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Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs (desklamp.io)

99 points by pj747 ↗ HN
Hey HN! I'm Prajwal, the co-creator of Desklamp! I just completed my undergrad, which is where we got the idea for Desklamp. A bunch of friends and I built this because we hated the experience of studying on our laptops. It was boring, and we found ourselves staring at the screen for hours on end with no output to show for it.

To make reading more engaging and to make sure we could remember what we read, we built a note-making system integrated with a PDF reader. The aim is to encourage you to make notes! LaTeX support, clipping out sections from the document, linking notes to sections in the PDF - everything is designed to really make sure you have no excuse to not make notes as you read.

We've also added a lot of fixes for minor inconveniences (scrolling across sections, hitting the wrong page number, light mode, viewing your highlights at a glance). And all of this is collaborative, because that just makes notes even more useful.

It's free for a while - we want to know what the rest of you think! Feedback can only help us make this even better. It's available as a web-app and a desktop app for Mac and Windows (Linux users, mail us, we're operating on a very closed beta right now).

50 comments

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wdpt
This is stunning. I'm very excited about it. As I really disliked the Zotero experience, I'm going to test it as soon as possible and provide you with immediate feedback.
pj747
Thanks a lot! Super pumped. Yeah we definitely want to improve the experience for researchers. Looking forward to your feedback!
anigbrowl
Looks very nice and I installed the desktop version, but needing to sign up before even trying it out led me to uninstall immediately.

It's free for a while

I'd rather you set up free and paid tiers now, in which case I could make pricing decisions (because I do pay for things I like). I don't like the idea of getting used to something and then becoming a price taker because I have a lot of data stored already, so I would prefer to do without.

pj747
Thanks a ton for that feedback! I absolutely did not realise how that sounded. We definitely don’t aim to blindside early adopters with a sudden pay-us-or-you-lose-data deadline.

The plan is that anything you do right now you’ll ALWAYS have access to, and at some point (not before December 2022) we begin charging a subscription to begin saving data to new documents. New users post that deadline will have a threshold of documents that they can use the product on for free.

If free and paid tiers are what you absolutely need, please drop me a mail! Would hate to have an early user disappear because we’re still figuring out exact pricing strategies.

anigbrowl
I'll give it another look. Thanks for your considerate reply!
Brajeshwar
When in doubt, do something like this -- $99.99 a year (or something higher than you are thinking right now) BUT free during the beta. So, people will either stay because they can afford that or is worth it or will leave. So, you end up with users who you will likely care enough to make good features for them.
pj747
Yup. By the next show HN, I'll be sure to come back with more clarity on this front. This is a solid idea. Allows us to focus on power users.
dotancohen 

  > Allows us to focus on power users.
I'm extraordinarily wary of relying on non-open-source software. But when I see that you are focusing on power users, that does arouse my interest - that's why I continue to pay for Jetbrains even though VIM is fee.

But if I leave Jetbrains I can still work on my projects with VIM. If I leave Desklamp, how can I continue to view my notes? Do third party PDF readers, e.g. Okular, support whatever annotation format you are using?

I need an exit strategy if the company goes belly up, or I am unable to pay my bills, or QT N+1 is incompatible with my Foobar, or I don't upgrade, or the US sanctions my country, or DNS is blocked after reinstalling the OS, or exploits are not resolved in Desklamp, etc etc.

elashri
I would argue that vim and its ecosystem is the one targeting power users while Jetbrains products are more open for users. Just look how much freedom you have to customize vim vs any IDE.
dotancohen
I find that much of the customizations done to VIM are the addition of features already in Jetbrains. In any case, I use IdeaVIM with Jetbrains, so I'm actually not missing VIM.
muti
Second this, I wanted to poke around and check out the UI for something that looked interesting and useful, I remember looking for something like this back when I was studying and wanted to take notes in PDFs.

