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Polar?
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➔ Polar website
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44 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
Snaps are really insane and more trouble than it's worth.
If you're maintaining an app you want a RELIABLE and easy to work with packaging systems.
I've been working on Polar for the least few months:
and we support debs and snaps and AppImage.
I think we're just going to go with debs. the snaps continually break and have VERY confusing issues dealing with sandboxing and containers.
It's just not worth it.
I recommend making cards as you go along. If you have a digital version of your learning material, I recommend trying out Polar to easily make cards from your learning material.
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Also, good luck with the learning. Do keep us updated ith your progress and when the exam is finally done.
You could give incremental reading a try.
If you have the books in digital form, you can try to upload them to Polar Bookshelf.
Simply said, incremental reading is when you switch between books / articles when getting bored or losing concentration. The idea is that you regain interest / concentration when moving on to the next.
It's really a shame that OSS in general has such a difficult time funding apps.
We asked our developer base to step up and received donations but you really need to get 100k-300k users before it actually makes a ton of sense.
Talking about Polar (my app)
I think there is a sort of bystander effect where everyone assumes others will fund it.
A shame really. We deserve to have awesome tools!
Check out my app Polar:
It's probably what you're looking for. You can capture web content and also store PDFs in Polar.
It's offline-first and you can commit your entire polar repo to git and replicate it between machines.
You can tag documents, filter by tag, create comments and annotate documents.
It's pretty sweet :)
I would suggest using Polar Bookshelf.
The flashcards you make inside of it syncs with Anki, therefore making the whole process a lot less tedious.
Also, break your flash cards up into small but specific pieces. It will allow you to test your materials faster and more effectively.
I really like the thumbnail preview.
I'm the author of a similar app:
I took more of a 'table' approach for managing the documents but I still love the thumbnail design you selected.
I think I'm going to end up implementing both at some point. I think each has its pros and cons.
Polar is Open Source too if you wanted to collaborate.
I think this is a good trend... people like Polar so much they're worried about me removing features I never said I would remove ;)
The Anki support in Polar will be improving - not going away. We're going to be adding better duplicate detection and at the same time fix the excessive tag issue.
I'm waiting to implement feature toggle support because I don't want to enable it by default but instead push it and allow you guys to test it out first - don't want to break anything.
BTW... if you would really like Polar you could help out the project by either:
Leaving us a review about our Anki addon: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/734898866
Buying Polar Premium: https://getpolarized.io/#pricing
Donating to the project directly: https://opencollective.com/polar-bookshelf
Start contributing to the project in the form of writing documentation or sending pull requests for new features or working on bug fixes.
Telling your friends about it... Writing up a blog post or tweeting about it also helps too!
If you're at a .edu PLEASE if you can link to it in an official resource directory for students that would be very helpful!
I have been diagnosed with ADD and all I can say without the Pomodoro technique I could not do anything without someone looking over my shoulder.
>Do you have a textbook for your language that you follow?
Multiple depending on what I want to improve. But most of my learning is not textbook centered.
>Do you take notes?
Short notes get transferred to Anki within 24 hours of my lesson. Any digital notes I take are synchronized directly to Anki using Polar.
>Do you listen to a podcast?
The only people I know who do not listen to podcasts are children and my parents' age. I almost exclusively listen to podcasts in my target language.
>How efficient do you feel your method is?
I am constantly trying to validate my methodology and find new and interesting techniques to experiment with. Any additional efficiencies would need to come from outside of my sphere of action. One example is my recent adoption of Polar which makes keeping track of what I am studying and importing certain things into Anki a bit easier. All my stuff is in one place now, so I do not have to spend time on the weekends preparing my learning material for the coming weeks.
Whenever I have more than an hour to study, I use a Pomodoro type methodology. I am up to where I can now do sessions of about 40/45 minutes of study and 10 minutes for a break. If I have slept exceptionally well, I can do up to 50 minutes with not drop in focus but that is about it. I think that this range is about where I am stuck. Additional effort seems to earn me nothing. I think it's a hard limit for me. If I could really get my sleep right, where I can sleep a full 7.5 to 8 hours without waking up 4 or 5 times per night, then maybe but that seems like an even greater fantasy than me being able to sit and focus for more than an hour at a time...
> 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.
