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Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

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Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#121
post #13

My use case for Pocket is completely different from the author’s. I use it every day to get web content onto a Kobo ereader. It strips ads and often gets stuff behind paywalls. My family shares the same pocket account and we often end up discussing things that get synced to all the kobos in the house. This functionality is so useful and seems like a well kept secret. If it went away I’d really be upset.

Firefox is breaking Kobo functionality in August.

https://www.theverge.com/23778208/kobo-pocket-ebook-reader-i...

Kobo can potentially fix it, but the short notice and breaking important functionality in one of their revenue generating products/services adds to my pessimism about Mozilla’s leadership, which is already very pessimistic.

Another example, look how much better Thunderbird is doing outside of Mozilla. Donations have more than doubled, but the product has a user centered roadmap, so imagine that. https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving...

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#122
post #13

My use case for Pocket is completely different from the author’s. I use it every day to get web content onto a Kobo ereader. It strips ads and often gets stuff behind paywalls. My family shares the same pocket account and we often end up discussing things that get synced to all the kobos in the house. This functionality is so useful and seems like a well kept secret. If it went away I’d really be upset.

Same here with Onyx.

I love ereading my Pocket articles in colour!

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#123
post #34

I use Joplin for this

What benefits does this offer, and what's your use case This Joplin? https://joplinapp.org/ > Please note that I'm specifically trying to capture online content --- full articles with references, URIs, etc. Not simply take notes.

Web clipper works great on a desktop web browser and saves content, but this uses a browser plug-in and I can’t think of a practical way to save an article on a mobile device (phone or ipad). Also, pages are converted to Markdown, which is usually helpful, but rendering can be different and I recall running into occasional issues. Now for reading, the mobile app at the time (I think still true) renders in Markdown, not a weblike view, so the reading experience wasn’t great (no inline pictures, diagrams). However, for pulling content it worked very well.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#124
Pocket recently changed their iOS app which sent me on a journey to finally get rid of it.

I had really bought into pocket. I paid for the extra reading features and fonts, and I bought a kobo Clara specifically to use pocket.

I built a proxy to use omnivore (https://omnivore.app), an open source alternative on my Kobo ereader. https://github.com/Podginator/KoboOmnivoreConverter

I have used pocket for over a decade. They finally broke the camels back.

Why a company would completely gut the reading features, the primary reason for the apps existence, is a mystery to me.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You certainly don’t need - I know and have worked with many successful people who don’t have any sort of meaningful (beyond grocery list type) notes or externally-stored knowledge of any kind. This feels like a comment without substance and in a way, it is. But I think it’s important to push back on this idea that if you aren’t managing a Second Brain while you’re GTD’ing a side project and Tools for Thought-ing your…

I eventually settled on a hardback A4 notebook. I don't usually need to scan back more than a few days, but one book lasts several months. You can use it standing up, e.g. in a SCRUM. It's resistant to having a mug of coffee spilled over it. It never crashes, and it doesn't need RAID or backups. You can attach post-its to the pages. You can use a stack of 4-5 of them as a monitor stand. Downsides: you can't paste scr…

I met plenty of productive people who do so with hardback notebooks and a pencil, you are good. Other thing I saw is once they are done with it they glue a paper on the cover and notedown some things and throw the notebook in a big plastic box for archival. Recently finished notebooks tend to find some time living in their desks before going into the box.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#126
I wonder if it wouldnt make more sense to just train a Commentator Neural Net with the pages you collect. It then can "remind" you of similar pages you have seen before, directly in the page, with little floating comments like "..skip..." "..contradicts.. http:/link/x/y/z " "..actual paper link.." "..paper is p-hacked shovelware.." "..authors reputation.."

It could be trained to become your personal pre-reading assistant, similar to information accumulators and pre-evaluators in governments agencies or company hqs.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#127

Being a silly person, my method of tagging things to archive and read later is stupid simple: I copy/paste/append the url to a text file, links.txt, along with a cut&paste of what its about. I can have multiples of those files. Search them with grep, whatever. I abandoned bookmarking tools long ago, because they reinvented (poorly) things like search, backups, etc., besides probably selling my bookmarks to some data…

I have infinite tabs on notepad++ with the copy pasted links and some notable sentences from the links.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks cool, but writing "pay for what you need" and no pricing info on the page is really off-putting.

"Thank you for your reminder. May I ask if you are accessing the website on your mobile phone? The pricing page is located at the top of the official website for desktop version. If you are using the mobile version, you will need to click on the hamburger button. I have updated the wording to: “Free during the beta period, Provide Believer plan, one-time purchase (60$) with lifetime updates.”

Ha, I love the 'Believer plan', it's much more honest than most of the vaporware sellers out there (errm... kickstarters) and to outdo them you have at least released.

Kudos. I'll consider becoming a believer, since the 'scrapbook' extension got murdered by FF leaving me with years of inaccessible notes I've been looking for a replacement, even if not perfect it will definitely have to be based on open standards and open source.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#129
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the exception of syncing the list between devices (a feature I personally can't imagine myself needing or wanting, though I can definitely see why others would), these things are basically what tabs are for. You open things up in tabs to read them later, and you can also search tabs (a feature supported by firefox, at least, not sure about other browsers) and categorize them (their order and grouping into separa…

Oof that won't work for me, I can't stand having 1-2 stale tabs open. It feels like clutter and I instinctively close them.

You'd really hate my browser state. While on a project I can easily have a few hundred tabs open for days.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks cool, but writing "pay for what you need" and no pricing info on the page is really off-putting.

"Thank you for your reminder. May I ask if you are accessing the website on your mobile phone? The pricing page is located at the top of the official website for desktop version. If you are using the mobile version, you will need to click on the hamburger button. I have updated the wording to: “Free during the beta period, Provide Believer plan, one-time purchase (60$) with lifetime updates.”

FWIW, I'm on mobile, and I too was concerned when I had to look around to see the price. It seemed like an "If you have to ask, then..." scenario.

But your $45 price seems really reasonable, so maybe worth showing it clearly on the mobile landing page?

Not my area of expertise; just my personal 2 cents.

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