Reader Public Beta Update #5 (Quoteshots, Snapshots, Notebooks, and more)

I'm excited to hit send on public beta newsletter #5 with our latest Readwise Reader updates 🙂

As a reminder, I write this newsletter every one to two months covering features we've just shipped, bugs we've recently fixed, and what we intend to work on next. I also share tips & tricks to help you get the most out of Reader. If you prefer to read these in-app, you can subscribe to the private RSS feed linked here.

I'm a few weeks behind on this latest edition, but at least I have a good excuse: on May 31st, my wife and I welcomed the newest member of the Readwise family into the world (Logan). I'd also like to congratulate my teammate Eleanor on the arrival of her second child (Lilah) on July 28th!

If you yourself have a little one at home or are expecting, reply to this email with your mailing address and we'll send you one of our limited edition Readwise onesies (pic). We've only got 15 left, so first come first serve.

Speaking of new team members, we've got a new job posting which I'll mention in the farewell: Generalist Startup Writer. If you or someone you know might be a good fit, we'd love to hear from you!

Onto the product updates:

• 🖼️ Quoteshots – You can now convert highlights to beautiful images on both web & mobile. ️
• 📷 PDF Snapshots – You can now highlight images, tables, and other graphics in PDFs using a "snapshot" feature. We've also shipped several quality of life upgrades to the mobile PDF experience.
• 📓 Notebooks – You can now interact with just your highlights for a particular document in a dedicated Notebook view.
• 📜 Long Tweets – You can now save tweets longer than 280 characters to Reader as if they were blog posts.
• 📱 Mobile Appearance – Many aspects of the mobile reading experience have been refined including an upgrade to the appearance panel, darker dark mode, more font settings, and firmer side panels.
• 🖥️ RSS Syncing – You should now see new RSS items appear within seconds of posting and many of the edge case feeds such as Daring Fireball fixed.

Quoteshots 🖼️

The term "quoteshot" (or "textshot") is a made up word referring to a feature that converts highlighted text into beautiful raster images. For years, this has been a moment of delight in Readwise 1.0. Now it's a part of Reader too!

To generate a quoteshot, open the more menu (...) on a highlight and select Share highlight as image. You'll then be able to select from 6 different styles such as Classic, Scribble, Fresh, Modern, Gradient, and my personal favorite, Unstyled. Each of these has dark & light modes, serif & sans serif, various color options, and 3 different aspect ratios leading to hundreds of permutations.

You should experiment to find the aesthetic you like best, but here's the example from above to give you an idea:

Props to Jesse & Artem. In the future, we'll be adding more styles including one that works well with cover images and book covers.

PDF Snapshotting 📷

The term "snapshot" is another (kind of) made up word referring to a feature that converts a rectangular selection in a PDF to a highlighted image. Basically, you can now highlight images, tables, charts, and more in PDFs!

As of this newsletter, you'll only find snapshotting on web, but Mati is very close to shipping the feature on mobile too.

Speaking of mobile PDFs, we've also shipped a bevy of smallish upgrades which I'll list here:

• Table of contents – PDFs don't always have tables of content, but when they do, they now appear in the left sidebar.
• Thumbnails – You can now navigate PDFs using thumbnails.
• Easier to tap-in UI – Activating the UI on PDFs is now much less glitchy, particularly on the first page of a PDF where it was sometimes much too finnicky.
• Download with annotations – You can now download annotated versions of PDFs on mobile for sharing into other apps.
• Fixed line breaks in highlights – First a superconducting metal, then a cure for cancer, now a way to highlight PDFs without random line breaks? At this point, no one can convince me these UAPs aren't extraterrestrial. Note that this alien technology only works when highlighting a PDF directly, not when highlighting the text view of a PDF (completely different tech tree, sorry).

Props to Mati for grinding on PDFs for the past two or three months.

Notebooks 📓

The concept of a Notebook has been in Reader since day 1. For each document, it's the companion section where all your notes and highlights are collected, inspired by the skeuomorph of writing reading notes inside the back cover of a paper book. Until recently, this Notebook was confined to the right sidebar, but now it's been elevated to a first-class feature enabling you to focus on a document's highlights without distraction.

This feature is a HUGE step towards recreating Readwise 1.0 functionality on top of Reader's abstractions. Notebooks are how we'll soon import your non-Reader highlights, create views of all highlights with a given tag, and so on.