Polar has google analytics enabled by default no opt out yet. To give them credit they say they only collect non personal information but its up to you to trust them
I'm the author of Polar...
I'm torn about providing an API for this directly into Polar. Are all the papers copyrighted or are some of them free/public domain?
I did some research and about 40% of the PDFs people add to Polar have DOIs so we're going to add metadata lookup using various service to provide addition data on the users collection of PDFs.
However, some people have just a DOI so it would be nice to have DOI fetch from multiple providers.
When I implemented the Anki sync support for Polar I thought it really wouldn't be that bad to have sync manually triggered.
... but it's definitely kind of a pain.
First you sync to polar, then you sync anki, then you sync your phone.
It's not fun.
I think what I'm going to do is implement basic spaced repetition directly in Polar at some point.
The reason being that we already have the flashcard maintenance and management there AND we're based on Firebase so we have 24/7 continuous realtime sync (it's beautiful really).
... if you're interested.
We're definitely still going to keep Anki sync for the experts though.
We working on some new features now including improved deck sync and placement.
My biggest potential concerns about AnkiApp based on numerous threads I've seen would be data security (both your privacy and the risk of crashes) and the lack of proper SRS algorithms. Additionally, there is the general skeevy-ness of an app/brand being built on an existing brand-name, trying to steal some of their audience - especially a program that is open-source, and free in most applications. I have no personal experience/research into it, but here's an example comparison write-up: https://getpolarized.io/2020/02/03/anki-ripped-off.html
What I would recommend: before buying AnkiMobile, try using the web version for a while, including deck download/building. If you like it, make the switch to the legitimate mobile program.
Thanks for your reply. I was afraid this project was abandoned since you guys didn't post anything for so long. Right now I'm using Polar since I find it more usable, but will definitely check BookFusion once the update is rolled out. I would also love to see some of Polar's features on BookFusion, like flashcards and spaced repetition.
I'll start.
I'm the founder of Polar.
I have 25 years of industry experience. I have a previous exit when I sold my company to six apart. My background is in distributed systems. One of the inventors of RSS. Previous company was a petabyte-scale search engine.
Polar is making money but not profitable factoring in salaries. The revenue model will work but we're just about to add some important monetization features.
What I need now is a co-founder that's really an expert on growth, product, marketing, and consumer.
Or users are VERY passionate about the product. Distribution right now is my main goal.
> They all get added to the "Default" deck, with no option to change this.
There is... you can use a deck: tag.
It's documented here:
https://getpolarized.io/docs/anki-sync-for-spaced-repetition.html
> The creator u/brainhack3r was unreceptive to these changes, constantly citing 'technical reasons' why they could not happen, .... His reasons were bullshit, and he had a very dismissive and rude manor.
I think I remember your email and quite frankly I stopped communicating with you because you were rude and started to use profanity and attack me.
My comment in regards to ME modify Anki internals and I was opting to not do that...
Ask any user who has communicated with me about Polar and they'll agree that I'll go out of my way to hear their concerns. I don't have time and won't make time for people that are abusive.
There is a fairly new app called Polar that can help you make, organize, and export PDF annotations. It can also sync with Anki flashcards. I have a PDF textbook that I plan to try it with (if my instructor makes it seem that details in that book will be tested). https://getpolarized.io/
https://getpolarized.io/
It's a piece of program you can manage documents in you would like to read. You can create flashcards inside the program and sync those to anki. I use it for all my uni readings
Might not be exactly what you want but you might like Polar:
... it's my app and it's not fully self-hosted but it's open source and the data is open and stored locally. Even if you use the cloud sync.
I wrote one... :)
Specifically for this use case.
It supports pagemarks to keep track of your reading. Huge PDFs, is free but hook a brother up with the $4.99 version so I can keep building new versions of it ;)
I don't read epub, but for pdfs try polar bookshelf. It has a few annoying aspects, such as using electron and relying on cloud storage, but arguably that qualifies it as modern.
The reader view uses Mozilla's pdf.js, which provides a pretty smooth experience, and the application offers a number of other convenient features like progress tracking and an annotation browser.
On my arch surface book with modified firmware, touch and one-finger scrolling worked out of the box.
It does have a premium-tier. That would usually scare me off, but it appears to be all open source nevertheless.
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?
