Yes. The idea feels very nice but the implementation is unbearable. I want to imitate that without having to install a browser extension which is ridiculously slow and requires access to all the pages you visit. I would tolerate it if it would stay off until I actively invoke it when and where I want (mostly local disk/host documents) and if I could be sure it doesn't spy on me. So I am passively looking for an alternative. So far LaTeX was the only alternative I've found that can do that but it is otherwise too complex to use (I managed to achieve the effect but failed to build a book of specific structure I needed in reasonable time). Now I'm curious if Ruby can fill this gap between MarkDown/HTML+CSS and LaTeX.
Totally understandable. I'm the creator of BeeLine (and the concept), and permissions in Chrome extensions are tough. One possible solution for concerned users is to whitelist certain sites via the extension manager, so that the extension only has access to those domains, but I don't think there's a way to do that for local files.
If you want to just convert files, you might try the File Transformer[1] by Blackboard Ally. They've licensed the BeeLine technology and are temporarily making it available for free publicly through the File Transformer (it's also available to their university customers through their LMS interface).
Lastly, I know it probably won't put your mind at ease, but I am the solo founder who runs BeeLine Reader. I do not do anything with user data, and in fact I don't even gather data at the individual user level. This is partly because my tools are used in K12 schools, and partly because I can't imagine selling out my customers.
I am happy to meet you. Thank you for the link (and for inventing the concept). I'll probably use it for some files but again this means uploading files to some untrusted server (I believe you when you say you don't gather data but uploading a file and being sure it won't be saved anywhere feels harder).
You probably know better as you have probably done some business modelling but just for my piece of feedback - I would buy it if you would offer a purely offline Linux+Windows+Mac app that outputs coloured (and structured) PDFs given a MarkDown (or some XML intermediary, perhaps FB2, for more complex structures) file and a paper format for input. At the moment I feel like the price I would pay could be something near $100. I wouldn't even mind paying if it's just a proprietary script on top of free software.
It would also be great if one day you would add an on-demand (on the extension button click) mode to the extension to save the users' CPUs and batteries.
I hope you don't feel insulted or discouraged by how do I speak about your creation's performance - I understand it can be hard to teach a browser's text rendering engine a totally new trick. Perhaps you have even improved it since the last time I tried (which was years ago).
I appreciate the candid feedback. We understand that different people want to use the extension in different ways, and some want more autorun whereas others want more manual control.
In our experience, the group that favors autorun tend to be the ones that get more benefit out of our software, and therefore are more likely to be paid users as opposed to people on the free trial. Because of limited resources (and the need to make the product simple), that means we've focused on optimizing for the autorun case instead of the manual activation case.
I should note that we do have a way to use the extension just as you describe, which is to use the Clean Mode. This is manually activated using a keyboard shortcut (which is hard-coded in Firefox and manually configured in Chrome). If you turn off autorun you can invoke BeeLine (in Clean Mode) using the shortcut.