This is just shipped, so it's still web-only and might have some edge cases we missed. Let us know if you find anything that's not working as expected.

Props to Mitch & Rena.

Long Tweets 🐤

A few months ago, Twitter (in this house, it's Twitter) added the ability to write tweets of any length. Tweets exceeding the classic 280 character limit are collapsed with a Show more link. For a few months, these special tweets foiled our Twitter integration, but no more: you can now save long tweets to Reader as if they were threads or blog posts!

Aside from adding support for long tweets, maintaining our various Twitter integrations the past few months has been like that meme of the guy squeegeeing the ocean.

But props to Bruno, Tristan, & Tadek for holding down the fort.

RSS Refactor

As a backend upgrade, there's no corresponding screenshot to share here, but Tadek has completed a huge refactor of Reader's RSS syncing logic. As a result, you should now see new items populate in your Feed within seconds of being added to their respective RSS feeds, on par with classic RSS feed readers.

Tadek has also gone and manually fixed several of the edge case feeds that initially broke our abstractions – most notably, that pesky yet popular John Gruber and his Daring Fireball RSS feed.

Mobile Appearance 🛝

Like PDFs, we've been quietly shipping a bunch of small quality of life features to the mobile reading experience that collectively amount to their own section.

• Edit metadata – You can now edit the metadata of a document such as title, author, and summary in the mobile apps.
• Darker dark mode – Dark mode is now much darker with less of a bluish undertone.
• Firmer side panels – The left and right side panels now slide out on top of the document rather than pushing it left or right giving the content a "firmer" feel.
• Redesigned table of contents – The table of the contents residing in the left side panel now has a more elegant UI with collapsible subheadings.
• New appearance panel – The appearance settings have been elevated out of the more actions section and the menu itself has been redesigned to accommodate features like switching from PDF mode to text mode and (soon) pagination.
• New screen awake setting – You can now toggle a Keep screen awake option in the mobile preference to override your system settings and ensure the screen never locks while you're reading.
• Larger font sizes – Every time we increase the max font-size setting, we think to ourselves, "Lol okay there's no way anyone would actually want a bigger font than this." And every time, we're wrong. Accordingly, the max font-size now goes to 11 (Spinal Tap reference). It's ridiculous. Maybe 10 words on the screen on an iPhone 13 Max. That said, I've actually used this Brobdingnagian setting myself while getting in some Huberman-Attia Zone 2 exercise on the rower or echo bike with TTS. Talk about killing two birds with one stone. And yes, that is a real word meaning gigantic.

Coming Up 🔜

• Performance – App performance remains our #1 priority as company. Unfortunately, the massive refactor we've been working on is all or nothing. It can't be shipped progressively. Fortunately, Adam is very close to having this ready.
• Pagination – We're about to ship pagination to mobile which enables you to read a document in left-to-right pages rather than in vertical scroll. We've been using Artem's test build internally for the past week and it's spectacular. Particularly for long-form reading.
• Readwise 1.0 – As mentioned above, Notebooks set the stage for a series of Readwise 1.0 features now underway including importing non-Reader highlights, viewing collections of highlights, and more.
• New Newsletter – Last but not least, we're about to start sending a weekly newsletter containing the most highlighted documents in Readwise. Our users are among the most elite readers on the internet, and it turns out that the content which they (ie you) actually read & highlight is extremely high signal.

Minor Improvements 🦐

• Bruno collaborated with the good folks at Tana to create our newest and most advanced export integration to date
• Hannes & Dan significantly overhauled the Ghostreader completion prompts – which were originally created before ChatGPT was even a thing (hard to remember) – to behave nicely with the GPT-3.5 chat model
• Artem made a series of performance improvements to the mobile apps, particularly when taking actions on an open document such as highlighting
• Artem improved the smoothness of scrolling the visual indicator while listening on mobile
• Artem & Jesse added some new fonts to the mobile app
• Artem improved the behavior of text input boxes on Android to fix issues with scrolling
• Réna added better formatting of numbers and times across the web & mobile apps
• Réna & Artem improved the smoothness of the loading screen when opening a document on mobile
• Tristan & Bruno improved the Document CREATE endpoint of the Reader API so it now supports setting a document note
• Tristan & Bruno improved added an updatedAfter parameter to the Document LIST endpoint enabling you to fetch only the documents updated since the last sync (with code samples)
• Bruno is almost done implementing Oauth to both the Reader and Readwise public APIs (reach out to us if you’re interested in using it)
• Tadek & Krzys massively improved Substack parsing

