I am definitely looking at Polar. It isn’t perfect, and the note-taking is suboptimal (especially the web annotation). It does nothing compared to what PowerNotes/WeavaTools does (that’s more elegant).
The high monthly cost is related to the storage, and I fail to understand why they don’t allow free sync with other cloud storage solutions? After carefully evaluating every solution in the market, I have reposed faith in Dropbox, and hence, I naturally gravitate towards applications offering the support.
Polar is free for you to self-host, and I might look into it, going forward. However, I wanted to highlight the exciting features coming up.
(It is not an endorsement but I am keen to highlight interesting features that are usable!)
We’re working on adding the following:
– a sidebar for documents with extended metadata (publication year, authors, abstract, etc)
– The ability for notes directly on the document itself. This would give you your ‘overview’. Lots of people want to use it as a summary feature. We might actually add a summary field.
– links between the documents and directly to annotations.
… in the longer term we’re going to add more complicated full-text search of the documents themselves. My background is search so I want to do this right using Elasticsearch as the backend so that we can add more advanced features like clustering, auto-tagging, etc.
Search is probaby 90 days away I hope. The other features are on the short term. I might actually flag the summary feature a bit higher as a a lot of people are asking for it and it’s pretty easy to add technically but I need to work on some UI around the summaries.
Maybe a non-perfect UI is good to get us off the ground.
Oh. I’m also working on adding metadata automatically from documents you upload like author, publication year, etc.
via Ask HN: How do you organize document digests / personal knowledge? | Hacker News
RadOncNotes 