So I hit the `open in browser` button, but left as soon as I was prompted to create an account.

killjoywashere
Hi, I was taking notes in Notability on a PDF of a manuscript I’m reviewing for a journal just before taking this break on Hacker News and finding this. I would really like this to have a freedrawing pencil interface like Notability does. I do agree that organized marginalia would be very helpful. I have struggled to find one app to rule them all this regard.
pj747
Noted! Do you think the app would work well as is on the iPad if we added free drawing with the pencil in the notebook? We’ve designed the entire interface with a laptop in mind. Very curious how iPad users feel about everything.
mkl
I don't have an iPad but I do a lot of free-drawing PDF annotation on Android with Squid. For maths it's way easier than typing Latex. Personally I wouldn't consider this kind of app unless it had free drawing as a primary tool. Even if you're focused on laptops, many laptops have pen input, especially those used by students. Many of my students use OneNote to annotate lecture slides with a pen; even though OneNote is pretty limited, there aren't many good competitors on Windows.
pj747
Very interesting! Definitely sounds like a gap even in the laptop space then. Thanks for the input!
killjoywashere
> Do you think the app would work well as is on the iPad if we added free drawing with the pencil in the notebook?

I'm not a frontend mobile developer, so definitely not entirely qualified to comment, but it doesn't open in Safari (MacOS or iPadOS). That said, I did try uploading Watson and Crick's paper on DNA and it seems to upload but won't open (hangs on 0%) in both MacOS Firefox and MacOS Chrome (both downloaded fresh today). I also tried opening the MacOS app on a computer with MDM controls and it was blocked (need a valid signature on your dmg).

Ginger Labs (publisher of Notability) has dozens of employees and has been in operation for 14 years, so it's a bit unfair to compare, but I definitely like the idea of have a Google Docs style wide margin to play in. Something like MathPad for LaTeX would be nice as well. Lots of asks, I know.

thelamest
Great job! I can see this being very useful, at the very least in the academia. For example, in meta-analytic reviews, you often go through hundreds of papers, identifying, highlighting and annotating the relevant hypothesis test details, among many irrelevant weeds. Tools that streamline this process are very handy, so that you can easily come back later and grok your past work. Pen and paper works for an individual, but can drown you in piles of binders, and is less easy to collaborate on/share.

Some quick, very minor UI comments: on a large screen, workspace switching could be available immediately through single-click icons instead of a dropdown menu. Similarly, minimizing open stickers could be done with a dedicated icon instead of through the “…” menu (right-click suggested in an example in the quick start guide didn’t work for me). Otherwise everything feels pretty intuitive.

One thing I’d want to learn from the introductory guides is if adding the metadata (comments, notes, highlights, etc.) changes the original PDF file (always, optionally, never?), so that for example you’d be able to send an annotated document right away, or need to keep backups of unmodified originals, etc. (I strongly assume the metadata is stored separately, as PDFs can be unwieldy to modify, but you never know.) In general, exporting/printing notes seems like a natural feature. I like that it’s easy to export clips.

As a casual right now, I don’t have any input regarding the possible business model, but will certainly be interested in where you go with it.

pj747
Thanks for giving it a try! Yes, the hide sticky note feature should be more visible. Workspace switching is also a good idea!

Your assumption about the metadata is correct! The original file is not tampered with. If you want to share a file with your highlights and annotations, there’s an export button in the hamburger menu on the top left (this UX is really bad, gonna fix this soon). Yeah should rework the guide too.

We have added an export notes as well but it’s in beta because it behaves a little weirdly with the LaTeX. Probably a good idea to export the entire notebook as a LaTeX file.

pbhjpbhj
I'd like to be able to take notes for a PDF where the note part can handle the PDF being updated and would link the notes to a numbered section (or a title, optionally) in the PDF.

Any chance this does that, or any other suggestions?

pj747
Note making connected to PDFs is abysmal. As far as I know, we're one of the better tools out there. Updating PDFs is a challenge for sure. Constantly updating content is probably better suited for a wiki/notion page though. I'm curious - what kind of PDFs are you dealing with?
pbhjpbhj
It's a mixture of legislative and technical documentation.

