Show HN: ScholArxiv – an open-source, aesthetic, minimal research paper explorer | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: ScholArxiv – an open-source, aesthetic, minimal research paper explorer

github.com

147 pointsdagmawibabi26 comments

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Some feedback:

1. It will be a lot better if the Summary popup can be stretched to full-screen with font size controls.

2. There needs to be a feature to browse papers based on subjects and other applicable categories.

3. There need to be playback controls (pause, rewind, etc.) for audio narration of the summaries.

4. Themes customization and dark mode will also be great features to have.

These are wonderful ideas, I'll implement them all and post when I'm done thank you!

Awesome!

Really love the concept by the way!

Thanks, I'll keep on improving. Also what do you think about a paid version where AI is integrated? So imagine each paper having an AI generated image cover, the summaries being more descriptive, and you can also converse with the ai to explain specific words/concepts right in the app. Do you think people would pay for it?

I like that idea and do think it'll be quite valuable if it had that.

But you're probably better off discussing monetization with the other more intelligent experts here. I'm just a lurker :)

The AI image cover idea should be free - colours help keep the mind from becoming distracted.

The content processing could be good, especially if it was to decrease the complexity of the language and simplify the concepts. I would take care that the descriptions could be horribly wrong and misleading.

I would probably look to monetize in a different way:

1. Synchronization of papers across devices.

2. Notes on papers, that could also be shared.

3. A service to find publications of that paper (arXiv isn't always updated with this).

ScholArxiv is an open-source aesthetic and minimal app that allows users to search, read, bookmark, share, download and view summaries of academic papers from the arXiv repository that you can download now.

Features

Read Papers: Read entire papers in detail within the app.

Bookmarks: Save your favorite papers for quick access.

Summaries: View and listen to brief paper summaries.

Search Papers: Search for papers using keywords, titles, authors and abstract. If no keyword is provided the app suggests random popular papers.

Download and Share Papers: Download papers for offline reading or you can share document links to others.

Can you define "open-source aesthetic"?

"open-source, aesthetic, and minimal app"

Thank you and yes! I've edited the title now.

Great app, if it is not too much trouble would you please consider posting it on f-droid as well?

alright doing it right now!

You know what else might be cool is a "see related" feature, whenever a paper references another, create a link between them and create an almost recomendation engine based on that. Ideally, you could then look at a kind of discoverability family tree of how the paper's evolved.

This is likely hard to implement and only wishful thinking, but I think it would be neat.

A) cool app, well executed!

B) this has further radicalized me into pure web development. What native features does this take advantage of that couldn’t be accomplished just as easily in typescript? I don’t have an android :(

A. Thanks a whole lot

B. Nothing that serious, it can definitely be a webapp. And currently working on doing that. I'd be happy if you'd like to contribute.

Fair enough, thanks for the polite response! I guess my overall gist was “we should outlaw apps” but I’ll save that for another thread ;).

I hope to see this linked from Arxiv itself some day soon!

Thanks a whole lot! :)

What about offline access to documents, bookmarks, summaries and other data you already downloaded? How would accessing this through a browser provide this reliably? Honest question.

Well dowloading just stores it onto the PC so that's up to the user to manage the files, but bookmarks can be stored in the cache/localstorage

But it will no longer be managed by the webapp like your native app can, right?

Nice! ScholArxiv is gonna make exploring research papers fun.

Thanks!

Could you supporting importing any paper from doi.org links? Like a mobile Zotero.

one suggestion i have is to add a few images or a short video of you using the app. personally i dont usually download apps to just try them out, without at least having some idea of what to expect

How do you get paid articles?

Cool project—keep it up!

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