There's been some good writing on the general failure of "Hypertext books" (e.g. the first couple of paragraphs here [0]). I personally think this stems from some of the reasons that underlie some of those that you outline - books published on the web simultaneously try to be skeuomorphic in retaining the physical book metaphor (organized linearly, mostly static and plain text, etc), while still losing some of the real-world effects of the physical medium (being able to intuitively understand progress, markup, etc). The way that we publish and read text actually hasn't changed much, even though the target medium has of course changed dramatically, and as a result you end up with arguably the worst of both worlds. E-readers try to side step the problem by extending the book metaphor even further, but text on the web doesn't have that privilege.
I'm working on a product, Literal [1], that aims to solve some of your specific problems, specifically providing for a way to annotate and add notes to web content and enabling some degree of source management. My ambition is to move on to solve some of the other problems you raise as well. If you have an Android device and are interested in trying it out, I'd love to connect!
Though not textual annotation, some of my favorite recent examples of the value of annotation have been NYT's Close Read series [0], in which they annotate works of visual art as part of communicating an idea or narrative. In some ways it feels like a museum tour or lecture, but more precise (can really call out specific aspects deserving focus, literally _zooming in_ the browser window) and yet also more broad (can easily change subjects, display new visual aids).
I'm currently working on a textual annotation product, Literal [1]. It's open source and implements the W3C Web Annotation spec [2] natively (Yes, there's a web spec for this kind of thing!). You can see a 1m video of how it works here [3]. It's currently Android-only but if you found this article interesting and / or find yourself wishing you could annotate or save bits of text that you read, I'd love to connect with you!
It's unfortunately not a widely supported spec. hypothes.is [0] is the most widely used desktop client, but they don't have a mobile client, and as of last time I checked they don't actually use the data model internally, they just expose a Web Annotation API.
I've heard you loud on clear on the feedback on Literal. I'll have a release out to make sign-in optional in the coming weeks and will follow up here once it's released. I'd be happy to create you some guest credentials in the meantime as well, shoot me an email if you're interested.
I wasn't aware of F-Droid but just created an issue to track publishing releases there here [1]. I'm not sure the inclusion timeline on their side but the work on my side should fast follow guest auth support.
Edit: to clarify _why_ authentication is currently required - the username is used as a primary key on associated data (e.g. annotations), and since I'm actively working on this, I try to personally reach out to everyone via email in order to solicit feedback. You can view the privacy here [2]. I'll move to support an optional auth flow regardless.
BigSpring | Software Engineers, Data Science | US-only REMOTE, Full-time
At BigSpring, we’re obsessively solving a major global challenge - employability. Our mobile learning and productivity solution is empowering people with the skills they need for a higher quality of life while helping enterprises transform productivity and growth through learning. We have traction, revenue, household-name enterprise clients, and are rapidly growing on all fronts.
We're a global company, but the product team is US based and very small. You'll have lots of ownership over your domain and the projects you work on, and should be self driven and product-minded.
Our stack includes: React, React Native, AWS (Lambda, RDS, S3), Postgres, GraphQL, Apollo. We make heavy use of TypeScript and are exploring ReasonML for greenfield development.
Email me at daniel@bigspring.io for more information and applications.
At BigSpring, we’re obsessively solving a major global challenge - employability. Our mobile learning and productivity solution is empowering people with the skills they need for a higher quality of life while helping enterprises transform productivity and growth through learning. We have traction, revenue, household-name enterprise clients, and are rapidly growing on all fronts.
We're a global company, but the product team is US based and very small. You'll have lots of ownership over your domain and the projects you work on, and should be self driven and product-minded.
For technical roles, our stack includes: React, React Native, AWS (Lambda, RDS, S3), Postgres, GraphQL, Apollo. Existing projects primarily use TypeScript and we are evaluating ReasonML for future projects.
Email me at daniel@bigspring.io for more information and applications.
This is the image that the instances in a Google Container Engine cluster run. Nice that its getting easier and easier to run a local cluster - for most things it doesn't matter but every so often I'd like to test things in a kube configuration locally before deploying to staging/production.
Edit: at least I'm assuming these are the same images as what they run GKE with due to the same name - can anyone confirm this?
I read three books at a time, and only pick up/start/buy a new one once I finish one. Helps acquiring a large back log of unread literature around the apartment. :)
* Labyrinths - Jorge Louis Borges [0]
I believe HN was the reason I picked this up, if I remember correctly. It's a collection of short stories, each of which can be finished in a night, which is satisfying. I really dig his writing style and fantastical nature of the stories. I've done a bit of philosophical reading but a lot of the references he makes go over my head, leaving me to do a bit of research after each story.
* The Design of Everyday Things - Don Norman [1]
Picked this up after finishing Debbie Millman's How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer [2] (Misleading title, I would 100% recommend this book to anyone). I'm not sure what I expected, but so far this hasn't been satisfying. The first couple of chapters have been laying out a framework and defining terms. Considering swapping this out for Jon Kolko's Well Designed - How to Use Empathy To Create Products People Love [3], which seemed much more actionable after picking it up at Barnes and Noble.
* Real World OCaml - Yaron Minsky, Anil Madhavapeddy, Jason Hickey [4]
Second time picking this up, originally read up to chapter on Functors over the summer. I started over this time and I'm about finished with the first section, "Language Concepts", now. It's worth noting that the entire text is available online for free on the book's website. [5] I did some Scheme in high school and read through the fist half of SICP and dabble in functional js, but this is my first experience with a semi pure functional language and I'm loving it. I'm going through the functional challenges on Hackerrank in OCaml at the same time to solidify some of the language concepts. Decided to go with OCaml over Haskell or Clojure because I'm super interested in using/contributing to Mirage OS [6]
"Simplified server implementation: Rather than having a proliferation of end-points (per action, per route), a single GraphQL endpoint can serve as a facade for any number of underlying resources."