Currently I copy to OneNote but there's no linking then to see updates to the original docs within my notes.

pkd
Congratulations! The only suggestion I have is about the logo: if you rotate it clockwise 90 degrees, then the lamp head also looks like a "D", instead of an "A" as it does currently. I immediately felt it would be better suited to the product name (with some tweaks, of course).
pj747
So the fun thing about the logo is it's also a pencil, the purple makes it slightly less obvious. I'm glad you got that it's a lamp - my aunt saw it and asked me why it is a random triangle. Never thought about the D parallel though, that's neat!
FastMonkey
This looks extremely cool. I'm doing a masters right now and would definitely use it!

My one question though would be how are the notes stored? Is it possible to download them as latex or a markdown file or something? If I have to keep up a membership to return to them that would be unfortunate.

Cool project though, there's definitely a need for something more fluidly interactive in the university notetaking space. Best of luck!

pj747
Thanks a lot! No there'll definitely be export options. As of now there's only a beta version of exporting as a PDF, but LaTeX/Markdown is on the cards. Probably LaTeX so that we can just replace the PDF generation as well.
lamfm95
I hope it would support fully-standalone mode for enterprise environment.

Lots of folks and I at my ML team found it hard to use these kinds of tooling without compromising the intranet. We have to have a permit to bring our laptop inside, otherwise stick to a proxy server.

pj747
Yup that is part of our roadmap!
flakiness
The "store" site [1] lists JEE, NEET and CUET as the "competitive exams" category. Can anyone explain what these are? I haven't heard about these before.

[1] https://store.desklamp.io/

Brajeshwar
These are standard test programs in India to get into various institutes.

JEE[1] is an engineering entrance assessment conducted for admission to various engineering colleges in India.

For students who want to study the general stream of physics, Chemistry, and Biology would go through the NEET[2]. This is for the Medical Colleges in India.

For everything else -- colleges, undergraduate, graduate, and other courses after 12th, students will go through the CUET[3]. This is the latest introduction to circumventing colleges and universities doing the test on their own.

I should add why these tests are crucial to students and parents alike in India. These decide the fate of most students and their careers.

I have a friend who collected and organized the questions for just JEE, and that's it. He charges a very minimal fee, and he is a Crore-ian (roughly $1M = ₹8 Crore) and leads a happy lifestyle. I'm no longer in regular touch with him and have no idea if he grew big or moved on or is sipping Mai Tai in Tahiti.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Entrance_Examination

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Eligibility_cum_Entra...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_University_Entrance_Tes...

pj747
Yup. In India, all of these are extremely huge deals. We wanted to put up some content on the store and being a team that did well on these exams we thought the easiest way to get some original content up was to use our own notes.
Brajeshwar
This is superb. The team sounds a lot more entrepreneurial than just being students. This is the perfect nurturing of entrepreneurs while still in college. Lots of people talk about it, but remarkably few execute on that idealogy.

Here are my exciting observations.

- I see you guys have been working on it for over a year, which shows perseverance.

- Most co-founders have professional LinkedIn Professionals -- very un-student but rather business-like.

- You already have one of the co-founders nurtured by Antler.

I feel you are thinking of exiting to one of the big EdTechs in India or becoming one. Best of luck to all of you.

pj747
Thanks a lot! Yes we are definitely enjoying the entrepreneurial journey. I have decided to work on this full time - learning so much! And it's always great to get to work on something that you can actually use personally.
dimal
This looks great! I've been bouncing between PDF readers that supposedly deal with highlighting well, and most of them are terrible. Is it possible to export highlights and notes as Markdown? That would let me dump my notes into Obsidian.
pj747
That's a very neat idea! Will look at a few more standards for exporting notes.
dotancohen
Okular used to store annotations in an XML "sidecar" file, though it now stores the annotations in the PDF itself. However there may still be a sidecar file option, or perhaps the annotations are still in XML in the PDF itself. You might want to take a look at that.
lf-non
You should look at logseq [1]. It is primarily an outliner but has a good integrated PDF reader with highlighting & annotation support. Content is saved as markdown.

