Google Killing Chrome Extensions with 1 Week Publishing Delays Google has recently started performing reviews/code audits on any chrome extension that requests the permissions. I can understand the need to audit the code for safety since this is a very specific use case and apps could…

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…

Portable Datastores and Platform Independence The other day, Arnold Schrijver from the Center of Humane Technology was nice enough to reach out to discuss git sync in Polar and the available of Polar on other platforms other than Firebase: Polar's on disk datastore supports basic version control…

Polar Usability Milestone Last week we were lucky enough to get on the front page of Hacker News again which resulted in a lot of new users providing valuable feedback. I'm going to be focusing on usability in the next few releases (as well as shipping Polar as a webapp) and I wanted to include the…

Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository I wanted to finally take the time and write up my long term vision of where Polar is headed as well as discuss some anti-goals (or at least secondary goals) of the project. Polar is designed around the idea of maintaining all your documents in one place…

Dear App Stores: Don't Block Apps - Lead With the Carrot Instead! Microsoft blocked Polar from the App Store after I spent 2 weeks implementing the changes needed for their platform. My crime? I didn't use MS Edge for rendering web content - I used Electron. Gasp! I know, right?! I'm truly evil…

Microsoft Blocking Electron Apps from the App Store I've been working hard to port my app over to the MS App Store (and the Apple App Store). It's an insanely difficult process involving multiple iterations. Each time you submit the app they only give you one reason why your app can't be…

Mendeley's Encrypted Repository is Fundamentally Anti-Science Hacker News ran a story the other day highlighting Mendeley locking in users to their product by encrypting their own data preventing external apps from easily exporting their data. Essentially, PDFs go in, but they don't come out - a…

Polar 1.9.0 Released Polar 1.9.0 was just released. This release is mostly focused around stability and fixes a number of important bugs. One big new feature went into this release though - you're now able create pagemarks across multiple pages. Documentation Here's the excerpt from the…

The EU Plan S for Open Access to Scientific Research The EU and China have an ambitious new plan to provide open access (OA) for scientific papers: Since the September 2018 launch of the Europe-backed program to mandate immediate open access (OA) to scientific literature, 16 funders in 13 countries…