So I’ve followed the development of polar for a while know. Recently I stopped and uninstalled the program. I might return to it later but at the moment the thing which is most important for something dealing with content gets the least attention: simply dealing with content. For instance, a pdf which loads instantly in Skim or preview on my Mac takes 20 seconds to load in polar a simple webpage took 4 seconds to loa…
This is probably resolved. There was an issue pre 1.17.5 that caused a few issues with PDFs taking longer to load.
We're also about to upgrade to Elecron 5.x which fixes some problems with latency on some Windows machines.
> a simple webpage took 4 seconds to load.
This is actively being worked on ... Unfortunately, I have to decompress in the UI thread and this slows things down a bit. I'm trying to work on a new streams approach which should allow me to decompress content in a background thread and also stream load it in the foreground.
Should work on the web too which I'm excited about.
> While polar focusses on saving webpages > adblock isn’t implemented yet and pages
I'm working on porting the web capture directly to the browser which should help solve this issue. Since the capture is done in a chrome extension ad block and other features will work as well as any type of extension.
Electron doesn't work on chrome extensions.
> often don’t save and/ or render > properly.
Report them and they will be fixed.
> Even though polar is supposed to be open a non standard format .PHZ > was implemented in polar and polar’s database is far from open or useable with > other programs. Feels like a lock-in.
We're lucky PHZ works at all. It's very very complicated to implement properly. Portability is NOT an issue until I completely nail it working reliably.
It's literally NOT possible to implement this now with any web standards. NONE support the features we need to implement caching of web pages.
Additionally, I've gone out of my way to mention that Polar is Open Source and that this is important to the vision and respecting people's rights on data portability is insanely important to me.
Not calling you out here but if I was trying to lock you up I'm going about it the wrong way.
Benefit of the doubt please ;)
> This along with a slew of other bugs, polar being webtechnology and the focus on > getting more users and developing the web version instead of focusing on > developing an app which is robust and feature full (or at least expandable) > makes me think my values and the values of the polar dev don’t align and polar > simply isn’t worth my time.
How's that?
The reason we're working on web + mobile is that users have demanded this functionality.
One of the other challenges we have is that there just aren't enough users of the Desktop app to support active development of JUST that platform. If anything the Desktop will be a losing leader for the web edition as I'm expecting more users on that platform.
That said, most of the web + desktop unification/integration is done now so desktop + web won't be an issue of competition.
Also, I found out the hard way that we MUST support web tech first in Electron as they do not properly support their internal APIs. Electron was broken for about 8 months preventing us from upgrading because of their internal broken APIs.
Chrome and web standards are much more reliable.
> In any case, I hope I’m wrong and polar will be better or someone else takes the > core ideas of polar and makes something more stable etc out of it. I hope I > might be able to do that, but at the moment I’m unfortunately far from being > knowledgeable enough to do this.
You can always donate if you want to keep supporting the project!