My advice is to go with a simple question / answer pair and put the actual name in the 'extra' field.
I talk about this here:
https://getpolarized.io/2019/05/25/13-lucky-tips-for-using-anki-and-spaced-repetition-2019.html
You don't want to give yourself too many hints. Active recall is where the magic comes into play.
If you DO go down this path try to randomize the options. At least that's a middle path.
I don't think I can because Mendeley now encrypts your database to literally prevent you from doing that.
https://getpolarized.io/2019/01/23/mendeleys-encrypted-repository-is-fundamentally-anti-science.html
I think this is a huge example of how closed data can sometimes beat open data.
It's easy for you to go from Polar to Mendeley but not the other way around.
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.
React + Typescript + Firebase ... deployed on Electron and of course browsers...
Really trying to work on a webapp + PWA but I'm having to prune things down substantially. Still at about 8MB for the webapp but I think I can get this down to < 1MB.
Nothing in your description seems that hard/impossible, if you are willing to learn a few more AWS services.
Here is an old example of "create audiobook from book text". (Personally, I think it's overly-complicated. I'd rather write simple program that runs on my computer that call the Polly API.)
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Also, https://getpolarized.io/ might give you inspiration on how to organize your PDFs. Maybe you could have your car audio player tell polarized what segments you have played, and maybe your notes could be stored in polarized.
Most likely not, since having support for pdf would then bring demand for all ebook file types.
Though, I would refer you to Polar Bookshelf which lets you create flash cards that you can import into Anki.
this article is really long. maybe you'll see the other fields when you scroll down. Maybe you'll see the buttons when you scroll up (in the first picture it looks as if you are not fully scrolled up (but I'm sure)).
My idea: try to avoid pdf as a source, search for an html version. With this article you're lucky there is https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6131264/
Maybe search for a better pdf to html editor. Maybe try google docs or microsoft office/outlook online. But converting pdf to html doesn't look good if you've got more than basic layout . and medical articles usually have diagrams and photos.
maybe try https://getpolarized.io/ .
I don't use the IR add-on because I want to be able to edit the text. I just use copy and paste and screenshots. With some automation software that's quite quick.
> It is a question of what you want to do vs. what the people using your app want to do.
Oh. totally agree with that. Not saying it will ever happen just that it's not the top priority of features just yet.
We might use Xapian for this use but baby steps.
One issue is that we would need to initialize the PDFs in the background so import would be much slower. But probably not insanely slower.
> The cloud is well and good but most documents I own can not be put on the cloud either for copyright or for other reasons.
You can store it in the cloud just like you would with Dropbox or S3
Doesn't mean your sharing it with anyone just that the cloud is providing storage.
We ARE going to add document sharing but only for shareable documents.
Just imagine it's like a blog. You can put an open licensed PDF on your blog but can't put up something under a copyright that doesn't allow sharing (say a textbook you bought)
> Another thing that makes a lot of difference is If you intend to keep this open source or if you wanted to monetize it in some way.
Monetization and open source are not incompatible.
You can read more about the long term strategy here.
https://getpolarized.io/2019/03/01/polar-personal-knowledge-repository.html
You might also want to look at Polar as I built it for this use case:
It supports anki sync.
One thing I do need to improve is the management and filtering of the notes so it's a bit powerful like Evernote / OneNote (but this isn't far off).
I'm working on 2.0 now and porting it to the web. We have a huge Anki community following too.
Also, if you have the book in pdf form, Id check out PolarBookshelf. its a program for incremental reading that you can also use to make anki cards. Ive been using it for a lil while and I think its pretty good, it is still in development though and has some bugs.
Your workflow looks like it could benefit from using Polar Bookshelf, a document reader with features such as highlights, creating of flashcards and anki synching! I highly recommend to give it a try.
Polar's Website Polar's subreddit: /r/PolarBookshelf/
It's not just their firewall . They've also gone and encrypted the database in their Mendeley app:
https://getpolarized.io/2019/01/23/mendeleys-encrypted-repository-is-fundamentally-anti-science.html
If you use Mendeley (an Elsevier product) and download a paper they store it in an encrypted on-disk database which you do not have the key for. Only Mendeley has the key.
This prevents integration with apps like Polar (my app) which would like to interop and use the papers you're reading.
