Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs

Hey HN! I'm Prajwal, the co-creator of Desklamp! I just completed my undergrad, which is where we got the idea for Desklamp. A bunch of friends and I built this because we hated the experience of studying on our laptops. It was boring, and we found ourselves staring at the screen for hours on end with no output to show for it.

To make reading more engaging and to make sure we could remember what we read, we built a note-making system integrated with a PDF reader. The aim is to encourage you to make notes! LaTeX support, clipping out sections from the document, linking notes to sections in the PDF - everything is designed to really make sure you have no excuse to not make notes as you read.

We've also added a lot of fixes for minor inconveniences (scrolling across sections, hitting the wrong page number, light mode, viewing your highlights at a glance). And all of this is collaborative, because that just makes notes even more useful.

It's free for a while - we want to know what the rest of you think! Feedback can only help us make this even better. It's available as a web-app and a desktop app for Mac and Windows (Linux users, mail us, we're operating on a very closed beta right now).

Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs
desklamp.io

This is stunning. I'm very excited about it. As I really disliked the Zotero experience, I'm going to test it as soon as possible and provide you with immediate feedback.

Looks very nice and I installed the desktop version, but needing to sign up before even trying it out led me to uninstall immediately.

It's free for a while

I'd rather you set up free and paid tiers now, in which case I could make pricing decisions (because I do pay for things I like). I don't like the idea of getting used to something and then becoming a price taker because I have a lot of data stored already, so I would prefer to do without.

I'll give it another look. Thanks for your considerate reply!

Great job! I can see this being very useful, at the very least in the academia. For example, in meta-analytic reviews, you often go through hundreds of papers, identifying, highlighting and annotating the relevant hypothesis test details, among many irrelevant weeds. Tools that streamline this process are very handy, so that you can easily come back later and grok your past work. Pen and paper works for an individual, but can drown you in piles of binders, and is less easy to collaborate on/share.

Some quick, very minor UI comments: on a large screen, workspace switching could be available immediately through single-click icons instead of a dropdown menu. Similarly, minimizing open stickers could be done with a dedicated icon instead of through the “…” menu (right-click suggested in an example in the quick start guide didn’t work for me). Otherwise everything feels pretty intuitive.

One thing I’d want to learn from the introductory guides is if adding the metadata (comments, notes, highlights, etc.) changes the original PDF file (always, optionally, never?), so that for example you’d be able to send an annotated document right away, or need to keep backups of unmodified originals, etc. (I strongly assume the metadata is stored separately, as PDFs can be unwieldy to modify, but you never know.) In general, exporting/printing notes seems like a natural feature. I like that it’s easy to export clips.

As a casual right now, I don’t have any input regarding the possible business model, but will certainly be interested in where you go with it.