It's slow on my mac. I suspect it's the pdf.js rendering engine.
would you mind taking a video? Some people are saying it's slow and I wonder if it's slow because of another issue that I haven't seen yet.
Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository
81–90 of 112 posts
Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean a document with no tags is just like sticking something in / Plus, with tags you can have multiple categories. Also, Polar suggest tags for you based on your history. So it gets smarter over time. We will probably add some sort of hierarchy viewer but I'm torn over whether it should be compiled based on the tags or built manually.
I just went to your website and saw this screenshot: https://getpolarized.io/assets/screenshots/document-reposito... This is exactly what I'm talking about. Tags may be supported but it's not a tag-first interface, per se. When I open finder/explorer/nautilus on my computer, what shows up is the top level of my file hierarchy. This would be like an interface where you showed only top-level tags and then you have to c…
Ah! That screenshot is out of date.
https://i.imgur.com/hXizVHG.png
Tags are now front and center and on by default in the UI.
You can easily filter by tag too:
https://i.imgur.com/9N5ZMi6.png
Polar 2.0 will be web based ... there have been thousands of people checking out the website but not many people downloading the app. Had it been web based I don't think that would have been an issue.
I think they would have started using it.
> it doesn't put it in / first and then as a second step I have to manually put it somewhere else.
no.. but it will pick either the users home or their Documents or their Downloads. That's not much better.
Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository
#83Also, wanted to thanks all you guys for reviewing Polar and there's a lot of good feedback here. In a nutshell: 1. I'm working on more document formats including Markdown and ePub. 2. I'm working on some preliminary support for reference management so we can lookup the full reference info via DOI and have reference formatters for you to use for your research. Some of the DOI storage is already done. 3. I'm working on…
This is cool! I am working on something similar but a slight variation on intelligence augmentation and memory recall. Would love to chat with you, if interested.
Sure.. jump on the discord:
Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository
#84AFAICT, this is for PDF files on your computer and websites converted to PDF. There's no option to add, say, markdown files or locally stored email files. Don't get me wrong, I've tried it out and it's awesome. I'm just not seeing how it's going to take off as a knowledge repository with its limitations. The last thing I want is yet another place I have to look for my files, and I sure don't want to have to keep thin…
> AFAICT, this is for PDF files on your computer and websites converted to PDF. There's no option to add, say, markdown files or locally stored email files. Key point of order. We don't actually convert the websites to PDF. We cache the pages offline so you have the original in your archive. This is massively cool and I need to do a better job of making it clear that this isn't just conversion to PDF. > Don't get me…
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Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository
#85I've tried a number of approaches to a personal data repo: plain text files, custom database tools, dropping everything in a file folder...
My current approach - which I really like - is vimwiki saving to markdown instead of the default .wiki. it's on a self-hosted NextCloud instance, giving me access across all my computers as well as my phone.
It's not perfect - I'm extending it with some standardized project templates and other things - but everything's ultimately text; it's self-hosted, so not dependent on a third-party service that might disappear; and I can easily extend it to meet my requirements.
Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository
#86I would pay decent money for the version of this thing that automatically found all the PDFs in my Pinboard account and loaded them in.
Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository
#87I would pay decent money for the version of this thing that automatically found all the PDFs in my Pinboard account and loaded them in.
I'm working on a better sync framework to easily drop in systems like this to discovery notes, documents, URLs, etc.
Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
> AFAICT, this is for PDF files on your computer and websites converted to PDF. There's no option to add, say, markdown files or locally stored email files. Key point of order. We don't actually convert the websites to PDF. We cache the pages offline so you have the original in your archive. This is massively cool and I need to do a better job of making it clear that this isn't just conversion to PDF. > Don't get me…
> But I don't get your point about a missing tag. At least in my experience, interfaces that use tags (Gmail, Google Docs prior to the Drive upgrade) end up being a massive global heap that make it impossible to find anything. Tags help but only marginally, and only when I'm very selective about applying them. When a tag becomes too big it, it's just the soup problem all over again. In my experience with Gmail/Docs I…
1. 100% agree. Tags based solution is non-started at scale.
2. Problem is pretty much all such apps today require you to be a methodical type-writer/curator on some system-of-record application. Hierarchical structures are only as great as your personal hygiene of maintaining them.
3. This is in no way a critique for Polar. I think its a novel effort but I believe we need something significantly better to be universally effective.
4. I am an aggressive user of Evernote and the best use I have gotten is type a keyword X in the global search and see what pops up from my personal knowledge graph. It's always this painful search (pull model of information) which only as good as your own hierarchy or note keeping or tagging.
5. Out of my own pain, I have started working on a project I called Kontext. Think of it as your personal knowledge graph in the cloud but you don't have to categorize or organize or tag anything. Just work as you would normally work with ideas in your head - clip, screenshot, comment, type thoughts and it would auto-categorize, auto-correlate for you with information push model when you need it based on your existing context. Another angle is temporal relevance is key; information relevance changes with time.
6. I am using some latest neuroscience research to base the idea on.
Happy to explore feedback, thoughts, use-cases collaboration ideas.
Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've also downloaded this software and my impression is that it is far far from 95% to be an outstanding product. At least I bumped into small ui bugs the author should catched himself before a release. At the same time I agree with his idea that a knowledge base + spaced repetition is a good combination, however outputting spaced repetition into a 3rd party app is not a good idea. I see that burtonator is trying to…
> I've also downloaded this software and my impression is that it is far far from 95% to be an outstanding product. I couldn't parse that. Is this good or bad? > At least I bumped into small ui bugs the author should catched himself before a release. If you can point these out we can fix them. I'm still working on fit and finish in some places and rapidly iterating. I'm pushing 1/2 builds a week now based on user fee…
Far far from 95% to be an outstanding product, to me, implies it is a bad thing.
Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository
#90> maintaining all your documents in one place, annotating them with highlights, comments, managing your documents with tags, and maintaining key extracted knowledge via spaced repetition
> I believe this is a new class of application
I haven't used SuperMemo (the app that inspired Anki development), but looks like it has all these features plus tons of other stuff (https://help.supermemo.org/wiki/Incremental_learning). It has some flaws (not cross platform, doesn't support PDF directly, complex UI, and of course closed source), but I think it's unfair to claim "a new class of application".