Polar 1.16.0 Released

A number of major changes went into Polar 1.16.0 but the big highlights include a big performance bump for the desktop app on startup, an updated chrome extension to improve stability during loading PDFs, and a new context menu for the document repository.

This also includes a new timing system which allows us to detect slow operations in Polar to help improve performance over time. The plan is to keep an eye on these metrics to help track down any performance regressions and also to improve performance over time.

Polar 1.17 (the next major version of Polar) is already under development and should include:

• Initial version of sharing of documents publicly.
• Fix for a major bug involving large PDFs and the "white screen of death"
• Removal of some important legacy code for content capture in the desktop app.

Full changelog for 1.16.0

• Multi-delete button now uses the confirm prompt properly.

• The doc repo now supports a context menu for each row

• Fixed major performance issue with the datastore on Electron as it was going through the IPC process for the datastore data reads and this was amazingly slow. Moving it into the renderer process speeds up reads by about 10x.

• Fixed bad bug in the webapp where we wouldn't ever fetch the latest docs from firebase.

• A ton of improvement to tooltips needed for mobile support but also the fact that having them popup bothered a lot of users.

• Inline app message that styling with rich HTML is supported for new users.

• More improvements for mobile.

• Fixed bag bug where Firebase batches weren't used properly and we had a delete outside of the batch which could leave FB inconsistent.

• Always show the multi-delete and multi-tag buttons even if just one is selected as it will still work just fine.

• Make the top buttons for tagging and delete permanently displayed not hidden.

• Added a couple key metrics for Firebase performance via tracer so that we can verify real-world behavior.

• RendererAnalytics now safer if accidentally called from the Node context and just silently fails.

• RendererAnalytics now supports using a stopwatch so we can track the times of important operations.

• Improved CSS of annotation sidebar and included instructions on how to create your first annotation.

• Use the sidebar area to explain how to create annotations.