Not opening

[DesBw]

Hello,
I am not able to open the Sente Assistant App. It just flashes VisualWorks menu for a second and fades away. What is going on here?

• I have my Sente library open
• I have targeted my browser to http://localhost:8008/, also http://localhost:8008/senteAssistant.ssp
• I have moved the whole Sente Assistant folder to my Applications folder
• i am using mac 10.11 (El Capitain) & the latest version of Sente (6.7.9)

clicking on the Sente Assistant as well as show sente note is giving me not result.
Can you help me please?

[mrobe]

Sorry, Third Street Software has given up on Sente, so I am no longer
supporting Sente Assistant.

On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 10:37 PM, Dellu [email protected] wrote:

Hello,
I am not able to open the Sente Assistant App It just flashes VisualWorks
menu for a second and dies away What is going on here?
i am using mac 1011 (El Capitain)

Can you help me please?

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#3.

[DesBw]

are you sure Sente will not be supported?

On Fri, Dec 25, 2015 at 9:08 AM, mrobe [email protected] wrote:

Sorry, Third Street Software has given up on Sente, so I am no longer
supporting Sente Assistant.

On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 10:37 PM, Dellu [email protected] wrote:

Hello,
I am not able to open the Sente Assistant App It just flashes VisualWorks
menu for a second and dies away What is going on here?
i am using mac 1011 (El Capitain)

Can you help me please?

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#3.

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#3 (comment).

[mrobe]

Third Street Software (TSS) used to run a user forum for Sente. Their
support staff would answer questions and they issued tickets for bugs.

Over two years ago, they quietly stopped issuing bug tickets, and stopped
fixing bugs. Then, they stopped answering certain questions from users.
They no longer said anything about what would be fixed in future releases,
or what their development priorities were. They stopped answering my
questions about issues with Sente APIs.

By this time, many customers started openly questioning the future of
Sente. Many posted questions about bugs on the forum, and got no answers.
People then questioned whether Sente had become abandonware. When
confronted, TSS at first denied that there were any issues with development
of Sente, and then they simply ignored these questions.

At this point, a number of customers started discussing alternatives to
Sente, such as Zotero, Papers, etc. People discussed their decisions to
stop using Sente and their experiences with other apps. I could not get any
answers about problems with Sente, so I gave up on Sente Assistant.
Finally, TSS killed the user forum and pulled the site. All of our
discussions about issues with Sente, work-arounds, the future, etc. —
they're are gone.

Draw your own conclusions.

On Sat, Dec 26, 2015 at 12:54 AM, Dellu [email protected] wrote:

are you sure Sente will not be supported?

On Fri, Dec 25, 2015 at 9:08 AM, mrobe [email protected] wrote:

Sorry, Third Street Software has given up on Sente, so I am no longer
supporting Sente Assistant.

On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 10:37 PM, Dellu [email protected]
wrote:

Hello,
I am not able to open the Sente Assistant App It just flashes
VisualWorks
menu for a second and dies away What is going on here?
i am using mac 1011 (El Capitain)

Can you help me please?

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#3.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
<#3 (comment)
.

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#3 (comment).

[DesBw]

Yes, I have seen that the forum is down. Checking out about the assistant a few days ago, i used some workaround to access the forum. In any event, it is really frustrating they are leaving it. I really hope that this all is untrue: for one fact that they have releases of to the 19th of December. Even if barely advertised, Sente has been the smartest PDF managing software out there. I was also thinking to lecture a class of university students on how to use the App (indeed, how to organize their references at large, and Sente in specific). I have already wrote about it before too (https://dellu.wordpress.com/2013/11/24/workflow-with-sente-devonthink-scrivener-using-hazel-and-dropbox-as-glue-part-1/). But, it is damn unfortunate if it is going away.

I wrote them about this issue a couple of hours ago. I hope they will reply.

And, by the way, I get the assistant working. Great job man!

Cheers,

On Dec 25, 2015, at 11:51 PM, mrobe [email protected] wrote:

Third Street Software (TSS) used to run a user forum for Sente. Their
support staff would answer questions and they issued tickets for bugs.

Over two years ago, they quietly stopped issuing bug tickets, and stopped
fixing bugs. Then, they stopped answering certain questions from users.
They no longer said anything about what would be fixed in future releases,
or what their development priorities were. They stopped answering my
questions about issues with Sente APIs.

By this time, many customers started openly questioning the future of
Sente. Many posted questions about bugs on the forum, and got no answers.
People then questioned whether Sente had become abandonware. When
confronted, TSS at first denied that there were any issues with development
of Sente, and then they simply ignored these questions.

At this point, a number of customers started discussing alternatives to
Sente, such as Zotero, Papers, etc. People discussed their decisions to
stop using Sente and their experiences with other apps. I could not get any
answers about problems with Sente, so I gave up on Sente Assistant.
Finally, TSS killed the user forum and pulled the site. All of our
discussions about issues with Sente, work-arounds, the future, etc. —
they're are gone.

