
Show HN: Polar – an offline web browser with annotations and tagging - burtonator
https://getpolarized.io/
======
burtonator
I thought you guys would like this.

I've mentioned it a few times in comments on HN and you've provided a ton of
valuable feedback.

Basically, it's like an IDE but for books and web content.

You put all your documents in it, tag them, and you can read them directly
within Polar. You can annotate them, add comments, create flashcards, create
highlights, etc.

The flashcards sync to Anki and you can view all your annotations on the
sidebar.

I wanted it to be similar to an IDE where you have everything at your
fingertips.

I also wanted to add support for "incremental reading" where you can suspend
and resume a document where you left off before:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_reading](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_reading)

... and it keeps track of your reading progress.

It's also very hackable. It's based on Electron and React so if you're a
developer you can extend it easily enough.

I'm also going to write a plugin API so that people can add 3rd party
extensions.

Anyway. Hope you guys like it.

~~~
noahdesu
I _cannot_ wait to start playing around with this. It really does seem to tick
off all the boxes I've been looking for. Do you have any plans / strategy /
tips for handling video? I tend to watch a lot of conference talks and
lectures on YouTube, and find that I'd like to take some notes while watching.
Having a single personal knowledge base handle that (or at least the notes
aspect) instead of a one-off solution for other types of media would be useful
to avoid fragmentation.

~~~
burtonator
> I _cannot_ wait to start playing around with this.

Love the enthusiasm!

> Do you have any plans / strategy / tips for handling video?

Yes. Working on it now.

The next revision will actually handle capturing video and we just show an
embedded player now. So at LEAST you can use Polar to keep track of the
videos, tag them, etc.

I'd like to make a full player including annotations too so you can keep track
of the pointer in the video so you can jump to the time where the
annotation/comment was kept.

Flashcards too.

With videos becoming 1 hour for a lecture having them in something like Polar
is critical.

~~~
dangoor
Something like this would be great for video, and I've been watching a lot of
talks in video form lately.

Generally, though, I'm watching talks on iOS devices... bouncing between
devices makes everything more complicated.

------
WhatIsDukkha
Very interesting direction. I like people taking their web browsing and
realizing its a serious thing for a more serious set of tools then we
currently have.

I'd like annotations to be the way forward for the web.

Just as a thought experiment, this comment I'm making.

Where does it go to live permanently? Why is all this typing I'm doing
ephemeral on my computer?

Why can I make comments all over the web and it's very likely I have no way of
tracking the fact that I made the comment longer term (even if I spend 30
minutes typing some instructions or help for example).

No regular way of hearing responses to it?

No solid way of copying it or morphing it for another output other then
laboriously (possibly having to google my own comment) finding it on the
original site (which was it?) etc.

Why can't I search my own comments over time?

==Hint: This is not a plea for yet another flakey web service==

It's a weird world when you consider how much you type into these boxes all to
evaporate for your own use.

As part of building a different world what relationship does Polar have with
[https://web.hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-
standar...](https://web.hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-standard/)

Why or why not?

~~~
burtonator
> As part of building a different world what relationship does Polar have with
> [https://web.hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-
> standar...](https://web.hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-standar..).

We will double down and investigate web standards once Polar is a bit more
solid. Right now it's just extra work when I haven't validated that Polar is
going to be useful to 100s of thousands of people.

------
wtmt
I was hoping and looking for ePub support, and it's listed in the long term
section of the roadmap. That's the main feature I'd want. This looks really
nice (though I'm not a fan of Electron apps). I can't wait for the ePub
support.

Another thing I'd like to see is a mobile app, on iOS and Android.

~~~
raihansaputra
I'm also really interested in a mobile app. Currently I am using Pocket, but
something like this (especially synced) would be golden. Pocket is just too
unpredictable in it's web rendering. I now prefer to see web view to not lose
any additional content (images, videos, unique content designs).

------
clvcooke
I really like where this is going, it seems a bit rough around the edges right
now (which is totally fine!) but functional enough to be useful. Really happy
it's free, open source and offline first (I can just sync through Drive or
Dropbox).

Couple thoughts on some exploring: \- Webpage capture: seems that only links
with `http` in front work, would be great to get resolving working nicer (say
news.ycominator.com should work). Can't see this being a large issue as mostly
I would copy paste from my browser, which keeps the http

\- The "inspect element" menu in the editor seems a bit unnecessary, as I
don't really think of PDFs as HTML. I guess this may be nice for some folks
who are familiar with HTML but for me its a bit confusing.

\- I managed to crash a page by highlighting a section and using the page down
buttons(unsure exactly what caused this)

\- I had some performance issues when resizing the page on a longer pdf
(140ish pages), crashed and then wouldn't reopen until I restarted the
application

As I said a bit rough around the edges still, but as you hopefully get more
use these bugs/inconveniences will get ironed out. Excited to see this develop
and great work!

~~~
burtonator
> Can't see this being a large issue as mostly I would copy paste from my
> browser, which keeps the http

We will ship a chrome extension so you can do one page sync between Polar and
your browser.

We're going to use Firebase for the auth and sending of this data between
instances.

> \- The "inspect element" menu in the editor seems a bit unnecessary, as I
> don't really think of PDFs as HTML. I guess this may be nice for some folks
> who are familiar with HTML but for me its a bit confusing.

I will probably remove it by default and add a 'developer' mode which turns
these on.

