This document is under construction and still evolving. Polar Mission Statement and Design for a Personal Knowledge Repository Polar has a broad mission statement to provide high quality tools for document annotation, management of documents (tagging, storage, etc) and sharing of content. There's a…

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…

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…

Getting Hacker News'd Twice - Lessons Learned for Entrepreneurs I've had Polar featured on Hacker News three times in the last six months. It's been interesting to say the least and I wanted to write up my thoughts here to share my lessons learned with other entrepreneurs and hackers who might be…

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…