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Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs

desklamp.io

31–40 of 51 posts

Re: Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs

#31

Let 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.

This is actually a legitimate concern. Productivity tools are overflowing right now, so the main confusion for us is do we aim to replace your existing notemaking suite or supplement it, For now, why not try out the free beta? Would like to know how/if it works with your workflow.

Re: Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs

#32

Let 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…

This is definitely our thought process too! The aim is to get you to note things down more / access insights faster so that there's less you're relying on your brain to remember.

Re: Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs

#33
post #13
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't have an iPad but I do a lot of free-drawing PDF annotation on Android with Squid. For maths it's way easier than typing Latex. Personally I wouldn't consider this kind of app unless it had free drawing as a primary tool. Even if you're focused on laptops, many laptops have pen input, especially those used by students. Many of my students use OneNote to annotate lecture slides with a pen; even though OneNote i…

Very interesting! Definitely sounds like a gap even in the laptop space then. Thanks for the input!

Re: Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs

#34
post #16

I hope it would support fully-standalone mode for enterprise environment. Lots of folks and I at my ML team found it hard to use these kinds of tooling without compromising the intranet. We have to have a permit to bring our laptop inside, otherwise stick to a proxy server.

Yup that is part of our roadmap!

Re: Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs

#35

I'd like to be able to take notes for a PDF where the note part can handle the PDF being updated and would link the notes to a numbered section (or a title, optionally) in the PDF. Any chance this does that, or any other suggestions?

Note making connected to PDFs is abysmal. As far as I know, we're one of the better tools out there. Updating PDFs is a challenge for sure. Constantly updating content is probably better suited for a wiki/notion page though. I'm curious - what kind of PDFs are you dealing with?

Re: Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs

#36

The "store" site [1] lists JEE, NEET and CUET as the "competitive exams" category. Can anyone explain what these are? I haven't heard about these before. [1] https://store.desklamp.io/

These are standard test programs in India to get into various institutes. JEE[1] is an engineering entrance assessment conducted for admission to various engineering colleges in India. For students who want to study the general stream of physics, Chemistry, and Biology would go through the NEET[2]. This is for the Medical Colleges in India. For everything else -- colleges, undergraduate, graduate, and other courses a…

Yup. In India, all of these are extremely huge deals. We wanted to put up some content on the store and being a team that did well on these exams we thought the easiest way to get some original content up was to use our own notes.

Re: Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs

#37

This looks extremely cool. I'm doing a masters right now and would definitely use it! My one question though would be how are the notes stored? Is it possible to download them as latex or a markdown file or something? If I have to keep up a membership to return to them that would be unfortunate. Cool project though, there's definitely a need for something more fluidly interactive in the university notetaking space. B…

Thanks a lot! No there'll definitely be export options. As of now there's only a beta version of exporting as a PDF, but LaTeX/Markdown is on the cards. Probably LaTeX so that we can just replace the PDF generation as well.

Re: Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs

#38
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup. By the next show HN, I'll be sure to come back with more clarity on this front. This is a solid idea. Allows us to focus on power users.

Re: Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs

#39
This is super nice! I tried to build something similar (PDF reader x Stack Overflow; as you read you can see highlights that link to Stack Overflow style posts): https://chimu.sh (site is broken right now), but it didn't work out.

The thesis was to make annotated textbooks, so if 100 people read a book then the 101th person could benefit from the knowledge of the previous 100 people.

I hope you guys consider the multiplayer aspect of note-taking!

Re: Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs

#40
post #39

This is super nice! I tried to build something similar (PDF reader x Stack Overflow; as you read you can see highlights that link to Stack Overflow style posts): https://chimu.sh (site is broken right now), but it didn't work out. The thesis was to make annotated textbooks, so if 100 people read a book then the 101th person could benefit from the knowledge of the previous 100 people. I hope you guys consider the mult…

Oh one hundred percent! That’s definitely part of our vision. Couldn’t have put it across better. So we already have a small pilot of that running with any documents you get from the Desklamp store - these have the multiplayer aspect in the form of public notes. The idea is that if you make useful notebooks like chapter summaries or some insight on a book, you can publish those for all readers of the book to see. Didn’t promote that here because we don’t have licensed content yet but you can check it out on any of the consulting books.
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