> \- I had some performance issues when resizing the page on a longer pdf
> (140ish pages), crashed and then wouldn't reopen until I restarted the
> application

That's weird. It's usually pretty solid for me.

~~~
pax
Waiting forward for the Chrome extension. I'd rather not have another app open
all the time / or open it each time I want to add a bookmark.

Meanwhile, I'd find helpful a shortcut for the 'Capture' command – ideally it
would also be pre-populated with the clipboard, like Pocket does on mobile –
when detecting a url in the clipboard.

------
EvanAnderson
It looks like the PHZ files are just ZIP files (which I really like), however
they're not compressed. As a test I created a new PHZ with compression (using
Info-ZIP) with the contents of an existing PHZ file. I found that the
compressed PHZ seems to open fine in Polar Bookshelf.

What's the rationale for not using compression in PHZ files? Is there any
reason for me not to update all my PHZ files to using compression?

~~~
burtonator
Oh.. That might be a bug. They are supposed to be compressed! I'll check into
that!

------
jacobedawson
Looks promising, but I feel like I've already run into a major bug - I
downloaded, opened a .pdf. Made a text highlight > all good. Delete the
highlight. Try to make another highlight > Now I can no longer make a
highlight at all.

Replicated twice running 64-bit on a windows machine.

Once the bugs are ironed out this could be really useful, good luck!

~~~
burtonator
Yes. Still a few small bugs like this here and there. working on ironing those
out.

------
bkberry352
This looks great, I'd love to have a local backup of saved documents.
Currently I'm using pocket which I love because it's so easy to share a
document from any of my different devices (personal laptop, mobile phone, work
laptop). However I'm worried about the service going away or any of the
"desktop version" of the links going stale (pocket's rendering isn't always
perfect). Any thoughts about support for pulling from Pocket as a data source?
Pocket has an API you could hit, find any new links, and download them.

~~~
snthd
[https://wallabag.org](https://wallabag.org) covers your complaints with
pocket and also has an API.

~~~
bkberry352
That's a very interesting concept that I'll have to check out. I guess
initially I was thinking of a single location to backup pocket in case it goes
down, however hosting my own server (like the wallabag solution) is an
interesting idea that I hadn't considered yet.

------
burtonator
Thanks for all the great feedback guys!

Feel free to jump on our Discord if you have any comments:

[https://discord.gg/GT8MhA6](https://discord.gg/GT8MhA6)

------
eximius
Haven't had a chance to watch the videos, so maybe this has been answered...

I see 'added' and 'last updated' columns on content - do you keep historical
versions or update in place? If you only update in place, then the content can
break or change for any number of reasons. Even if it's only configurable, I'd
rather use the extra space (text is tiny anyways) to store the history (with
an infrequent update schedule).

------
ilprincipe
Loving the idea, will definitely battle test it.

Idea: consider linking it up with fx. Zotero, so you don't need to maintain
two document repositories.

------
Torwald
On macOS it doesn't let you open all PDFs and I wouldn't know why, expect
maybe file size.

~~~
burtonator
Any specific error? Let me know what's happening and we'll fix it.

------
maxwell
What's the .phz archive format that's used to store each document in
.polar/stash?

~~~
burtonator
It's our own file format for storing compressed HTML and associated resources
in one bundle.

~~~
voltagex_
Any chance of supporting HAR or WARC?

------
philfrasty
Would be very helpful if it does also save links x levels down, e.g. for
reading documentation.

------
crooked-v
This is neat, but to me it looks more conceptually like "personal ebook reader
you can sync across machines (and can also import web pages)" than "offline
browser".

Edit: Similarly, I find lack of any epub support kind of weird.

------
StavrosK
Unfortunately, the snap dies with this error for me on Ubuntu:
[https://www.pastery.net/vfyfyj/](https://www.pastery.net/vfyfyj/)

~~~
burtonator
Yes. The debs work on Ubuntu. REALLY sorry about the snap packages.

They are apparently broken due to a bug in Ubuntu's snap but I don't have a
work around.

Could you try to install canberra-gtk-module and let me know if the problem
goes away?

~~~
StavrosK
Unfortunately it seems to already be installed, so I don't know what else I
could install :/ Almost all the entries in apt that have canberra in the name
are already installed.

EDIT: The deb works perfectly indeed, thanks!

------
nyxtom
This looks great! Been hoping for something like this for a while that is
especially: free, open source, office first!

------
nasredin
Is the Windows version portable?

Website doesn't say.

~~~
burtonator
What does that mean? I don't follow. It supports 64 and 32 bit windows.

~~~
lj3
[https://portableapps.com/about](https://portableapps.com/about)

Basically, they're apps that don't need to be installed to a single system.
They can execute from a dropbox directory, usb drive, etc.

~~~
burtonator
Oh. Thanks. I think the current app is an installer BUT there is a Windows
version that doesn't require a setup and is just a flat .exe.

I think we could publish one if this is frequently requested.

------
georgewsinger
Would use if it supported Android.

~~~
burtonator
It's on the roadmap for the flashcards and annotations. Probably not reading
for the short term as reading PDFs on Android doesn't sound super fun.

~~~
teknico
I read PDFs on an Android 8" tablet without problems with the EasyPDF app. It
mostly works on the phone's 5" screen too if the text is not too small (reflow
mode doesn't work well for many files).

------
j45
This looks very attractive. Is the project open to setting up bounties to
express certain features?

~~~
burtonator
yes.. I think we're open to bounties. Wondering what apps people are using for
that part.

