Help me find a Read-later / Notes solution nitinkhanna.com
@nitinkhanna Tried commenting on the post but hit a 503 so....
Have you considered pinboard.in? Not fancy, but fast, cheap ($25/year for the full version that also crawls and archives everything you link to). Syncs with both Instapaper and Pocket. I find it to be basic, but good enough for both bookmarking and read-later functions. Notes can go in the Description field but that may be too much of a kludge.
@jack huh. Could you tell me if you were trying anonymous commenting or which login you used? I'll have to test that 503 out.
Pinboard... I've gazed at it longingly since a long time. Should have bought it way back when it was considerably cheaper. But no, I'd like something that lets me highlight and add notes inline. Pinboard is a bookmarking solution at the end of the day...
@nitinkhanna I was logged in via Wordpress before trying to post the comment.
I've never found an annotation tool that I like and/or trust for the long term so I mostly save pages as PDF to DEVONthink and annotate them there.
@sanspoint and I agree! :)
Instapaper is definitely what I'm leaning towards. Like, 99% there. They even have a beta tool which lets you export the text of the articles in a printable format, for whatever reason. So they're definitely trying! :)
@jack hmmmm Strange. You know what's odd? Your commends and @Sanspoint's are showing up on my blog now because micro.blog is pushing them there. But your first comment isn't showing up.
Maybe I need to make a throwaway WordPress account to test out posting directly on the site.
@jack I like DevonThink, but my home Mac isn't my device of choice. I'm on Windows most of the day. DevonThnk is super powerful, but not omnipresent, sadly.
Also, I hate pdfs! Stupid file format, frankly.
@nitinkhanna PDFs on the Mac feel like lightweight, native documents to me. I also enjoy working with them using LiquidText on iOS. On Windows, I agree, they kind of suck. Having to work on both Mac and Windows really does limit your options.
@jack true. I was pleasantly surprised the first time I pressed the spacebar on a PDF on my brother's Mac, upon his instruction. I think I've looked at LiquidText? Can't recall.
True about your comment about Mac/Win, but true cross-platforming is basically being a web service. Polar is so close, and yet so far!
@nitinkhanna Evernote is a read later solution even if you have not used it that way. It also has the note taking anoottion features you seek. Try it. I know Evernote isn't "sexy" and there are always people looking for cool, sexy solutions to simple problems. But try it.
@nitinkhanna What about Notebooks by Alfons Schmidt? Like DEVONthink Jr. it syncs with Dropbox and can save in PDF or web archives. It supports highlighting and markup.
@nitinkhanna Polar does look very cool! I can't believe they make it free for most users (for now, at least, I guess?).
@canion I’ve not seen it. Perhaps it would be good. The App Store is not letting me in right now. Will check it out (pricing and all) later. It’s Windows friendly, it seems, so that’s nice! But I see that they’re priced as a total solution. Hmm.
@nitinkhanna I’ve bought it for iOS and also bought the PDF reader IAP. I’m currently using the beta version of the upcoming new Mac release which I will also buy.
@khurtwilliams ummmm. Sorry about that! I’ll have to look at why it’s messed up. I removed disqus a long time ago thinking WordPress comments will just work. I guess not.
@khurtwilliams Evernote is PDF centric? I respect people who can use it as a single use tool. I just have noticed that I need a focused tool.
@canion Notebooks looks interesting. I'm another in the "what do I do with all this stuff" camp. DevonThink is just too customisable, Evernote is too clunky, and Notes.app doesn't give me very good search, and it's PDF and webarchive functions aren't up to scratch.
@nitinkhanna To throw out a different track, have you looked at the citation manager side? I haven’t used Mendeley but it’s free and has PDF annotation capabilities. Or on another track, the binder part of Scrivener for collecting materials?
@sproutlight I was this close to mentioning Mendeley in my blog. But I thought no one would get the reference. 😊
Mendeley is nice, but Hypothes.is does all that and in a nicer manner. It’s not strictly for citations, but the ideology is similar.
@sproutlight I have not used the binder in Scrivener. It does seem to be an option, since I have Scrivener for all platforms 😊
I’ll look at it. But that again feels like using something for the wrong purpose.
@sproutlight Bah! This is why I hate PDFs. I had a feeling I had tried taking notes in Scrivener before, and sure enough, there was the option called Web Notes in there. The problem is that Scrivener iOS doesn’t support PDF annotation. But you can export, annotate, import. 1/2
@sproutlight so I did just that. I exported to PDF Expert, highlighted, made a note, and imported to Scrivener. Guess what? The note shows up as a highlight and doesn’t show the note text. This is why I hate PDF as a format. 2/3
@sproutlight No one can have a complete implementation no matter what. We really ought to move away, to perhaps something like the phz format, or TextBundle or some such. 3/3
@khurtwilliams and @jack thanks for letting me know about my website’s broken comment system. It seems that Bad Behavior was interfering with Jetpack. There’s a setting in Bad Behavior that allows for OpenID based commenting, which I’ve now enabled. Would you plz test it? Thanks!
@nitinkhanna I've posted a WordPress comment and did not see an error this time. I don't see the comment yet, but perhaps they are moderated.
@jack yup! Comments are moderated. At one point, I was getting hit by an absurd level of spam for a personal site. Thanks for testing! Your comment is up now 😊
@nitinkhanna That sounds maddening. I had a similar experiemce when I played around with using Scrivner for a wiki. Yes, technically it supports linking but it was so broken. If you find a solution, I woukd love to hear. I’m Mac/iOS only and have things split scross Notability, Dropbox, Papers3, amd The Brain. It’s a bit of a situation.
@sproutlight wow, that’s a lot of places you’re putting your thoughts. But at least you’re organized. Right now, all my immediate writing is going into my WordPress blog as private posts, while my longer timeframe writing is going into Daedalus on iOS. Ideas go into Apple Notes!
@mexpat oh dear. I just checked my blog and there’s no comment in pending. I’m sorry about that! 😱
@nitinkhanna well phooey. Signed in via email. Any way, my suggestion for read later was Dropbox Paper.
@mexpat I'm so sorry about that! No one usually comments on my blog, so I never noticed anything wrong till this wonderful community of people decided they want to help!
Hmmmm... Paper huh? You enjoy using it? One can save anything to it, or do you save everything as PDF and then import to Paper?
@canion I had installed Notebooks on my old iPad Pro. For some reason, I haven’t really found it easy getting my head around how it works.
@nitinkhanna understsood. I know a professional photographer who uses it to scope locations -- photo, notes, links, data/time, etc. - and field trips and workshops. I don't use it personally but he loves it..
@nitinkhanna Nitin, this comment was posted without any login (Firefox, macOS Mojave). I filled in the comment fields.
@nitinkhanna I performed some tests with Firefox on macOS. I had no issues. Let me know if things are working on your end.
@nitinkhanna Are you using Akismet? It keep nearly 100% of the comment spam from appearing on my blog. I setup WordPress to turn off comments on posts that are older than 90 days.