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getpolarized | 5 years ago
About two years ago we launched Polar on HN [1] and now we’re back to announce Polar 2.0!
Polar is a tool used by software engineers, students, and professionals. Anyone who wants to manage academic research, technical documentation, textbooks, or web-based reading to build a personal knowledge base.
Polar is an integrated reading environment similar to your IDE that you use for writing code. Think of it like Visual Studio or IntelliJ but for books, web content, PDFs, EPUBs, etc.
What makes Polar special is that we’ve built an integrated workflow so that you can read, annotate (make highlights, add comments, pagemarks etc), and convert anything to flashcards. You can then use spaced repetition to review your material directly in Polar or sync it to Anki.
My co-founder and I have been working tirelessly on this since the lockdown started to get this shipped.
This release represents everything we’ve learned since 1.0 and includes:
- Dark mode!! This was by far our #1 requested feature
- Both EPUB and PDF supported (originally it was just PDF)
- Web pages capture content using Mozilla readability, then saving them to EPUB
- Web capture works entirely from our chrome extension so that your cookies, etc get captured too
- Easy reading management with flagging, tagging, archiving, pagemarks to mark specific sections in the book, and more
- Improved annotations and highlights management, including area highlights, annotation tags, margin notes, etc
- One-click flashcards directly from annotations
- We’ve greatly improved our Anki sync to make it more reliable, faster, and has more features like support for cloze deletions, front and back cards, HTML, etc.
What’s more, Polar is open source so you don’t have to risk being locked into a platform you don’t control!
We want to make obtaining an education as easy as possible. In addition, it shouldn’t cost a fortune to get a decent education. Be it tuition or overpriced textbooks. This is why we are building Polar with the vision to truly democratize education.
This is still early stage for us of course. Some of the upcoming features will include mobile apps, integrations with tools like Zotero, and much more.
If you’re someone who reads a lot and likes to remember the material, give Polar a shot! For power users, we also have a premium version with up to 500 GB of storage. For HN readers, we are doing a 20% discount promotion for a year-long subscription. Use the code hackernews20 to take advantage of that
We would love to hear what you think about Polar!
ajvs|5 years ago
Except the v2 update changes this from local or cloud storage to cloud only. So in order to use the app at all you do have to upload your documents to servers you don't control. But this isn't my biggest pain point, as long as export capabilities are comprehensive and my data is private.
But that's not the case here. For an open-source app that requires uploading personal documents to yet another USA-based server there is a surprising lack of focus on privacy. Without end-to-end encryption it's unreasonable to take the privacy risk that serious use of this app entails. And I've been burned by one too many productivity apps to believe there's not going to be a willful or accidental privacy breach here too.
maxcan|5 years ago
A safari extension, or at least a Firefox one, would have me pulling out my credit card on the spot.
getpolarized|5 years ago
The code actually is written to be portable as a 'web extension' as both Safari and Firefox use the same general API.
I'll try to get some time and see if it works on Firefox. The biggest issue we have is testing. If something breaks on FF I want to know and we don't have a testing environment there.
maxioatic|5 years ago
Can you expand on the Zotero integration? I like Polar for reading/annotating more than Zotero, but the metadata import and bibliography functionality of Zotero is extremely useful to me. Combining these in some way would be pretty amazing!
burtonator|5 years ago
The other is to just open the PDFs directly but I don't think we can get the metadata that way unfortunately.
justin-tm|5 years ago
Curious if it's worth moving off the convenience of 1.0 for mandatory cloud storage otherwise.
I would assume it's elastic with storage so I could just continue to use it as a reader and delete books as I finished(?)
getpolarized|5 years ago
We've also tried to make it pretty cheap so if you have a huge repo it won't be super expensive. It also won't bloat your local computer so if you have a large repository most of that data will be on the cloud.