Sometimes, an app really is just as good as it looks, and that's all there is to it. I like it better than Pocket, better than Instapaper, respects RSS, integrates email newsletters, even lets you convert your google/apple login to an email login with a click. Even support for a private library of PDFs and EPubs! I seem to be having a little bit of trouble adding highlights to Epubs, but this is just about the perfect app.
So now, it's just a question of when the other shoe drops and they look at monetization. How much will it cost, what will the free version lose, what data of mine will be sold, etc? As long as its good enough and stays true to what appears to be its current vision, I can't see why I wouldn't pay for it, so it's just a matter of trusting that it will stay good over time.
> We have a few product ideas we have experimented with that would be paid add-ons to the current service: collaborative tools, AI integration, translation tools, and premium text to speech voices.
It may “respect RSS” but I wish it would go much farther: I wish to import all my jRSS feeds into Omnivore.
Till the day this becomes possible, I’ll have to use NetNewsWire and Omnivore next to each other. And export and then import articles of interest. This is a PITA.
I just tried it both on Android and in the browser, and while it looks very nice for the price of nothing, there are two things that will probably make me not use it. In case it's of any use for any dev that might be reading: First issue would be no AMOLED option. Second issue is that I can't get it to remember where I left reading in an article; every time I go back to the article it auto-scrolls to a random part of it (happens in both app and browser).
I'm actually using the remarkable for this kind of functionality. Some article i want to read later --> Share with remarkable, you do need the remarkable cloud service for that work seamless though.
Maybe one could use this to circumvent the paid cloud service.
I wrote a telegram bot (because share with remarkable does not work on mobile) to auto generated epub out of url and upload to remarkable cloud, until remarkable keep changing their cloud API and I finally cannot make uploading epub to their cloud work any more.
As someone who pays a yearly subscription for Readwise, I have a hard justifying that price when Omnivore excels at that core functionality entirely for free.
Matter is another paid read-it-later app who's lunch Omnivore is eating, though they seem to be shipping useful features (podcast transcript parsing, send-to-Kindle, etc.) much faster than Readwise.
Tough time to be a for-profit reading app these days, when options like Omnivore exist.
I wanted something more advanced than Pocket, which integrated with my Obsidian vault and had better highlighting features and voice, so it was a choice between Matter and Readwise Reader.
I went with Readwise because they were a bootstrapped company vs VC-funded Matter, but now I'm starting to wish I went with Matter because they've been shipping meaningful updates more reliably.
Also, I interviewer with Dan from Readwise and he totally ghosted me, so I may be a little bitter about that, ha.
No matter how good it is, it has to compete with my safari “read it later” list and a folder with subfolders filled with my 15-year-and-going pdf collection.
Also at €11,99 it’s just too expensive, no matter if it can also dance.
I recommend everyone to try this app out. It’s just the best iOS app that allows offline read it later functionality and supports self-hosting the server! And highlights and notes work really well on iOS.
Question: how you all deal with the new reddit app not allowing to share the url of the article / link you end in?
Comparing to other reddit clients we all lost (I was using bacon reader, but it's the same with my hn client) the reddit app inside browser is not providing me the possibility to share the page I am visiting (normally the three dots in the top right corner)
I've just installed the iOS app, so can't tell if it actually works and how well. But when it asks you to connect, there's a link at the bottom of the screen saying "self-hosting options" which asks for "API Server base URL", "web server url" and "text-to-speech url".
Maybe my primary use case is too rare to get much love, but I'm still stuck on Instapaper because so far in a decade of alternatives nobody has quite hit the mark for me; I want to be able to go into my list of saved articles and create a reading list that is going to then be read to me. They should be read in the order in which I select them. It should be that straightforward. I don't need any fancy synchronization of on-screen text with the speech etc, the whole point is for me to be able to queue up a few things and go. Should take a couple seconds.
Raindrop is very good for storing bookmarks, Omnivore is pretty good at being a read-it-later app. You can annotate in Raindrop, but it's not very ergonomic, and I honestly don't even recall if it has a reader mode. I'm certainly not sure where how to turn it on on the web. Omnivore's reader is excellent and annotating documents works great.
FWIW, I use both services daily and maintain a plugin to import Raindrop annotations & highlights into Logseq. I enjoy using Omnivore for reading much more than Raindrop.
I’ve been using Pocket less and less these days because I’m concerned about lock-in (both in terms of my data and the business model).
It’s a shame that Mozilla hasn’t managed to open-source Pocket in all these years. People that care about (and are capable of) self-hosting would probably gladly donate/contribute; people caring about the convenience paired with the brand name could just continue paying for the SaaS version.
