4 ms·

One thing I hate about annotation in general is everything is siloed. For example, I have an app on my iPad called PDF Viewer (I think) which is pretty good an

One thing I hate about annotation in general is everything is siloed. For example, I have an app on my iPad called PDF Viewer (I think) which is pretty good and has lots of annotating features. I've often used it to highlight pieces of text I'm interested in, or references I might want to follow up on The follow ups never happen though because the annotations are locked in this app, I can't say, look on my mac to see what I've 'clipped' recently from the app on my ipad, or most other apps for that matter. Ideally what I'd like is some sort of central place where all my 'clippings' go in a seamless manner, be it from PDFs, photos, websites, whatever.

j88439h84 7y ago
This is a really good idea. It means there needs to be standard way to specify the relevant location for a note inside each media format.
- scottshamus 7y ago
  There has been active work on this: https://www.w3.org/annotation/ https://www.w3.org/annotation/ It says web annotation but it was born out of an open annotation initiative. The fragment selector supports the most common media types https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/#fragment-selector https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/#fragment-selector
maire 7y ago
I was a little confused about the PDF annotation part of the discussion since this works for me. The author does say that he doesn't have a mac and this might be the issue. It works across all of my devices and all of my apps. Annotation itself is part of the PDF standard. It is defined well enough that all of the apps I use preserve annotation. The parts that are missing are both provided by Evernote. Evernote inserts the major annotations at the start of the file. You can then read a summary of annotations in any PDF app. Evernote was also the first that automatically converted image based pdfs to "searchable pdfs". When this feature first came out it was awesome. Now I see it everywhere. My scanner automatically converts to searchable pdfs and I have an OCR converter that does the same.
- djhworld 7y ago
  I guess I focussed too much on the PDF aspect, my desire is some sort of system where if I annotate something, be it a PDF, website, image, text file or whatever, I'd like the contents of that annotation (with maybe some context/metadata around where that annotation was from) to go to some central place. It's tricky though because a lot of apps are siloed, and the interaction ideally would be almost seamless. Like taking a screenshot.
  - maire 7y ago
    Yep this is what I use evernote for. When I was working I had to consume and organize a lot of proprietary information and evernote was the only thing that worked. I use evernote clipper in my browser and forward from email. You can put additional information in the note. The generic "web aggregators" don't work for me because they don't work behind a fire wall.
j45 7y ago
Currently I'm using Diigo for inter-platform annotation. It annotates web pages as well as PDFs, with a solid free plan.
hirenj 7y ago
I'm actually partly there with that workflow. I directly annotate PDFs and then let a server side script extract relevant annotations that can be used to place the file in the right folder. Similarly, I extract out highlighted text, but right now I don't know what to do with it, because I don't know how this workflow should function, especially with regard to updated highlights.
Nition 7y ago
Microsoft Courier was designed to solve this ten years ago, by being essentially a digital version of a notebook[1]. You'd fill your notebook with digital clippings from any media and freely annotate them. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmIgNfp-MdI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmIgNfp-MdI
Karrot_Kream 7y ago
Hypothes.is is actually a big champion of open standards. Here's their post https://web.hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-standard/ https://web.hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-standar... on the W3C Annotation standard, and you can read the standard to see how to peer your own data.
grblovrflowerrr 7y ago
Yes, this siloing stops me from using annotation features "native" to each app and format as such as well. Instead, I prefer to exfiltrate information from the silos(apps, formats, etc) and put them into my note taking system. Then I can do highlights, annotations, etc. on my own terms and also get the benefits of centralization such as searching and linking(the OP has another post describing their own system, which is pretty cool[1]). Currently I'm using Notion, which is also a silo of its own, but it's one that gives me a lot of control over how I lay my information out(and an escape plan from). There are a lot of perspectives on this issue with data silos and walled gardens. But I'm of the opinion that it's a fairly bad state for all of us "end users". Computers to me are about infinite flexibility and malleability, but ironically the tools we have for annotation and remixing are in practice worse than what we have in the physical world. Reading a book in the physical world, I can converse with the author simply by jotting marginalia with my pencil. It's fluid, intuitive, and the medium of paper encourages it(in fact it can't help but be mutated by my use!: pages get bended, stained, torn, etc.). If I want to go further I can add post-it notes to mark interesting passages, I can xerox some pages and create subsections, if it's a magazine I can just tear them all out! That kind of flexibility just isn't available on a computer. I think it's worth thinking really hard why we're in this state, especially since computing pioneers were actually very optimistic that data and computing would be way more personally malleable than it is now(I've been working on a small comic on this theme myself[2]). For example, check out this short demo[3] of Smalltalk where Alan Kay hooks up a single frame from an animation of a bouncing ball to a painting program, to modify that one frame while also monitoring the loop. Smarter than paper, but way more flexible. My own thinking lately has been that developers need to think more about how their apps, like your PDF viewer, could cooperate with other apps to achieve our goals. All sorts of deep questions spring forth from here: "what is the best inter-communication system for them to cooperate with?", "how do you design them to intuitive?", "how can you make the UX as good as 'packaged apps'?". And looking at the history of personal computing, these are fairly old questions. The Unix Philosophy provides us with some clues, and its success, even in the smaller world of developer-oriented computing, gives us some hope. Personally, I'm excited to one day live in a world where my desktop and smartphone and other devices -my computing spaces- feel less like a collection of walled gardens that refuse to intermingle, and more like one big beautiful garden, an ecosystem: lots of small, useful programs, chatting and cooperating, data freely flowing between them, each new program multiplying their collective potential and creating a new ecology, that I can adapt to my psyche and my needs, helping me be a better human. [1] https://beepb00p.xyz/pkm-search.html https://beepb00p.xyz/pkm-search.html [2] https://twitter.com/yoshikischmitz/status/1188455560045158400 https://twitter.com/yoshikischmitz/status/118845556004515840... [3] https://youtu.be/AnrlSqtpOkw?t=607 https://youtu.be/AnrlSqtpOkw?t=607

j88439h84 7y ago

This is a really good idea. It means there needs to be standard way to specify the relevant location for a note inside each media format.

