Ladies and Gents, please welcome... The Biber!

[2004-10-09] The Alpha release phase has begun! We are very proud to announce you that the very first alpha version of The Biber was released today. It contains The Biber himself, plus the plugins XML bibliography, BibTeX bibliography, Library, and Print. There will be (hopefully) many releases during the alpha phase. We encourage everyone to download, install and test The Biber. Please report bugs and feature requests to us. Thanks a lot! – Lutz Ißler, The Biber's First Father

The Biber ist a personal bibliography reference manager, written in Java™. His audience are primarily scientists of all kinds and disciplines. So, if you are

and if you're

it will be a pleasure for The Biber will to work for you! Really, believe us and give him a try! See how…

The Biber is an open-source development project, licensed under the GNU Public License, and hosted on SourceForge.

How can The Biber help me?

The Biber helps you by:

What, that's all? Not loads of features, guys.

Well, you're right. And, oh no, you're so not right, man. The great thing of The Biber is that he's fully plugin-extendable. All the features described above are realized by plugins, and can therefore be easily enabled or disabled. Easily means: as easy as plugging your phone to the wall plug. So the lack of functionality you might experience results from two reasons:

I never heard of The Biber before. How old is he?

The development work started on 2004-05-14. The development project was founded about a month later, on 2004-06-20. As we, The Biber's developers (called The Biber's Fathers), are not magicians of any kind (neither black nor white), The Biber grows slowly. As of 2004-10-09, we have reached the alpha phase of the development process. We encourage you, if you are somewhat familiar with alpha state software and it's the case you like experiments, to try out The Biber and give us feedback. Additionally, if you are a Java™ developer, maybe you have a look on The Biber's source code from the CVS and then decide to join our team.

Okay, you convinced me. How do I make The Biber work for me?

That's easy! Just follow the installation instructions below. Since The Biber is an application written for Java™, you have to install a copy of the Java™ Runtime Environment, version 5.0. (The Biber is a cool program that needs the full and state-of-the-art power of a cool programming language.)

Installation instructions:

  1. Install Sun's JRE 5.0.
  2. Download the newest alpha release ZIP file.
  3. Unzip the downloaded file to any folder you like.
  4. Start The Biber by double-clicking on biber.jar. (If this does not work, you probably have not installed Java™ correctly.)

Please give us feedback! We cannot further develop The Biber without your feedback.

I started The Biber. What I see is much less than I expected. Why?

The Biber is extendable by plugins. In the release versions, there are only some of the most common plugins installed. So the next step you might want to take is to download some additional plugins that suite your needs. Don't be scared, it's easy: when you downloaded them, just put them into The Biber's plugin directory.

If The Biber really does all that for me, he must be expensive!

Must he? If that's your opinion, feel free to donate us some money. But in general, The Biber works totally free for you. Furthermore, the source code of The Biber is released under the GNU Public License (GPL), so that you can easily participate in his further development.

You people are cool. How do I contact you?

For getting in contact with us, you need a SourceForge login. (But that's really sure a great thing and a real must-have this summer, didn't you know? Having a SourceForge account gets you ten more cool points, additionally.)

Bug reports

Please submit any bug reports to our bug tracking system. Before submitting a new bug, make sure that it has not already been submitted by someone else!

Feature requests

Please submit any feature requests to our feature request tracking system. Before submitting a new feature request, make sure that it has not already been submitted by someone else!

General feedback

Submit a message to the open discussion forum on The Biber's project homepage at SourceForge.

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