Show HN: Annotate PG, our YC application demo

Normally I don't comment (at all) on posts like this, but this is just bad.

The comments overlay cover up the very text that you're suppose to be reading. This disrupts the reading flow, making it hard to find my way back to where I was reading, especially comments are merely secondary to the actual article. To get back to the article I have to press this tiny close button on the top left corner of the comments overlay. Plus, there's a huge amount of whitespace to the right of the article which you're not using http://i.imgur.com/1JvLWQP.png - why cover important content, leaving large amount of screen space unused when there's perfectly good unused space on the right?

The pagination scheme is terrible. The article is a blog post, not a book. And even if it were, no one would want to read something on screens. (Edit: Firefox 21 beta. I see Chrome that has transitions, which means this is not actually poor performance, but simply missing transitions. I still don't see any reason why Firefox shouldn't have transitions, though) The performance is terrible. I can count seconds between me clicking on the next page button and the next page actually showing up, with no feedback whatsoever that the page is loading.

Document annotation and comment UI isn't hard. When Microsoft Word has you beat in terms of UI, you're probably doing something very wrong.

You guys should check out https://test.hypothes.is. Non profit open source project that does this for the entire web. Here's the github: https://github.com/hypothesis/h

Randall, the lead developer, is one of the authors of the open annotation spec: http://www.openannotation.org

Dan, the founder, recently put together the I Annotate conference, which brought together all the individuals and groups who have been applying annotation to their problem domains for the past few years.

I designed the interface.

Annotation should be open source, standardized, and portable, not locked into little silos. Also, I'm not pg, but if I was, I would find this a bit... odd.

Interesting idea. Probably would be a stronger demo if you pre-populated it with some actually worthwhile comments.

Really don't like the pagination. Scrolling is how this is done on the web. Arbitrary page breaks and non-intuitive scrolling breaks this.

This would be nice if not for the pagination. It's slow, unpredictable, and unnecessary.

For another approach to annotation, check out fixjam.com. I never took this past the 1-day hack stage, but I'd like to revisit it at some point. You can try it by clicking the bookmarklet and highlighting some text.

It's a cool concept, but I can see everyone comparing it to RapGenius (several people in the thread already have). RapGenius has a bunch of features that seem to be missing here, you'll probably have to justify their absence.

The biggest problem I see, however, is the slideout pane from the right when you click an annotation. RG does this without taking up the whole reading area; it seems a bit silly to reproduce the whole sentence being annotated and cover up the rest of text for one heavily padded tweet. Personally I would find a two-mode interface more useful: hover to see a small dialog with the top/newest tweets and a summary of the annotation activity, and click to get a larger overlay if there's too many tweets for the small view.

Finally, I think using pg's essays might actually hurt you. I get that it's a gimmick, and the HN crowd might like it, but I think the man himself might be less flattered and more put off if it seems like you're trying to make up for technical shortcomings by flattering him.

I actually prefer the Medium's implementation of sidebar annotations/comments. For example: https://medium.com/design-ux/926eb80d64e3

At least, the content isn't blocked when the annotations/comments are activated.

Echoing other comments about the scrolling, but wanted to add that I'm not strictly against the pagination.

For me, it's simply that the trigger is both unpredictable and way too insensitive. It takes two very large scrolls of the entire height of the trackpad on my MBP, and it doesn't respect the scrolling momentum. It just feels very non-native.

Overall, I like the design.

I love the responsive design of your navigation menus. But it feels redundant when i see your page on my laptop. Both the left navigation pane and the TOC button display the same list of articles.

Instead you could perhaps make the TOC button display the chapters within the current article on a wider display and revert to the current behaviour on phone/tablet.

I agree with rdl, I think classical scrolling would work better here. Also, could you make the app utilize the full width of the browser window? The comment box obscures the text on my 1680x1050 display, even though there would be enough space to display it next to it.

It reminds me of Django book's early days when it was being written (http://www.djangobook.com). Each paragraph could be commented upon and it led to a really fantastic collaboration.

Is this not how Medium comments work? And the pagination is a bit annoying.

That aside, What's the use case of this app? Is it like an alternative to disqus for my blog?

Great concept, I noticed Medium.com is doing something very similar in their stories now. See: https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/265cc8a17432 They don't cover the text up, but push it left which is something you should consider. Best of luck with your application.

We posted this two weeks ago, and we've improved the demo in response to the initial feedback. Thanks for your feedback!

So it's a content creation play on the annotation ideal? Like: tumblr + annotation features.

I'd be curious to see how this goes after watching browser plugins struggle to achieve lasting popularity.

I'm guessing this is where Rapgenius is headed, one community at a time.

Where a full stop/period is preceded by a single letter you should treat it as an acronym rather than the end of a sentence (I can't think of a valid sentence ending that has a single letter in it ... )

I just noticed that you're splitting up m.o into separate sentences.

You need to cater to people who doesn't want to share the full sentence. Allowing for inline editing in the overlay section might be great, or allow for selection of a partial sentence instead.