Vorpal Blade

February, 2016. Personal project

This project was meant to ease downloading research papers in bulk. When writing my papers, I recall situations when I had bookmarked multiple IEEE article pages for download. I found it cumbersome to navigate to each page, click download, and to wait for enough downloads to complete before I could download the next set of papers. I had wanted to make a program that could automate the process. I guess I had put it off for almost a year before I actually started working on it. As of now, it supports only IEEE. It wouldn’t be too hard to implement ACM support as well. I completed this project back in August, but, I put it up only now.

Highlights:

  • Simple and integrated UI
  • Download manager for sequentially downloading a specified set of IEEE papers.
  • Display of download speeds for each transfer
  • Interrupted downloading
  • “Work lists”, for saving and loading lists of papers to download.

Usage:

All the users needs to do is to specify IEEE article links in any format. The user can feed multiple articles at once for the sake of convenience. The program first attempts to retrieve the title of the paper from IEEE (For list view clarity), and then proceeds to scrape out the download link for the file. Once it does this, it uses a background worker to download the article so as to leave the UI still operational to the user.

Screenshots:

Minimalistic UI Demonstration. (Gif file, may take time to load)

Paper titles are extracted and shown in the listview

Paper titles are extracted and shown in the listview

Sequential Download in progress

Sequential Download in progress

Context

List context menu