scottshamus 7y ago
There has been active work on this: https://www.w3.org/annotation/ https://www.w3.org/annotation/ It says web annotation but it was born out of an open annotation initiative. The fragment selector supports the most common media types https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/#fragment-selector https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/#fragment-selector

maire 7y ago

I was a little confused about the PDF annotation part of the discussion since this works for me. The author does say that he doesn't have a mac and this might be the issue. It works across all of my devices and all of my apps. Annotation itself is part of the PDF standard. It is defined well enough that all of the apps I use preserve annotation. The parts that are missing are both provided by Evernote. Evernote inserts the major annotations at the start of the file. You can then read a summary of annotations in any PDF app. Evernote was also the first that automatically converted image based pdfs to "searchable pdfs". When this feature first came out it was awesome. Now I see it everywhere. My scanner automatically converts to searchable pdfs and I have an OCR converter that does the same.

djhworld 7y ago
I guess I focussed too much on the PDF aspect, my desire is some sort of system where if I annotate something, be it a PDF, website, image, text file or whatever, I'd like the contents of that annotation (with maybe some context/metadata around where that annotation was from) to go to some central place. It's tricky though because a lot of apps are siloed, and the interaction ideally would be almost seamless. Like taking a screenshot.
- maire 7y ago
  Yep this is what I use evernote for. When I was working I had to consume and organize a lot of proprietary information and evernote was the only thing that worked. I use evernote clipper in my browser and forward from email. You can put additional information in the note. The generic "web aggregators" don't work for me because they don't work behind a fire wall.

j45 7y ago

Currently I'm using Diigo for inter-platform annotation. It annotates web pages as well as PDFs, with a solid free plan.

hirenj 7y ago

I'm actually partly there with that workflow. I directly annotate PDFs and then let a server side script extract relevant annotations that can be used to place the file in the right folder. Similarly, I extract out highlighted text, but right now I don't know what to do with it, because I don't know how this workflow should function, especially with regard to updated highlights.

Nition 7y ago

Microsoft Courier was designed to solve this ten years ago, by being essentially a digital version of a notebook[1]. You'd fill your notebook with digital clippings from any media and freely annotate them. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmIgNfp-MdI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmIgNfp-MdI

Karrot_Kream 7y ago

Hypothes.is is actually a big champion of open standards. Here's their post https://web.hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-standard/ https://web.hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-standar... on the W3C Annotation standard, and you can read the standard to see how to peer your own data.

grblovrflowerrr 7y ago

Yes, this siloing stops me from using annotation features "native" to each app and format as such as well. Instead, I prefer to exfiltrate information from the silos(apps, formats, etc) and put them into my note taking system. Then I can do highlights, annotations, etc. on my own terms and also get the benefits of centralization such as searching and linking(the OP has another post describing their own system, which is pretty cool[1]). Currently I'm using Notion, which is also a silo of its own, but it's one that gives me a lot of control over how I lay my information out(and an escape plan from). There are a lot of perspectives on this issue with data silos and walled gardens. But I'm of the opinion that it's a fairly bad state for all of us "end users". Computers to me are about infinite flexibility and malleability, but ironically the tools we have for annotation and remixing are in practice worse than what we have in the physical world. Reading a book in the physical world, I can converse with the author simply by jotting marginalia with my pencil. It's fluid, intuitive, and the medium of paper encourages it(in fact it can't help but be mutated by my use!: pages get bended, stained, torn, etc.). If I want to go further I can add post-it notes to mark interesting passages, I can xerox some pages and create subsections, if it's a magazine I can just tear them all out! That kind of flexibility just isn't available on a computer. I think it's worth thinking really hard why we're in this state, especially since computing pioneers were actually very optimistic that data and computing would be way more personally malleable than it is now(I've been working on a small comic on this theme myself[2]). For example, check out this short demo[3] of Smalltalk where Alan Kay hooks up a single frame from an animation of a bouncing ball to a painting program, to modify that one frame while also monitoring the loop. Smarter than paper, but way more flexible. My own thinking lately has been that developers need to think more about how their apps, like your PDF viewer, could cooperate with other apps to achieve our goals. All sorts of deep questions spring forth from here: "what is the best inter-communication system for them to cooperate with?", "how do you design them to intuitive?", "how can you make the UX as good as 'packaged apps'?". And looking at the history of personal computing, these are fairly old questions. The Unix Philosophy provides us with some clues, and its success, even in the smaller world of developer-oriented computing, gives us some hope. Personally, I'm excited to one day live in a world where my desktop and smartphone and other devices -my computing spaces- feel less like a collection of walled gardens that refuse to intermingle, and more like one big beautiful garden, an ecosystem: lots of small, useful programs, chatting and cooperating, data freely flowing between them, each new program multiplying their collective potential and creating a new ecology, that I can adapt to my psyche and my needs, helping me be a better human. [1] https://beepb00p.xyz/pkm-search.html https://beepb00p.xyz/pkm-search.html [2] https://twitter.com/yoshikischmitz/status/1188455560045158400 https://twitter.com/yoshikischmitz/status/118845556004515840... [3] https://youtu.be/AnrlSqtpOkw?t=607 https://youtu.be/AnrlSqtpOkw?t=607