felipefar

This is an useful tool. I wish there was something similar for desktop applications.

The nice thing about implementing this for the web is that the API you have to record data from (DOM events) is the same no matter what UI toolkit you use on top of it. But on desktop, the ecosystem is more fragmented and would require more ports and quirks to implement a widely compatible bug recorder.

I'm not a fan of webdev, but this is an advantage it has over desktop development.

1) The post-roam research note-taking apps (Obsidian, logseq) have shown the usefulness of creating notes with links, back-links and databases.

2) Document editor apps (Notion, Craft) have popularized the concept of documents as a set of text and non-text blocks. They're useful and provide rich building blocks for documents.

3) Some design engineers are exploring multi-modal text editors. Text, audio and video in the same document, integrated with CRDTs for collaboration.

One would think that digital text editing had already reached state of the art, but the work above shows that there's plenty to discover yet. I'd love to hear your take on what you think could be much better.

I agree with you. We're expanding our support for import/export as time goes by, there will be no lock-in. We already have markdown support and plan on adding markdown import/.bib export and import/pdf export. Plenty of formats to choose from. Your notes can already be exported and opened on Obsidian today.

If there's enough interest, I'm also open to documenting the file format we use.

Thanks! Yes, we plan on adding a Linux version. The framework we use is cross-platform, but there is a thin layer that has to be ported.

I'm eager to add synchronization and mobile support for Cahier. It could take some time because the amount of work is not trivial, but I know I'm able to deliver.

What other features are essential for you? Do you work on academia or in the industry?

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.

I think that the main issue is that the columns in the PDF aren't identified as columns of sequential text, they are just rectangles. So there is no reliable way to reposition the text so that it doesn't use two columns.

I've seen others propose to replace PDF in favor of more dynamic formats like EPUB. But I wonder if it wouldn't be more pratical to standardize tags and proporties that can be written to the PDFs, so that readers are better able to handle them.

I've been working on having my notes better integrated with the content I read. I try to gather references to where an idea is developed/contradicted in the literature, or just collect good ideas.

Cahier (https://getcahier.com), the software I'm developing, supports creating cards with references to passages in the PDFs read.

It's exciting to see the developments that are being made in this area in the past few years.

tesseract is fine for basic use cases, but it fails when the image is tilted (and thus the text isn't laid out horizontally), which can happen several times with scanned books. Compared to how well the Google OCR engine works, tesseract should be much better than it is.

I wonder how difficult it is to develop a better OCR engine than tesseract.

Can't you preprocess them with a custom parser and then hand over a conformant HTML to the browser?

You're right. In that case you could implement the unzipping and metadata parsing in WASM and just hand the HTML to the browser to be rendered.

It's still useful since browsers don't come with built-in EPUB support.

Besides opening PDFs (and despite the project's name), MuPDF can also read EPUBs, but currently this WASM viewer can't open them. They must have had to reduce functionality of the library to port faster to WASM.

But I wonder if there are any intrinsic issues with displaying EPUBs using WASM?

Human beings are unique in the world because they are the only species that can understand it. If you remove them from the world, there's nothing left that can throw light in the world's misteries.

> The only thing you need is to stop this idea that living a richer life means earning/spending a lot of money / reaources. There's so much personal development you can do without participating in the materialistic rat race.

If you launch projects to gain fame, sure it is materialistic. But you can work on projects that help you understand things better, or to build the personality you want to have, both of which are the opposite of materialism.

They aren't egoistic as well, because you can then share your solutions with others, which are also going to benefit from it.

Most articles about public speaking, including this one, have interesting advice, but they miss the point on the most important factor in a presentation: the content.

If you do everything that the author recommends, but you don't have anything valuable to share, your talk will flop. So make sure you have something important to tell people.

What I'd really like to read is an account of how to make interesting content, how to arrive at great conclusions while working on great problems.

I liked the dual header 2D graphics rasterizer that this uses: https://github.com/xboot/libcg. I'm always amazed by how we can build powerful software with minimal dependencies like that.

Would it be that hard to build nice, clean and powerful UI libraries as alternatives to Electron?

I really like licensing models of one-time payments with a pre-defined duration of updates. But I wonder how they enforce it while not making internet access a requirement for the app.

Sorry for the ignorance, but if the forum posts require login to access then you won't be able to use SingleFile, right?

Also, how is the quality of the output generated compared to a .pdf? I'm used to print PDFs from chrome for articles that I want to save, but the layout can become awkward sometimes, and navigation bars can appear several times and hide portions of the text.

I like this feature from chrome, but it's not consistently reliable.

Thank you for your interest! I've received that request more than I thought I would. It's high on the priority list now, and will arrive soon.

Thanks! I'm considering that. We might first implement P2P or external services (dropbox, iCloud) sync, but we'll see.

The data is all local, so there's no need for encryption yet. But when we implement sync it'll be end to end encrypted.

What do you like about organization in Mendeley?

I was also unhappy with how reference managers handle annotations. So I rolled my own app (https://getcahier.com), with highlight management integrated in the application. This enables me to extract highlights according to topics, organize them in notes using document elements (like collapsible notes and outlines) and use them to plan more complex arguments. This makes it much easier to read actively.

On the paper organization side, I would also like to find out a better way of doing it. What helps me a lot, from a more methodological perspective, is to categorize books according to time period, school of thoughts, or perspective.

I'm considering on supporting it. What kind of package and for what distro would you need?

But some users use it through Wine for the moment.

I'm glad you liked it! I thought from the start to ask for a price that I myself would pay. The files are stored locally, so there's no cloud involved at the moment.

The attachments are stored as files in a directory, while annotations, notes and the folder structure are written to a SQLite database. I haven't made commitments yet regarding the database format, but I could look into documenting and creating compatibility requirements for it.

Is that something you need?

It's curious that in Qt Widgets QWidgets (that are generally "alien windows") aren't cheap either. If you implement a list view from scratch, you shouldn't create the list items as QWidgets otherwise your application will become slow very quickly.

What you want to do instead is to use custom drawing and event handling code for those list items. The it will be very snappy.

Part of the force of this book comes from its explanation of fundamentals of computing, and how it relates to javascript. Another part is due to how interesting are the projects that it proposes that the reader build. I don't even like programming in javascript but was drawn to read the book.

As someone who's also developing a product in the tools for thinking space, and going through the ordeal of finding PMF, I can empathize with Muse's journey.

Even though the project didn't pan out the way they initially planned, they handled the inevitable ups and downs with a lot of skill. You can see the amount of thinking that went into their software. Even though this is not an explicit takeaway of the article, I believe that the biggest lesson is to aspire to the same level of craftsmanship that they've shown.

Does this have the hallucination problems that LLMs show? Do you offer any protection against that?

That's not the definition of Christianity. Catholicism has a long philosophical tradition discussing the existence of God, and that tradition is far from refuted.

There are even more ways to benefit your work from other more mundane activities.

It helps a lot to find a day job where you can learn a skill that will help on one independent project you will tackle. It's a great idea as well to test ideas and arguments when having a casual conversation with someone: it both deepens the conversation and you have a better feel about how your opinion will be received.