Polar Roadmap for Q2 and Q3 2019

I wanted to write up a quick blog post for the features I'd like to see in Q2 and Q3 2019 for you guys to review.

Q2 2019

• Initial version of sharing. Single document only with public URL (public or private only)
• Area highlights with support for annotations and storing them as screenshots along with the document as binary attachments.
• Advanced sharing with teams and user to user + groups a month later
• Mobile PWA supported to use Polar on iOS and Android
• Polar bundled in app stores directly
• Native Flashcard support without having to need Anki
• Support for bibliographic information stored in Polar for scientific usage
• Full team sharing / collaboration including protected documents across teams and realtime collaboration.
• Firefox extension support
• Web app out of preview (and fast!)
• More colors for highlights
• Binary attachments required for area highlights
• Actively engage the user to encourage reading progress via integrated reading tracking (partially implemented today)
• Webpack refactor to make our app much smaller <1MB download size on mobile
• Comments + Notes + Flashcards directly on the document
• New annotation bar so that user can add comments and flashcards without having to use the sidebar.
• Thumbnails for documents
• All CSS embedded in thin web archives.
• Initial UI / UX re-design
• Better key bindings along with documentation
• Latex (math) in comments and flashcards
• DOI lookup provided by unpaywall API.
• Extended metadata support with metadata 'profiles' so that they can be merged
• Search documents on arxiv and import automatically
• Bulk import from directories recursively on install
• New icon / logo
• More documentation improvements
• Figure out a solution + UI for hierarchical tags. Many users have requested this and I think we can do this via our normal tag mechanism and just need to figure out how to fix the UI for this to handle it properly.
• Comments and annotations should themselves support tags not just inherit the tag for the book with which they're associated.

Q3 2019

• New document viewer which supports ePub, and Mobi document formats
• Dark mode implemented once we're on a new document viewer.
• Full-text search in cloud but possibly in the standlone desktop version as well
• Plugin API for desktop applications
• Basic REST API for local desktop app for basic operations such as adding files and updating metadata for integration with 3rd party apps.
• Active Capture where the chrome extension automatically saves content while you browse.
• Web annotations without having to capture documents offline but support documents which are just URLs references stored in polar.
• Capture directly within the browser using the chrome extension which won't require the desktop app.
• Annotations attached to shingles not based on absolute positioning. Right now our annotation model positions an annotation at a specific place in on the page at an x,y coordinate offset. This won't work with fluid web layout or normal web pages and possibly not with ePub so we need a system based on position the annotations around text.
• Import from Pocket, Zotero, Mendeley (if possible), Evernote.
• Distributed and real-time annotations with federation when using document sharing.
• Usability improvements to document viewer thanks to new architecture.
• Support for note taking without having to have a document backing the note.
• Support for feeds of content and edge aggregated data streams similar to RSS feeds
• Support for thin and fat captures with web archives. Right now we support thin content with just the CSS but we should also support images as well.
• Tabbed browsing for desktop edition.
• More documentation improvements

Q4 2019

• Rest API using OpenID to authenticate with the webapp and provide access to a users data with 3rd party APIs.

Pricing

Some of the above features may fall under the following pricing model: