "Premium" accounts and the user forum was closed.

Beware before investing time, energy and money in Sente.

It’s a great piece of software but seems on track to become abandonware. The last update to both the Mac and iOS apps has been at least a year ago. A coming update will only ensure that the app keeps functioning with El Capitan. In the past months the support site has been all but ignored by the TSS team. User requests are ignored as a matter of policy. Several threads have been launched in recent months by worried users inquiring what the future of Sente looks like. These questions have been ignored and met with deafening silence, as have personal emails.

Meanwhile Sente’s main competitor Bookends has released an update recently with vastly improved import from Sente, a clear sign. To be clear: I own Sente as well as Bookends and actually switched to Sente over a year ago because of its Quicktags system, ability to nest smart groups into smart groups, and overall better GUI. I have invested a lot of time in transitioning from Bookends to Sente and my academic workflow is very much built around it. I also rely heavily on the iPad app which is also great. I can understand temporary silences and I am willing to give a lot of credit to developers if the app is worth it. But the company's current disdain for its customers suggests the end of the app might be in sight.

I purchased a Sente 6 license and installed it under Mavericks, following directions. All attempts to add the registration number failed with an odd error ('signature failed'). Part of this was my fault (I used the wrong email address), but I followed directions to fix this. Still no success. The support person then made a series of suggestions, all of which failed. I supplied the logs he requested and detailed reports on what I had tried. After two days of trying to sort this out, he simply stopped responding to my inquiries. After four days, when I was still unable to register and got no response despite multiple politely worded requests for help, I wrote a more firmly worded message saying basically that I required some kind of reply, and if I didn't get one, I would be compelled to file a complaint. I got an answer back almost immediately saying: No need to file a complaint, I have issued a refund you should see within a day or two. They would have saved me a lot of trouble if they had just admitted that they didn't know how to fix the problem. It's great software, but I was very unhappy with this unprofessional and rude treatment by support. And I still haven't seen the refund.

Reference and document syncing between the desktop and iPad version has worked flawlessly for me through the past term, including annotations. One of the features of Sente that has amazed me the most is the web browser which auto-detects citations while browsing academic sites and auto-adds PDFs to the relevant reference.

I decided that I need to write some positive reviews on MU of the software I use most often and Sente is a good candidate because I have it open almost every day. Why? Because all of my references are there! But far more informative are my reasons for using the application. Like any hopelessly disorganized grad student, as comprehensive exams loomed ever closer, I decided I needed some applications to do some digital organizing for me, particularly one to keep track of my references. References when you're an undergrad are a doddle. Pull up a giant stack of books and dutifully type out your references in alphabetical order! At least that's what I did. But grad work is long and complex. So, as I churned out little papers for my last semester or two of classes, I started testing out these reference managers. I started with Endnote because I asked for advice and it seems to be the only program IT departments have ever heard of. Endnote was very "wasn't." If it wasn't crashing, it wasn't generating references as it should have. I am forced, against my will and better judgement, to use MLA (the despiser of footnotes and jewel of the wordy) and Endnote was still using MLA formatting from the late eighties (or something). In fact, I found this to be the case with Bookmarks too. Can you imagine how annoying it is to go through your bibliography and type "print," "web," etc. at the end of every reference of a (rather overambitious) 140 reference paper? If you can, perhaps you've used these apps before. I knew something better had to be out there somewhere. After days of extensive searching on Google, I finally typed in "reference manager mac" and discovered Sente. Sente imported all my references from the other programs and, when I asked it to generate a bibliography, it actually added those irritating "print" and "web" tags. It struggled a bit with journal articles, but reference formatting is fully and easily editable so just a wee bit of tinkering and the app was back on track. That was enough to convince me. So for years I've been storing my references on Sente. And in that time, the developers have added lots of features that I never use. I'm sure they're great for someone looking to start anew, but if, like me, you'd been using other programs, you probably aren't too interested. For instance, you can now add pdf files to Sente and even tag them. Unfortunately, Sente doesn't use OpenMeta so my years of tagging in Yep! would be undone in Sente. Sente also has a cloud feature that I don't use. Maybe I've been avoiding my advisor in my log cabin in Montana too long, but I don't trust digital clouds. I'm certainly not going to store my beloved references in one! I'll just back everything up on my daisy-chained time machine. Even though I don't use these features, I still believe Sente is a great app. It works with Scrivener. It generates references. It stores enough references for the i-ching and the complete works of Confucius. It'll even look them up on various sites and build them automatically (although I strongly recommend a human review - Sente may think it's a Cyberman, but it is still being upgraded). Apologies.

Wow, I haven't used Sente recently, but I've just read through the changes to Sente and its cloud model, and a look through how careful and open the developers are on their blog. Very impressive, I always leaned towards Bookends, and suspect Bookends is still a more powerful reference manager (in terms of lower-level database management), but Sente has done a brilliant job of making it very tempting to new users!!!

Well supported by thoughtful and accommodating developers, this software is simply the best. As I complete my dissertation I'm always pleased to see what new features it has been given. Additionally, with the change to 6.6 the developers were very generous to existing users. Such a delight, and so well crafted, worth every penny.

MacUpdate is there any way you can get changelogs for Sente up here?

Huh? 6.5.6 is the current version.

Sente is an outstanding program. With each update, it gets better and better. The developers listen to user opinions and continually add features. I was a beta tester for the new interface and it is truly fantastic. I bought this software for everyone in my laboratory. And the synchronization with the iPad version makes this incredible. (For some reason, Macupdate won't let me give it 5 stars for overall rating, only 4.5 stars - but its a 5)

Wow, the new user interface in this update is brilliant!! I would give it five stars for this improvement.

The problem of updating reference still persists! Updating incomplete refs: Bookends has a really nice host of tools to update refs. If you have a ref that got loaded in when it was online only, it's quick and easy to use a Bookends menu command to update the reference. There are a couple of ways of doing this, and it works well. Sente is supposed to do some auto-updating, but it doesn't seem to work nearly as well. I really like this handy feature. Another thing Sente need to improve is its note-taking feature. It always asks you to specify a location (sentence or paragraph) when you make note. But sometimes we need to make comments/note on the whole paper but not a specific paragraph or sentence. [Version 6.2.11]

I've used both Bookends and Sente. I was very happy with Bookends, but switched to Sente because it offered an iPad version. It is so handy to read my pdfs and annotate using my iPad. Since then, I have been very impressed with the feature set of Sente 6. Sente also offers a very affordable version for those that have smaller libraries. The UI of Bookends is quite rough and unpleasant to look at. Sente has a very nice look to it (Endnote looks the worst). I'm very happy with Sente right now. The developer continues to add fixes and tweaks. Both Bookends and Sente are very good, but personally I'm going with Sente 6.

have the exact same comment as Couseypike below feature regarding update of incomplete reference that Sente lacks. This has resulted in many duplicated references in my library, which is really annoying. Updating incomplete refs: Bookends has a really nice host of tools to update refs. If you have a ref that got loaded in when it was online only, it's quick and easy to use a Bookends menu command to update the reference. There are a couple of ways of doing this, and it works well. Sente is supposed to do some auto-updating, but it doesn't seem to work nearly as well. I really like this handy feature. Another thing Sente need to improve is its note-taking feature. It always asks you to specify a location (sentence or paragraph) when you make note. But sometimes we need to make comments/note on the whole paper but not a specific paragraph or sentence.