Hacker News Reader

I _cannot_ wait to start playing around with this. It really does seem to tick off all the boxes I've been looking for. Do you have any plans / strategy / tips for handling video? I tend to watch a lot of conference talks and lectures on YouTube, and find that I'd like to take some notes while watching. Having a single personal knowledge base handle that (or at least the notes aspect) instead of a one-off solution for other types of media would be useful to avoid fragmentation.

> I _cannot_ wait to start playing around with this.

Love the enthusiasm!

> Do you have any plans / strategy / tips for handling video?

Yes. Working on it now.

The next revision will actually handle capturing video and we just show an embedded player now. So at LEAST you can use Polar to keep track of the videos, tag them, etc.

I'd like to make a full player including annotations too so you can keep track of the pointer in the video so you can jump to the time where the annotation/comment was kept.

Flashcards too.

With videos becoming 1 hour for a lecture having them in something like Polar is critical.

Something like this would be great for video, and I've been watching a lot of talks in video form lately.

Generally, though, I'm watching talks on iOS devices... bouncing between devices makes everything more complicated.

I've already got dedicated eBook readers and article stashers (Pocket, usually), but I can see an excellent use for this: Gamefaqs walkthrough companion.

Right now if I want to play through a game with a walkthrough (usually HTML or text only), I load it into my tablet and leave it in a browser window. This is an inefficient way of doing things, because the page generally sits there for about a month as I'm slowly progressing through the game, and very often the browser will forget its place if the tab loses focus or if the tablet goes to sleep.

This will also probably be much better for going through Programming Books than my normal e-reader app.

Exactly ... this is what incremental reading is designed to solve.

"Send tab/link to Polar" Firefox and chrome extensions could be useful.

Very nice.

I feel like there was a missed UI opportunity with the pagemarks and annotations: When you add your page marks, the percentage bar at the top increments, but there is no easy way to jump to where you were last reading. Likewise, if you add multiple pagemarks, if e.g. you've read multiple sections, there is no way to know this from the progress bar.

Instead of highlighting the progress bar at the top, I would just highlight the scrollbar on the right. This would (1) free up space at the top, (2) make it trivial to jump to where I was reading last, because I would just click on that spot on the scroll bar, (3) make it obvious if I have marked multiple page marks, and (4) open that pattern up for other uses, such as marking on the scroll bar where I have made annotations (which are presumably very important passages).

I am thinking of the scrollbar in an IDE. For instance, in VS Code, I can see all the lines with errors etc directly on the scroll bar, and I can click on those marks to instantly jump to that section.

> Likewise, if you add multiple pagemarks, if e.g. you've read multiple sections, there is no way to know this from the progress bar.

oh.. I think we could solve that by migrating to another visualization. I'll have to mock it up.

I had thought of this but of course Polar is very MVPish right now.. but getting to the point of being a real product her soon.

The problem with highlighting on the right is that it's hard to do multiple columns but maybe I could have a full page visualization on the right.

Very nice. What happens when two clients open the same document library at the same time? Do they only overwrite content if you add comments etc?

We created a web based multiuser web annotation and discussion system, for inline annotations around ‘99-00, then the dotcom bubble burst and we had to shut down. I have been looking for something along those lines since then. There have been several attempts by others but it seems that the alternatives (PDF, screenshots, email etc) are hard to displace.

> Very nice. What happens when two clients open the same document library at the same time? Do they only overwrite content if you add comments etc?

Polar is a single instance app. You can't open multiple docs at once. It will just re-focus the window you already have open.

I think they are asking what happens if another program edits the index while the Polar program is running, which still might happen if the library is stored in something like Dropbox and multiple computers have it open at the same time.

Oh.. Right. Right now it wouldn't be good. My plan was to implement filesystem events but unfortunately the Electron scalable version of filesystem watching isn't actually supported anymore.

I think I might be able to re-implement by checking only the files that are open.

That said. I'm planing on implementing cloud support natively in Polar. Offline-first and always but we will have cloud sync.

Thanks for the answer. Yes I have something like Evernote open on multiple devices at once. Not a killer feature, mostly used on a phone or table and a computer. Not applicable yet for this, but was curious.

Keep up the good work!

Very interested to start messing around with this.

Regardless of whether it ends up being something I start using, I'm very glad to see people working in this direction. Thanks a ton for sharing.

