What are /r/PolarBookshelf's favorite Products & Services?

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> for managing web content, books, and notes > \ https://getpolarized.io

Mixing web content and PDFs in a single place got me interested, initially. I see it as a place to add content in a certain research area I'm interested in, and later I can come organize it. I also see it as a tool which helps me keep focused while I work through the sources backlog. Most of the PDFs I add are relatively short (5-20 pages).

That said, after looking at it more carefully, it seems the product is intended more for larger documents, because that's where highlighting is a crucial tool.

That's great and very promising, thanks so much for your efforts.

I very much like the ability to view thumbnails of my documents. For me it is not just cosmetic but quite useful, as it solicits the visual representation of the document that we built up in our memories while reading and highlighting it.

Could you please consider implementing a grid view, similar to the one that was recently added to Calibre ?

https://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

These guys have ~60k books with expired copyright.

It may give you an idea.

The files are epub/html etc.

Not sure how to explain it also, but here you can see how embedding works on Notion: https://www.notion.so/Embeds-6b7133323590447b9d8e963c136ebce5

It would be cool if you can embed Polar into Notion with just a selection of a notation you made in Polar. But maybe it's too much of a hassle, instead of just copy pasting...

Can you create a gif?: https://alternativeto.net/software/recordit-co/

>However whenever I try to capture a highlight box from the text the box is impossible to manage.

I think this is too general for anyone to know what you mean.

https://opencollective.com/polar-bookshelf

I need to make this more obvious in the next release here soon ;)

> I just see Document Repository, Sync Flashcards to Anki

Yeah. That's it! That option isn't working?

It can always be user supported via plugin but we will eventually support relocating the directory.

And there's also a non-trivial amount of work required here. If you have a document open and your cloud pulls down a new version I have no way to detect that and it could lead to corruption.

Filesystem events don't really scale on node+electron but it might be possible to just check before we write to the store if the version on disk has been updated or just check when the user switches to that window.

and if you'd like some of these features we always accept donations :)

https://opencollective.com/polar-bookshelf

I had been under the impression that the client is (and always will be) open source, but the service (cloud sync, web app etc) is not necessarily OS. This seams very reasonable to me, as long as it is made clear to the user.

From https://getpolarized.io/2019/06/02/Polar-1-19-8.html:

>We're going to be working to bring on a few more premium features in the next couple weeks. These include:
>
>Watch directories that can automatically import documents into Polar.
>
>Markdown support
>
>Dark mode

Is this implying that since these will be premium features they will not be available on the desktop version?

I talk about this a bit in the following posts.

https://getpolarized.io/2019/03/22/portable-datastores-and-platform-independence.html

https://getpolarized.io/2019/03/01/polar-personal-knowledge-repository.html

There's also more functionality I want to support such as document collaboration, sharing, group collaboration, and also features like differential sync.

For example you could just tell polar to only keep say 100MB local and it figures out how to do that.

I haven't implemented that feature yet but it's planned for the future.

Ah.. so Polar supports cloud sync natively.

https://getpolarized.io/docs/cloud-sync.html

Can you help me by suggesting how we can make it more obviously / clear that it natively supports cloud sync?

In 1.10 (just released) I changed it to be "Enable Cloud Sync" but not sure it's clear yet.

I also put a tooltip on it to explain what it does.

I'm going to change onboarding in 1.11 to explain some of these key features more clearly.

I need to work a bit harder at clarifying it... still working on more documentation.

https://getpolarized.io/incremental-reading.html

You have to update pagemarks. Polar pagemarks are explicitly created right now but we might add some support for auto pagemarks in the future.

I'm also going to create a new intro video to Polar to show off all the features which I think will help clarify things.

The copying problem won't ever go away I'm afraid.

The way PDFs handle text is frustrating. The mathematical symbols aren't actually text usually and they are manually positioned so the formula will always be corrupted if you just copy it as text.

I'm planning on fixing this when reworking the area highlights support.

Figures and mathematical formulas could just be captured as area highlights and they would look perfect.

Latex can be supported within Anki + Polar I think and I've already done some work towards this.

Summernote supports Latex and we area going to support Katex to handle this I think.

Then when you sync to Anki all your figures will work along with the original mathematical formula.

My current thinking is that some of these more advanced features will be with a premium version of Polar though. Probably priced at $3.99 USD per month. $7.99 would get you the premium features + cloud sync.

The thinking from an Open Source perspective is that if you build from source yourself it would be free but official binaries and ease of use would cost money.

I'm trying to build something very pervasive which just costs money as I have to hire developers, support staff, etc.

But I think the outcome will be awesome for everyone involved.

Literally every scientist I talk to HATES their tools and complains constantly.

I think we should fix this problem.

I'm really motivated by what IDEA has built with IntelliJ ....

https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/

The goal is to build a tool that scientists stay in 8 hours a day for 10-30 years and don't have to worry about it going away because there's a solid open community behind it with revenue to support the project.

Kind of like the Wikimedia Foundation but for open tooling around scientific research.

Kevin - so much of your vision resonates with me, and I applaud you for how far you've already come.

I would really appreciate some thoughtful commentary on how Polarized differs from or is similar to hypothes.is. Other than dabbling in both as a user, I don't have a vested interest in either Polarized or hypothes.is (yet!), and I've been looking for a movement to join and contribute to. I say movement because I think the potential goes way beyond a new product or app. I want to interact with information in a fundamentally different but obvious way, which includes a blend of retrieval and referencing, and an overall emphasis on reducing the chore of making connections with content and people so I can focus on the meaning of the connections.

At the core, I don't see a huge gap between the vision you've presented and what I'm reading over at hypothes.is , and for the record I don't think that's a bad thing. I think innovation is commonly obvious to many and executed by few. But, I would like to hear your thoughts if you think there are fundamental differences, overlaps, or other considerations you would voice as we consider funding and participating in Polar.