I should take a deeper look, but at first glance most of its features seem to revolve around working with already existing documents—viewing, annotating, searching, signing, filling out forms.
I think they are in the beginning stages of what they eventually plan to offer. I am hoping they open up their API so developers can access the documents, change the way documents are displayed and how they inter-relate/handle being searched. I am assuming all of the data is held in a db rather than post script files meaning there is a lot of potential for cool parsing/analysis and novel ways of displaying the docs.
But at the same time I can see why people who only see it as "a new pdf" hate it. I really think/hope they have a much larger scope than that but it's obvious that portraying that on first impression is difficult.
Yeah, fundamentally it helps you manage records of documents. Of course you can also attach PDFs and full text (if you have them), but it's the record that's important.
A common use case is in academia - it helps you track your citations and then output standardised reference lists, which is a pain to do by hand.
Other tools in this space are Mendeley and Endnote.
If I mostly want to keep my own document repository (pdf, word, etc) with search ability over all included documents and, maybe, the ability to do notations, is this the right tool? If not, any suggestions?
It's better because it automatically OCRs everything and puts it into a search index. It means that finding documents now consists of typing a few keywords and immediately getting what you're looking for vs having to open a ton of PDFs
They haven't implemented the killer feature yet... the ability to highlight and annotate documents, and share those highlights. For instance, you read a paper and find some portion interesting, I want see that portion and then if I need more info I can read the whole thing.
Also, I want them to integrate with the university library system like google does so that I can get authenticated access to the documents.
it all depends on the software around it. Is this just annotating pdf's? How about epub, etc.? It seems very focused towards education, but I am missing a more every-day user story in a world where not everyone is sharing PDFs or own a device like this.
Also, definitely how comfortably the latency compares to the normal pen to paper experience.
Looks like it has basic support for annotations, but is limited in its scope. I'm hoping I can use this to read annotations from PDFs so I can hook it into a journal paper reading/organisation workflow.
This is extremely cool, I've been wondering about how I can create subject matter repositories of various media types and then enhance that data with my own findings.
What would be cool here would be the ability to reference between documents and notes, like you would with hypertext.
Imagine you write an essay or blog post, and you want to instantly browse the citations and quotes you use. That document could live inside polar, maybe as a simple MarkDown editor.
Either way I've downloaded and installed. I wonder if I can get some fancy PDF scanning gear so I can get book segments into it.
> Right now it's nothing more than an electron wrapper around pdf.js and knowing how far I read a pdf.
Except for cloud sync, and annotations, and flashcards, and sync to anki, and pagemarks, and archived documents, and flagging, and tagging, and stats on your reading, and a dedicated annotations view, and the ability to export your annotations, and the ability to capture entire web pages for offline use and annotations.
This is exactly why I created Cahier. I want to make it excel at the capture and processing steps of the research workflow. We're close to having the foundational features of the software in place and will release the beta soon.
But we want to expand the supported attachment file formats (possibly with video and audio as well), with full annotation and referencing support, more formatting options in the note editor, .bib import/export, synchronization, linux and mobile apps.
I don't plan on having feature parity with Zotero. I think we can provide more value by focusing on the features that explore the interaction between the annotations and notes and on supporting more media types.
It's mostly a tool to manage research literature. It allows you to add works you are viewing in your web browser to collections. Then, you can create bibliographies from these collections. As a researcher I use it a lot, since it makes working with references much smoother. There's also extra features like cloud syncing and most recently an integrated PDF viewer and annotator. https://www.zotero.org/
This looks nice! I've long wanted a PDF viewer that had annotations that appeared off to the side and could be annotated collaboratively so I'm very excited to see that crocodoc has made progress in that direction.
Some misc. comments:
* The "chrome" isn't very android friendly. I'd really like to have something like this that would work well on a mobile device. In fact, it would be nice to have a full mobile app allowing local annotation/syncing with your web service. Currently, I just tried the site on my phone, but I have an android tablet coming soon and will be looking for a good pdf reading/annotating experience.
* When you download a marked up pdf file, it would be awesome if the notes could be included (possibly by shrinking the original document a bit. (or are the currently included and evince is failing to show them?)
* Syncing all of a users docs/annotations with Dropbox would be a killer feature. I really like this trend towards apps using Dropbox as user-owned cloud storage. (Dropbox isn't perfect for this, but is pretty nice).
* A bit more esoteric: many of the documents I read are two-column. It would be amazing if crocodoc could show just one column at a time to provide bigger text and more room for annotation. I've toyed with putting together some simple tools to display pdfs in this way, but never had the gumption to make something that worked.
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