Draw your own conclusions.

On Sat, Dec 26, 2015 at 12:54 AM, Dellu [email protected] wrote:

are you sure Sente will not be supported?

On Fri, Dec 25, 2015 at 9:08 AM, mrobe [email protected] wrote:

Sorry, Third Street Software has given up on Sente, so I am no longer
supporting Sente Assistant.

On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 10:37 PM, Dellu [email protected]
wrote:

Hello,
I am not able to open the Sente Assistant App It just flashes
VisualWorks
menu for a second and dies away What is going on here?
i am using mac 1011 (El Capitain)

Can you help me please?

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#3.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
<#3 (comment)
.

—
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#3 (comment).

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[Honame]

wow! I was surprised that they took down the forum but didn't know what mrobe just said. It is sad indeed. I wouldn't mind to migrate to Zotero or Mendely if I could only migrate my PDFs with annotations along to use them directly in one of those apps. I was even convincing my colleagues of using Sente instead of Mendeley and EndNote, I will not anymore.
Dellu, have you had any word from them? Does anybody knows where this is being discussed? I mean another forum or something? Any idea of migrating to other app with the least of pain?
BTW, mrobe, great work with Sente Assistant!

Regards,

honame

[mrobe]

Indeed, I wish it were not true, but I'm afraid that it is.

A number of Sente users (not just me) posted messages in their forum asking
again and again about the future and TSS simply ignored us. Not just once,
but many times for months. I say "ignored" because they answered other very
simple support requests. It is clear that they transitioned Sente into
maintenance mode or a condition of quasi-abandonware but refused to
communicate their decision to their customers. So, I had no choice but to
bail out.

Honame, I am in the same position as you. I would like to migrate to
another application but with all of my annotations. Unfortunately, there
doesn't appear to be any simple way to do this. There was a fair amount of
discussion on the Sente forum, while it was still open. To answer your
question, I don't know of any other forums where this is being discussed.

A number of people had good experience with Bookends and finally that was my
choice too. It seems to be the closest to Sente in terms of functionality,
and the developer is very responsive. I have exchanged e-mails with him and
he was very communicative, even when I wasn't a customer (yet). However, I
don't think it is possible to import all annotations and have Bookends work
exactly as in Sente. It's close, but not quite, as Sente uses a
non-standard approach.

The difficulty is that Sente represents annotations as rows in its own
library database, while Bookends represents them as annotations in the PDF
file. Sente does include a feature to "export PDF with annotations" but
IMHO it is broken, as Sente creates a separate annotation for each line of
text in the PDF file.

I have given some thought to a work-around, but the only way I can see to
do this would be to modify Sente Assistant to read the proprietary
annotations from the library and add standard annotations to the attached
PDF files. I have spoken with a third-party developer of a PDF framework
that I could use with SA, and he claims it is not complicated to do this.
However, the APIs to his framework are not documented and I need his help.
I have sent a number of emails asking for assistance, but since he works on
this in his spare time, I haven't gotten the details yet. When he explains
how to do this, and if it is not too complicated, I will try to update SA
once more to do this and post a new version here. This would add some
"migration away from Sente" functionality for all of us who are trying to
move to another app while rescuing our annotations.

I'm sorry I can't offer a timetable for this, as it's not really under my
control now. Hopefully sometime this spring.

On Sat, Jan 9, 2016 at 6:15 AM, Honame [email protected] wrote:

wow! I was surprised that they took down the forum but didn't know what
mrobe just said. It is sad indeed. I wouldn't mind to migrate to Zotero or
Mendely if I could only migrate my PDFs with annotations along to use them
directly in one of those apps. I was even convincing my colleagues of using
Sente instead of Mendeley and EndNote, I will not anymore.
Dellu, have you had any word from them? Does anybody knows where this is
being discussed? I mean another forum or something? Any idea of migrating
to other app with the least of pain?

Regards,

honame

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#3 (comment).

[DesBw]

Yes, Mikael has replied my email: he said "We continue to support and
maintain Sente on a daily basis". My understanding is, probably they will
support it for some time; but won't be any developments. But I am not sure,
really.
In any event, I think bookends is the best app, closest to sente, to export
your references to. Your notes and pdf files will be imported intact.
Personally, I have decided to continue to use Sente until some Mac update
breaks it for good.

Dellu
On Jan 8, 2016 10:16 PM, "Honame" [email protected] wrote:

wow! I was surprised that they took down the forum but didn't know what
mrobe just said. It is sad indeed. I wouldn't mind to migrate to Zotero or
Mendely if I could only migrate my PDFs with annotations along to use them
directly in one of those apps. I was even convincing my colleagues of using
Sente instead of Mendeley and EndNote, I will not anymore.
Dellu, have you had any word from them? Does anybody knows where this is
being discussed? I mean another forum or something? Any idea of migrating
to other app with the least of pain?

Regards,

honame

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#3 (comment).