Notes in Polar - a new chapter

Notes now live

Today, we've released non-linear notes in Polar. Some of you have already been trying out the beta notes feature 🚀 This is a major stepping stone toward Polar 3.0 🎉 Highlights will now be treated like non-linear notes, including backlinks between individual text highlights and notes, direct editing, and all the other good stuff that comes with notes 📈

Please note, using the latest Polar version will require you to do a one-time migration. Please migrate within the next month to avoid any data loss ⚡

Before we go into any details, check out this short clip summarizing the main updates 🎥

What's new

• Your highlights from documents are now notes. You can edit, comment, create backlinks, and various other things that come with non-linear notes 📝
• You will see two new icons on in the left side nav by default - one for all your notes by title and one to quickly access your daily notes 
• Remember how Polar would create an error if you have too many highlights in one file? No more. This new system fixes this problem 🙌
• Area highlights are now being treated like images in notes

Looking ahead 

We also want to provide some visibility into what's coming up as there's multiple items in the pipeline

• Apps - that's a massive undertaking but is coming closer to a usable MVP - it will come with both notes and reading 📱
• Collaboration - we've heard consistently that collaborating is crucial for you. Plan is to have this released within the next few weeks 👨🏻‍🤝‍👨🏻
• Improvements to the notes features. The notes system has all basic features but we want to add multiple new features to make it even more useful (e.g., better image handling, synced notes, in-line commands, embeds,...) 🚀
• Significantly improved search functionality 🔍
• Improved flashcard, flashcard review, and spaced repetition features
• Major design improvements across the entire platform ✨
• Improved documentation - this has been on the backburner since we've been very focused on actually building. Moving forward, we want to make sure documentation is up to date, incl. video tutorials 💡
• The annotation viewer is still available for now but you can expect changes to that very soon
• Expect changes to the Anki sync feature and our flashcard feature

Let us know your thoughts

We hope that with this release, Polar's usefulness will increase drastically. If you have any feedback or notice any bugs, let us know! Similarly, if you have an interesting workflow using Polar, feel free to also tell us about it. It helps us prioritize what to build next. You can provide feedback either through Canny or through the Intercom button in the app.