I'm happy with Pocket. Not a hardcore user of this type of tools, just need some place to save interesting articles that I read and want to read.
But one feature that I will like on Pocket, and an AI feature that I think will be actually useful and not just hype, is segment my articles (readed/to be read) by broad categories. I don't have time to manually add categories. This tool have something like that?
Is the app also handling PDF documents for the reader mode? I made an app related to this for iOS called ReaderView where you can also highlight your read for later pages, including PDF documents. (No images are preserved for pdf files yet, only the text)
No pagination. That is such an important feature for me in general, since it's much more comfortable way for me to read. And, since I would want to put this on an Android e-ink device, pagination is essential.
Instapaper has been in maintenance mode for years, yet it has workable pagination, and none of the competitors do.
What I'm looking for is more of a solution to save a webpage as it is. Kind of like Internet Archive but better for individual pages. The thing with Internet archive is some things stop working, like mobile view etc
Perhaps ArchiveBox[0] will work for you? A self-hosted archiver to save websites in various formats. Has a section on that page for alternatives as well that might work too.
Singlefile [1] works pretty well for me for that use case.
It has the added advantage that the file format is just plain HTML, and together with “reader mode” in most browsers, it’s a great way to save long-form text or other mostly static pages for later reference.
It obviously doesn’t work for very dynamic pages, let alone web apps.
You can also use Zotero paired with the Zotero Connector Chrome/Firefox extension for this, I use Zotero as my document archival in addition to my academic citation manager. The Zotero Connector saves any PDF or web page opened in your browser to a local PDF/HTML file, and for HTML under the hood is uses the SingleFile extension to package the whole web page, images and all, into just one file.
It works well - now I'm just looking for a good way to annotate/highlight the local HTML/PDF/ePUB files cross-OS cross-platform. KOReader (https://github.com/koreader/koreader) works pretty well for this with its new hash-based storage option.
In addition to the various tools mentioned elsewhere sometimes saving the page as markdown in Joplin with their page saving tool is the best way for further use
In addition to archivebox and singlefile/singlefilez, I'd recommend scoop[0] and archiveweb/webrecorder[1]. Both create WACZ format archives using a browser which has slightly better fidelity than the way archivebox creates WARCs (using wget). There's also Save Page WE[2][3] which does something similar to singlefile.
This is what grabbed my attention most. Current means of deployment are a bit convoluted at best. It looks like they're on a path to a clean docker deployment that can truly be self hosted but they aren't quite there yet.
Yeah not actually this post, but another post that generated a lot of user's running huge imports of their libraries from other services, which unfortunately are not 100% isolated yet.
Curious if the traffic was from the Verge's article[0] yesterday? That's where I heard first about Omnivore, and presumably where this HN post came from
Yeah I think so. Honestly we don't really have much in terms of analytics but based on timing it was earlier than hacker news. I think the verge users were more likely to initiate a migration from Pocket or Instapaper. Imports can be quite intensive if we have to fetch the content, especially because a number of older sites might not exist anymore and timeout.
When we started I liked the concept of the mono repo. Things like a client update landing in the same commit as it's API requirements and doc changes all sounded great.
I still think there are some pros of the mono repo, but definitely some cons as well. Especially for people trying to work on just a small bit of the code.
This seems to be a good alternative for evernotes, my only hesitation to switch would be migrating existing notes, does ominvore support migration from evernote ?
As far as I know Omnivore is not a note app like Evernotes is. You could link Omnivore to your notes app to export highlights and such. I believe they maintain a plugin for Obsidian and Notion.
After installing across 3 platforms and testing it out, it works as advertised, looks nice, and doesn't seem to cost anything (yet). Tough to find software "application" offerings like this.
I saw their pricing page, but I’m a little confused. Do they have funding? Is this someone’s passion project that they are paying for out of their own pocket? I’m unsure how or why it’s free right now?
From the list of features it seems to have a web-app, iOS native, android native, and you can host it yourself... What... what more do you really want? Also, what does "application" mean to you?
What do you mean? I looked through both, and they are both very easy to set up. Especially if you ignore the build documentations for wallabag which suggest OS level install of PHP, and do it with containers instead.
So, if you want to try it out, both are identical. 1. Clone, 2. docker-compose up.
So now, it's just a question of when the other shoe drops and they look at monetization. How much will it cost, what will the free version lose, what data of mine will be sold, etc? As long as its good enough and stays true to what appears to be its current vision, I can't see why I wouldn't pay for it, so it's just a matter of trusting that it will stay good over time.