This looks great! I've been bouncing between PDF readers that supposedly deal with highlighting well, and most of them are terrible. Is it possible to export highlights and notes as Markdown? That would let me dump my notes into Obsidian.
Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs
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Re: Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs
#22Let me get my pdf highlights into readwise and let me orgazize my notes as a zettelkasten in obsidian and i’ll get in lline to pay you.
Re: Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs
#23Let me get my pdf highlights into readwise and let me orgazize my notes as a zettelkasten in obsidian and i’ll get in lline to pay you.
I used to be a lot like this. Without trying to demean you, I would suggest stepping down from your awesome bubble and talk to the common people on the ground. The 99.99% of the people are not like us.
Once you learn to listen to them, a whole new world opens up.
About the payment/price; you are lowering the cost of your time way below what you should priced yourself at. Instead of me doing, maintaining, if I can buy time with a subscription the price of a coffee, I'd always go for that and free up my time just to laze around or read something or sleep under a tree. Just imagine that, not worrying if the server I self-hosted on a German ISP will go down because I paid off $9.99 a month. ;-)
Re: Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs
#24Looks 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…
Thanks a ton for that feedback! I absolutely did not realise how that sounded. We definitely don’t aim to blindside early adopters with a sudden pay-us-or-you-lose-data deadline. The plan is that anything you do right now you’ll ALWAYS have access to, and at some point (not before December 2022) we begin charging a subscription to begin saving data to new documents. New users post that deadline will have a threshold…
When in doubt, do something like this -- $99.99 a year (or something higher than you are thinking right now) BUT free during the beta. So, people will either stay because they can afford that or is worth it or will leave. So, you end up with users who you will likely care enough to make good features for them.
Re: Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs
#25What a pleasant surprise to find you guys on HN! Massive congratulations to the team.
All those long hours in the library paid off =)
Go IITM!
Re: Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs
#26Hi, I was taking notes in Notability on a PDF of a manuscript I’m reviewing for a journal just before taking this break on Hacker News and finding this. I would really like this to have a freedrawing pencil interface like Notability does. I do agree that organized marginalia would be very helpful. I have struggled to find one app to rule them all this regard.
Noted! Do you think the app would work well as is on the iPad if we added free drawing with the pencil in the notebook? We’ve designed the entire interface with a laptop in mind. Very curious how iPad users feel about everything.
> Do you think the app would work well as is on the iPad if we added free drawing with the pencil in the notebook?
I'm not a frontend mobile developer, so definitely not entirely qualified to comment, but it doesn't open in Safari (MacOS or iPadOS). That said, I did try uploading Watson and Crick's paper on DNA and it seems to upload but won't open (hangs on 0%) in both MacOS Firefox and MacOS Chrome (both downloaded fresh today). I also tried opening the MacOS app on a computer with MDM controls and it was blocked (need a valid signature on your dmg).
Ginger Labs (publisher of Notability) has dozens of employees and has been in operation for 14 years, so it's a bit unfair to compare, but I definitely like the idea of have a Google Docs style wide margin to play in. Something like MathPad for LaTeX would be nice as well. Lots of asks, I know.
Re: Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs
#27This is superb. The team sounds a lot more entrepreneurial than just being students. This is the perfect nurturing of entrepreneurs while still in college. Lots of people talk about it, but remarkably few execute on that idealogy. Here are my exciting observations. - I see you guys have been working on it for over a year, which shows perseverance. - Most co-founders have professional LinkedIn Professionals -- very un…
Thanks a lot! Yes we are definitely enjoying the entrepreneurial journey. I have decided to work on this full time - learning so much! And it's always great to get to work on something that you can actually use personally.
Re: Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs
#28What a pleasant surprise to find you guys on HN! Massive congratulations to the team. All those long hours in the library paid off =) Go IITM!
Haha thanks! Would be a nice moment to mention our mascot, if we had one. Go Blackbucks?
Re: Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs
#29This looks great! I've been bouncing between PDF readers that supposedly deal with highlighting well, and most of them are terrible. Is it possible to export highlights and notes as Markdown? That would let me dump my notes into Obsidian.
That's a very neat idea! Will look at a few more standards for exporting notes.
Re: Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs
#30Congratulations! The only suggestion I have is about the logo: if you rotate it clockwise 90 degrees, then the lamp head also looks like a "D", instead of an "A" as it does currently. I immediately felt it would be better suited to the product name (with some tweaks, of course).
So the fun thing about the logo is it's also a pencil, the purple makes it slightly less obvious. I'm glad you got that it's a lamp - my aunt saw it and asked me why it is a random triangle. Never thought about the D parallel though, that's neat!