Polar (https://getpolarized.io) is basically a reading manager. It allows you to annotate, highlight, and tag the papers you're reading.
It would be great if we could have access to Mendeley but they've walled it off.
This is probably also illegal and a violation of the GDPR as the users are supposed to have rights to export.
> The data subject shall have the right to receive the personal data concerning him or her, which he or she has provided to a controller, in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format and have the right to transmit those data to another controller without hindrance from the controller to which the personal data have been provided...
Because you can never have too many options, I just found this.
No iOS or Android apps, but a few other nifty features like the synchronisation with Anki for SRS flash cards.
Facebook is too big to fail.
There are rules for you and I and a separate set of rules for big companies like Facebook.
This really needs to change.
I'm a small app developer (https://getpolarized.io/)
... what do you think would happen if i pulled this shit?
I would be nuked to oblivion and NEVER allowed in the App Store again.
Heck. Even when I play by the rules I have trouble.
Uber literally went out of their way to circumvent Apple's auditing system and all they got was a slap on the wrist.
We need some sort of SAG like union for independent app developers.
People constantly get screwed over on Youtube. Their apps get blocked, etc.
EXCEPT if you're a BigCo... then you can do whatever you want and they won't block you.
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.
These stats are really amazing and encourage you to use anki day in and day out.
For the incremental reading support in Polar I just added stats for the same reason!
here's a screenshot:
Sorry can't get you a full screen screenshot.
The next feature I'm adding is a 'streak' so you can track your reading per day (and per day) to encourage you to keep up on your reading and to also show stats over time.
I'm using Nivo for the charts and it's a pretty amazing framework:
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.
> But I've come to the realization that I'm retaining very little of any of it. [...] I'm coming to the conclusion that despite all this stuff being interesting and insightful, it's still just entertainment to me: in one ear and out the other ...
It's a regrettable fact of human memory that if you want a fact to be retrievable in the future, you have to practice retrieving it in advance.
This is where flashcards (Anki, Supermemo, Quizlet, etc.) come into play.
> I know of spaced-repetition tools like Anki, but have never understood how it would be useful for something like this that isn't learning languages or medical anatomical terms or something.
Anki is just a convenient way to write down stimulus-response pairs with an algorithm to schedule the optimal time to review.
Here are some facts that have nothing to do with language or anatomy which I find useful/interesting to know:
> The two most useful study techniques are: {{c1::active recall}}, and {{c2::spaced repetition}}.
> We don't {{c1::rise to the level of our expectations}}, we {{c2::fall to the level of our training}}. -- {{c3::Archilocus, greek poet}}
> The {{c1::scientific revolution}} started in {{c2::1571}} when {{c3::Tycho Brahe saw a New Star}}, and ended in {{c4::1704}} when {{c5::Newton published Opticks}}.
Each of the curly braces will turn into a fill-in-the-blank card (a "cloze" in Anki terminology), so the last example will turn into five different cards.
Check out Polar Bookshelf which implements incremental reading (or look into SuperMemo/incremental reading) and connects with Anki (you need the anki-connect addon to make it work).
I've been working on a projects specifically for researchers and students who need to track and maintain a GREAT deal if research:
It's a bit like Mendeley, Zotero but it's Open Source and designed for long term storage of your personal knowledge.
It also has support for Anki and creating flashcards from the material you're consuming so you (ideally) never forget key aspects of your reading.
Would love your feedback here.
it uses ankiconnect to export cards to anki. Polar is a standalone application.
basically, it allows you to first mark important pieces of your notes and then you can add flashcards to specific fragments. finally, it will export them into anki to a deck named after the article
there is probably more it can do, but i am pretty new to this app.
Name: Polar
Location: San Francisco, CA
Elevator Pitch: Polar is an offline browser for web content and PDFs that allows you to tag and manage all your content, annotate it, and sync it with your phone and across devices.
*More Details: * Polar is targeted towards people who read very technical material and need to keep this material long term. Researchers, students, lawyers, etc. Anyone highly intellectual who wants to keep their educational materials in a secure repository.
We launched on Hacker News about 3 weeks ago. About 500 REALLY passionate users (1 day) 2k (weeklies).
Right now I'm working on the initial user experience. Trying to clarify the value proposition and elevator pitch, get product market fit, and also work on cloud sync and a revenue model based around cloud storage.