Ok, so if you're going cloud only are you at least getting to feature parity in the web version? Or is this going to be the worst of both worlds where I need an electron app running locally _and_ all my data in your system?
Show HN: Polar 2.0 – Integrated reading environment for EPUBs, PDFs, & web pages
31–40 of 42 posts
Re: Show HN: Polar 2.0 – Integrated reading environment for EPUBs, PDFs, & web pages
#32I tried Polar out about a year ago and it was too buggy to keep using, but I liked the idea. Today, giving it another shot, I see some serious work has gone into it and it's really expanded into something interesting. Kudos to you and your co-founder!
The only thing stopping me from going all-in on paying for Polar and using it as the "hub" of my reading (mostly technical docs, long-form blogs, whitepapers, and textbooks) is the lack of tie-in with E Ink readers, which I vastly prefer for reading and note-taking over computer screens.
I use a ReMarkable 2 tablet for reading technical docs (nd a Kindle Oasis for casual nonfiction. It would completely "connect the ecosystem" if there were ways to sync with my readers or at least push documents to them and pull annotations back. Boox, ReMarkable, and other popular E Ink tablets have APIs, OTG USB disk access, and other ways to interchange the docs (with authorization). I'm seeing loads of hacks for them on Github, so maybe even opening a plugin system would be enough; the community would contribute to fill in the gaps.
IMO, this is the killer final piece of the puzzle and would keep my reading and note-taking in one wonderfully organized place, which is something I'm 100% interested in paying for and supporting.
Re: Show HN: Polar 2.0 – Integrated reading environment for EPUBs, PDFs, & web pages
#33I tried Polar out about a year ago and it was too buggy to keep using, but I liked the idea. Today, giving it another shot, I see some serious work has gone into it and it's really expanded into something interesting. Kudos to you and your co-founder! The only thing stopping me from going all-in on paying for Polar and using it as the "hub" of my reading (mostly technical docs, long-form blogs, whitepapers, and textb…
> The only thing stopping me from going all-in on paying for Polar and using it as the "hub" of my reading (mostly technical docs, long-form blogs, whitepapers, and textbooks) is the lack of tie-in with E Ink readers, which I vastly prefer for reading and note-taking over computer screens.
> IMO, this is the killer final piece of the puzzle and would keep my reading and note-taking in one wonderfully organized place, which is something I'm 100% interested in paying for and supporting.
The plan here is to support tablets (Surface, iPad, etc) very well and have very tight integration.
Stay tuned ;)
Re: Show HN: Polar 2.0 – Integrated reading environment for EPUBs, PDFs, & web pages
#34This looks phenomenal. I'm a huge Anki fan so I'm intrigued by the Anki integration. Two issues/questions though: 1. How do you import flash cards into Anki? After adding the AnkiConnect add-on the documentation just says to use the "Sync Flashcards to Anki" within Tools but there is no Tools (on the Web App / MacOS versions). I can see it being done in the old version of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F…
> 1. How do you import flash cards into Anki? After adding the AnkiConnect add-on the documentation just says to use the "Sync Flashcards to Anki" within Tools but there is no Tools (on the Web App / MacOS versions). I can see it being done in the old version of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2aMWBdZUeQ&t=636 Where did you see that? The directions might be stale somewhere. I checked our site and it's no…
Ah, appreciate the response!
Another suggestion is to gray out the 'Start Review' button if there's nothing to review. I couldn't figure out if my test cards were made correctly when it kept saying 'Review Completed!'
I now assume the reason was that the algorithm (?) doesn't have you review cards until a certain amount of time was passed so that screen just indicates there's nothing left to review.
I'd also suggest a way to test the features before creating an account. Perhaps let someone upload and edit a document and only save it once they've created an account.
Re: Show HN: Polar 2.0 – Integrated reading environment for EPUBs, PDFs, & web pages
#35I tried Polar out about a year ago and it was too buggy to keep using, but I liked the idea. Today, giving it another shot, I see some serious work has gone into it and it's really expanded into something interesting. Kudos to you and your co-founder! The only thing stopping me from going all-in on paying for Polar and using it as the "hub" of my reading (mostly technical docs, long-form blogs, whitepapers, and textb…
To be frank I think integrating with the Remarkable 2 (I have one as well) is going to be tough. This has more to do with the device than with Polar - it's very difficult as architected today to connect to anything else (Dropbox, etc). Given that, it might not make sense for these guys to prioritize this specific device, especially since so few people have one
Re: Show HN: Polar 2.0 – Integrated reading environment for EPUBs, PDFs, & web pages
#36Please consider increasing the PDF size limit. I'm guessing it's about 100MB, and I have plenty of PDFs that large or larger. I'm using 2.0.53 on Windows
Which limit are you hitting. There's no inherent size limit but uploading 100Mb would take a minute or two.
My bad -- I keep all my files on a home server and connect to it via webdav. That error message is from webdav, not polar, and I didn't recognize it. Sorry about that!
Re: Show HN: Polar 2.0 – Integrated reading environment for EPUBs, PDFs, & web pages
#37The announced new incremental reading feature doesn’t seem to be incremental reading as implemented in supermemo, no? How do the articles come back to your pile, and how do you extract the information from them?
The way it’s explained it seems like a normal anki-like flow to me.
Re: Show HN: Polar 2.0 – Integrated reading environment for EPUBs, PDFs, & web pages
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
brew install polar-bookshelf got it. Great open source project!
This isn't official btw. I didn't even know about this! I suspect this is a 1.x build. Make sure it's 2.0 :-P This is the interesting thing about Open Source is you get interesting developments like this that you didn't anticipate!
yup indeed. the art over artists, and code over the author.
Re: Show HN: Polar 2.0 – Integrated reading environment for EPUBs, PDFs, & web pages
#39Hey Hacker News! About two years ago we launched Polar on HN [1] and now we’re back to announce Polar 2.0! https://getpolarized.io/ Polar is a tool used by software engineers, students, and professionals. Anyone who wants to manage academic research, technical documentation, textbooks, or web-based reading to build a personal knowledge base. Polar is an integrated reading environment similar to your IDE that you use…
> you don't have to risk being locked into a platform you don't control
Except the v2 update changes this from local or cloud storage to cloud only. So in order to use the app at all you do have to upload your documents to servers you don't control. But this isn't my biggest pain point, as long as export capabilities are comprehensive and my data is private.
But that's not the case here. For an open-source app that requires uploading personal documents to yet another USA-based server there is a surprising lack of focus on privacy. Without end-to-end encryption it's unreasonable to take the privacy risk that serious use of this app entails. And I've been burned by one too many productivity apps to believe there's not going to be a willful or accidental privacy breach here too.
Re: Show HN: Polar 2.0 – Integrated reading environment for EPUBs, PDFs, & web pages
#40It looks like a great project.
It would be useful if I could import a url directly into the desktop app, without having to go through the Chrome extension. My main browser is Firefox and I understand the difficulty in developing an extension for each browser, but I expected to being able to copy the url and import it somehow into the app.
Great job in any case!