It has pretty much replaced other note taking tools for me, but I know of people who use it in conjunction with Obsidian/Zettlr/Zotero.

[1] https://logseq.com/

loudouncodes
Let me get my pdf highlights into readwise and let me orgazize my notes as a zettelkasten in obsidian and i’ll get in lline to pay you.
Brajeshwar
I used to be a lot like this. Without trying to demean you, I would suggest stepping down from your awesome bubble and talk to the common people on the ground. The 99.99% of the people are not like us.

Once you learn to listen to them, a whole new world opens up.

About the payment/price; you are lowering the cost of your time way below what you should priced yourself at. Instead of me doing, maintaining, if I can buy time with a subscription the price of a coffee, I'd always go for that and free up my time just to laze around or read something or sleep under a tree. Just imagine that, not worrying if the server I self-hosted on a German ISP will go down because I paid off $9.99 a month. ;-)

pj747
This is definitely our thought process too! The aim is to get you to note things down more / access insights faster so that there's less you're relying on your brain to remember.
pj747
This is actually a legitimate concern. Productivity tools are overflowing right now, so the main confusion for us is do we aim to replace your existing notemaking suite or supplement it, For now, why not try out the free beta? Would like to know how/if it works with your workflow.
kretaceous
What a pleasant surprise to find you guys on HN! Massive congratulations to the team.

All those long hours in the library paid off =)

Go IITM!

pj747
Haha thanks! Would be a nice moment to mention our mascot, if we had one. Go Blackbucks?
vsroy
This is super nice! I tried to build something similar (PDF reader x Stack Overflow; as you read you can see highlights that link to Stack Overflow style posts): https://chimu.sh (site is broken right now), but it didn't work out.

The thesis was to make annotated textbooks, so if 100 people read a book then the 101th person could benefit from the knowledge of the previous 100 people.

I hope you guys consider the multiplayer aspect of note-taking!

pj747
Oh one hundred percent! That’s definitely part of our vision. Couldn’t have put it across better. So we already have a small pilot of that running with any documents you get from the Desklamp store - these have the multiplayer aspect in the form of public notes. The idea is that if you make useful notebooks like chapter summaries or some insight on a book, you can publish those for all readers of the book to see. Didn’t promote that here because we don’t have licensed content yet but you can check it out on any of the consulting books.
ale42
Looks great! Is there a plan for a lightweight native app? (I mean not Electron)
kobiguru
I don't have any feedback I just love the design and work flow. I downloaded to software. Overall I can see myself moving into this workflow but my only big concern is the exit clause and the login screen when I start the app (maybe have a file browser -it might be my adobe reader hangover) , I could not figure out how to export the notes, maybe you will work. Overall my reservations are just nitpicking and I absolutely love the product. Great work.
zeagle
Neat idea. You may have addressed this but one suggesting is allowing to creating a scalable canvas (at least vertically) and annotating that blank slate. The only software I know that does this well (with robust search) is onenote.

I am not sure if it is something specific to comp sci/engineering but most of the note taking apps have a similar focus on taking source material, pretty figures and equations, and then annotating it. Maybe it is undergraduate level nitpicking where every minutiae might be tested. This mirrors old paper-based annotating and highlighting a textbook, but not note taking which aims to summarize. I think the right panel partly addresses this which is great.

I switched to digital note taking towards the end of my first degree so maybe I’m a fossil, but my then digital approach on the life sciences/medicine side has always been the opposite: take screenshots of the important content, paste them into a note taking app (e.g. onenote), and annotate or re-organize that. That cuts down the amount of notes to sift through and then review by at least an order of magnitude, if only thorugh eliminating duplication and whitespace. Years out I still do this for my CME and during meetings.

derekzhouzhen
I suggest you to add social logins, to lower the bar of trying out.