[HN Gopher] Show HN: Desklamp - convenient and collaborative not...
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Show HN: Desklamp - convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs
Hey HN! I'm Prajwal, the co-creator of Desklamp! I just completed
my undergrad, which is where we got the idea for Desklamp. A bunch
of friends and I built this because we hated the experience of
studying on our laptops. It was boring, and we found ourselves
staring at the screen for hours on end with no output to show for
it. To make reading more engaging and to make sure we could
remember what we read, we built a note-making system integrated
with a PDF reader. The aim is to encourage you to make notes! LaTeX
support, clipping out sections from the document, linking notes to
sections in the PDF - everything is designed to really make sure
you have no excuse to not make notes as you read. We've also added
a lot of fixes for minor inconveniences (scrolling across sections,
hitting the wrong page number, light mode, viewing your highlights
at a glance). And all of this is collaborative, because that just
makes notes even more useful. It's free for a while - we want to
know what the rest of you think! Feedback can only help us make
this even better. It's available as a web-app and a desktop app for
Mac and Windows (Linux users, mail us, we're operating on a very
closed beta right now).
Author : pj747
Score : 18 points
Date : 2022-07-03 11:35 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (desklamp.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (desklamp.io)
| wdpt wrote:
| This is stunning. I'm very excited about it. As I really disliked
| the Zotero experience, I'm going to test it as soon as possible
| and provide you with immediate feedback.
| pj747 wrote:
| Thanks a lot! Super pumped. Yeah we definitely want to improve
| the experience for researchers. Looking forward to your
| feedback!
| killjoywashere wrote:
| Hi, I was taking notes in Notability on a PDF of a manuscript I'm
| reviewing for a journal just before taking this break on Hacker
| News and finding this. I would really like this to have a
| freedrawing pencil interface like Notability does. I do agree
| that organized marginalia would be very helpful. I have struggled
| to find one app to rule them all this regard.
| pj747 wrote:
| Noted! Do you think the app would work well as is on the iPad
| if we added free drawing with the pencil in the notebook? We've
| designed the entire interface with a laptop in mind. Very
| curious how iPad users feel about everything.
| thelamest wrote:
| Great job! I can see this being very useful, at the very least in
| the academia. For example, in meta-analytic reviews, you often go
| through hundreds of papers, identifying, highlighting and
| annotating the relevant hypothesis test details, among many
| irrelevant weeds. Tools that streamline this process are very
| handy, so that you can easily come back later and grok your past
| work. Pen and paper works for an individual, but can drown you in
| piles of binders, and is less easy to collaborate on/share.
|
| Some quick, very minor UI comments: on a large screen, workspace
| switching could be available immediately through single-click
| icons instead of a dropdown menu. Similarly, minimizing open
| stickers could be done with a dedicated icon instead of through
| the "..." menu (right-click suggested in an example in the quick
| start guide didn't work for me). Otherwise everything feels
| pretty intuitive.
|
| One thing I'd want to learn from the introductory guides is if
| adding the metadata (comments, notes, highlights, etc.) changes
| the original PDF file (always, optionally, never?), so that for
| example you'd be able to send an annotated document right away,
| or need to keep backups of unmodified originals, etc. (I strongly
| assume the metadata is stored separately, as PDFs can be unwieldy
| to modify, but you never know.) In general, exporting/printing
| notes seems like a natural feature. I like that it's easy to
| export clips.
|
| As a casual right now, I don't have any input regarding the
| possible business model, but will certainly be interested in
| where you go with it.
| pj747 wrote:
| Thanks for giving it a try! Yes, the hide sticky note feature
| should be more visible. Workspace switching is also a good
| idea!
|
| Your assumption about the metadata is correct! The original
| file is not tampered with. If you want to share a file with
| your highlights and annotations, there's an export button in
| the hamburger menu on the top left (this UX is really bad,
| gonna fix this soon). Yeah should rework the guide too.
|
| We have added an export notes as well but it's in beta because
| it behaves a little weirdly with the LaTeX. Probably a good
| idea to export the entire notebook as a LaTeX file.
| [deleted]
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Looks very nice and I installed the desktop version, but needing
| to sign up before even trying it out led me to uninstall
| immediately.
|
| _It 's free for a while_
|
| I'd rather you set up free and paid tiers now, in which case I
| could make pricing decisions (because I do pay for things I
| like). I don't like the idea of getting used to something and
| then becoming a price taker because I have a lot of data stored
| already, so I would prefer to do without.
| pj747 wrote:
| Thanks a ton for that feedback! I absolutely did not realise
| how that sounded. We definitely don't aim to blindside early
| adopters with a sudden pay-us-or-you-lose-data deadline.
|
| The plan is that anything you do right now you'll ALWAYS have
| access to, and at some point (not before December 2022) we
| begin charging a subscription to begin saving data to new
| documents. New users post that deadline will have a threshold
| of documents that they can use the product on for free.
|
| If free and paid tiers are what you absolutely need, please
| drop me a mail! Would hate to have an early user disappear
| because we're still figuring out exact pricing strategies.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I'll give it another look. Thanks for your considerate reply!
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