One question - since this is Electron, it's based off Chrome's engine, right? Does that mean when you talk about adding 3rd party extensions you're including Chrome extensions in that? Having a hackable browser that I can directly mess with gets rid of the need for me to have a lot of extensions -- but there are a still a few (uMatrix, uBlock Origin) that would be a huge benefit. Even when I'm just downloading a document for offline access, I still don't really want to have a bunch of trackers in the stuff I access.

> Does that mean when you talk about adding 3rd party extensions you're including Chrome extensions in that?

Alas, no.

Electron doesn't support Chrome extensions.

I agree that extensions would be awesome but Electron won't ever get extensions while it's based on libchromiumcontent.

NW.js (an Electron alternative) does support extensions though and if Electron drags its feet I might consider porting Polar to NW.js. That might be a herculean effort though.

Since no one mentioned it: is it possible to create mind maps. I'm not sure whether it's a good feature but I'm curious.

Very nice. I'm filled with enthusiasm about this. I've been meaning to "scratch" the "itch" re: offline browsing so that I can clear out the hundreds of suspended browser tabs that I'm toting around. This looks great. (Now, I just need to do, like, 10 tabs / day.)

I never considered how useful such a system would be for me; couldn't care less about anki and incremental reading: just having a binary done/not in a compressed view alone is huge. Combined with the webpage capturing aspect for archival and view.. And a usecase for electron that isn't purely developer-convenience? This is the kind of thing that makes days

I've got some ~150 tabs I'm holding onto just because I'm not ready to archive them into bookmarks yet, just waiting to be moved into this thing. If this thing works as well as I'm imagining, this is really going to fix my shit (and probably save me tons of ram)

Edit: A couple issues I've noticed from a few minutes of usage however, at least from my interest of using it as an archive: there doesn't appear to be a proper way to retrieve the original url of a document (important for sharing, especially to non-polar users), and its not clear if the polar archival format stores it in the first place. And ofc, a convenient way to find the polar archive, for sharing to polar users

There also doesn't appear to be a proper way to edit & save a polar archive (important for archiving; cleaning up). You can't edit properly pre-fetching the webpage, because of the webview/js trick you're doing, and you can edit but not save when viewing the archive post-fetch. It would also be a useful bandaid until readability or something is attached properly.

Since these all appear to be absent from roadmap, I'm wondering if the project has (my) interest as a shareable archival system, or is it intended primarily for personal usage? In terms of my own interest, I'd be looking to replace bookmarks & tabs with this: the offline archive has both value for speed/convenience, but also the defense against site-decay; but bookmarks/tabs also operate as my reference for sharing, and the site would be preferred, with polar second, and webarchive last.

With the current (roadmap-planned) setup, I'd need to maintain both systems: bookmarks for (slowly) decaying, shareable archiving, and polar for personal, long-term archiving/reading. And probably a third system for proper, shareable, long-term archiving (ie webarchive).

Wow, looks great, polished. Annotations are a wonderful extension. I've been using iBooks for pdf collecting, but this should blow that out of the water, with the cross-platform part being especially useful.

Thanks for the hard work!

I was soo looking for a tool like this. I considered Zotero which is much too research-focussed for me. I really appreciate the annotation support and Anki integration! Thank you :)

Speaking as a technical writer, this look like it could have a lot of applications for me. The annotations are wonderful. An IDE for books and web content is a great concept that I never knew I needed.

I love you. This is the direction I always wanted the internet to go - tools that provide a more interactive/active experience with what I'm reading.

This looks really amazing! I'll have to try this out with documentation, and it would likely be great for html books as well. Thank you!

Does support RSS feeds as data sources?

No.. not yet but it's an interesting idea to support updated sources.

We're going to ship a chrome extension to sync with Polar and I'd like to have 1 click button for Feedly, Hacker News, Reddit, etc.

Are there plans for OCR?

Yes but not in the short term. I'm considering some cloud integration so we could farm off some tasks to OCR and NLP libraries in the cloud. Some of this is too complex for the desktop though.

Some of these features I would have to charge for though as there aren't OSS alternatives.

I'd ask that you consider local alternatives, or at the very least make it opt-in. It would be very annoying to have some awesome open-source document manager send off my documents to the cloud.

There are some surprisingly powerful OCR libraries you could run locally, Tesseract.js not the least of them.

Cheers, and awesome project!

http://tesseract.projectnaptha.com/