spires.app & inspire.app

What does it do?

It's an app for inspirehep.net and arXiv.org.
Downloads & saves PDFs by one click/tap.
You can even read your favorite arXiv/new.
Syncs the content of the sidebar across your Macs/iPhones/iPads over iCloud Drive.
Mac version has many extra features, such as maintaining the bib file following the content of LaTeX files. (Instruction video)

Setting up: iOS

Setting up: macOS

Please download the app, depending on your OS version:

10.13 High Sierra & 10.14 Mojave & 10.15 Catalina & 11 Big Sur & 12 Monterey & 13 Ventura & 14 Sonoma
OS X 10.10 Yosemite & 10.11 El Capitan & 10.12 Sierra
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, 10.6 Snow Leopard, 10.7 Lion & OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, 10.9 Marvericks

Then, please open the preferences pane by spires→Preferences, and set the directory for keeping PDFs.
If you don't, ~/Desktop is used by default. It will soon clutter your desktop into a mess, though.
If you already have PDFs named as 0808.0808.pdf or hep-th0123456.pdf, please move them into the directory you specified, or make symbolic links to them in it.

Instruction videos: part 1 part 2

Basic Usage

Type in an old-style inspire query at the search box, such as
t duality and a witten
Here, 't' stands for the 'title', and 'a' stands for the 'author'.
Hit the enter key / tap the search button.
arXiv/new can be refreshed by clicking on it / tapping the reload button.

Query Syntax

Currently only supports a(uthor) name, c(ites) key, cn collaboration, d(ate) year, ea name, e(print) number, j(ournal) journal, t(itle) title, to(pcite) number,
and their simple "and", "and not" combinations.
Example: a Maldacena and t holography and d > 2000

BibTeX watcher (macOS)

See the instruction video. In words:
The menu command Window→BibTeX watcher (⌘1) brings up the BibTeX watcher panel.
Drag & drop the LaTeX file to watch.
When a citation of the form \cite{author:2018xxx} is added to the TeX file, the corresponding BibTeX entry is automatically added to the .bib file referenced from the TeX file.
Add a line %%list folder-name in the LaTeX file. Then the bib entries in the LaTeX file are automatically put in a red "playlist" named folder-name in the sidebar of spires.app.

PDF viewer (iOS)

The PDF viewer in the iOS version is the standard PDF previwer of iOS. You can open the PDF file to your favorite PDF app as seen in the scrrenshot here.
Note that these icons can be reordered by a long tap & drag.
Note also the difference between "Copy to" and "Open in". When you send the PDF file to a "Copy to" app multiple times, there will be multiple copies of the same PDF in the app. This is probably not what you want.
You're strongly encouraged to use PDF apps supporting "Open in". PDF Viewer by PSPDFKit and Apple's own iBooks are two examples I know.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. Why is the Mac version of the app called spires.app?: A. The current inspire database is a successor to the previous SPIRES database, and this app has been in development before this transition.
Q. The Mac app keeps crashing since (some date). What should I do?: A. Try launching the app while pressing the option key. If this does not work, re-copy the database file from your backup just before (some date), say, using the Time Machine.
Q. Where's the database file?: A. It is kept in your ~/Library/Application Support/spires/. You can open this folder using Finder via the menu Go→Go to Folder... .
Q. What if I am not keeping the backup?: A. You should start keeping the backup today. Buy a hard drive, connect it to your Mac, and enable Time Machine.
Q. I'm using the app for a long time and it became very slow. Is there any way out?: A. spires→Clean up database... might help, but your milage might vary.

Extra Info

Data harvested

Inspire MARC-XML interface
arXiv.org: arXig.org API
DOI: DOI resolution
and webpages of published journals.

Known Problems

Many. If you have any specific bug reports or comments, please contact the author via spires→Send Bug Reports (spires.app on Mac), or menu→write to yuji (inspire.app on iOS).

Source code

It's available at GitHub.

This app does not collect any of your personal data and send it to the developer.