Bug Fixes 🐛

• Fixed a major Android bug where the app would freeze on launch
• Fixed a TTS bug where the audio could randomly speed up or slow down
• Fixed a TTS bug where the audio would sometimes desync with the visual indicator
• Fixed a TTS bug where audio would stutter on start
• Fixed a mobile bug where long documents (especially EPUBs) would inadvertently set reading progress set to 100%
• Fixed a Safari extension bug where signing into Readwise wouldn’t work properly
• Fixed a mobile bug where footnotes/links in EPUBs would show an alert instead of navigating to the correct location
• Fixed a mobile bug where custom swipe actions weren't saving across sessions for some users
• Fixed a Chrome/Arc extension where selecting a loooot text could crash the browser (shout out to the Arc team for bring this to our attention)
• Fixed an iPad issue where the iPad sidebar could be accidentally swiped in
• Fixed an issue where some t.co links weren't saving when using the iOS share sheet
• Fixed a web app bug where the PageDown key didn’t work after making a note
• Fixed an Android bug where bold system fonts were distorting the display
• Fixed a mobile bug with the Literata font
• Fixed a web app bug where removing a tag sometimes required clicking the x button twice
• Fixed a web app bug where the keyboard shortcut to slow down YouTube video playback (,) wasn’t working
• Fixed a mobile bug where tapping the bottom menu UI could open images underneath the buttons
• Fixed a web app bug where the "more actions" menu would sometimes not open
• Fixed an Android bug where sometimes a black bar would cover the left side of the mobile app screen
• Fixed a mobile bug where tags containing the slash character would behave improperly
• Fixed an issue where highlights made with the browser extension weren’t overlaying on the clean document in many cases
• Fixed an exporting bug where Kindle highlights sometimes wouldn’t trigger an export after syncing automatically
• Fixed some exporting bugs affecting Obisidan and Logseq where there would sometimes be duplicates or missing items
• Fixed an exporting bug where a new highlight sometimes wouldn’t sync to Evernote
• Fixed a PDF bug where sometimes hyperlinks would render with improper colored rectangles
• Fixed a web app bug where the header would cover the top of PDFs incorrectly
• Fixed a PDF bug where the copy highlight shortcut wasn't working
• Fixed a web app bug where the "Apply action to all above/below" commands weren't including the focused document
• Fixed a bug with the Atkinson Hyperlegible font
• Fixed an export bug where the {{date}} variable wasn't working in header templates
• Fixed a web app bug where the app would flash "Document not found" after deleting an opened document
• Fixed a bug where the filtering syntax wasn't respecting lowercase boolean operators (such as "and" and "or")
• Fixed a mobile bug where adding a document tag via the share sheet would create duplicates
• Fixed a mobile bug where newly deleted highlights in PDFs would stay visible until the app was refreshed
• Fixed a web app bug where keyboard shortcuts would sometimes reset
• Fixed a web app bug where the OPML export of RSS feeds would sometimes encode broken characters
• Fixed parsing issues where documents would sometimes show too much whitespace
• Fixed a web app bug where the shortcut + wasn't capturing the numpad +
• Fixed a mobile bug where receiving OS-level notifications would pause TTS
• Fixed an issue where users with large numbers of deleted documents would experience memory issues and crashes
• Fixed an email parsing issue where the formatting and sizing of images were significantly distorted
• Fixed a mobile bug where some swipes would get "stuck"
• Fixed a Ghostreader bug where the response would inadvertently overwrite existing highlight notes
• Fixed a web app bug where archiving items using the mouse sometimes showed an "Already in Archive" message even when the document was not yet archived
• Fixed a mobile bug where selecting text would sometimes inadvertently slide the left and right side panels
• Fixed a mobile bug where marking documents as Seen would sometimes improperly set them as the "Currently reading" document
• Fixed an Android bug where the mobile app would crash on start for some users
• Fixed a mobile bug where some RSS feed URLs would crash the app
• Fixed a web app bug where exporting document highlights wasn't working properly on Firefox
• Fixed an EPUB bug where images would sometimes render incorrectly
• Fixed a web app bug where the top bar header would sometimes show a border line incorrectly when scrolled to the top
• Fixed an RSS bug where The Atlantic feed would show HTML markup in document titles
• Fixed a web app bug with the zoom shortcuts
• Fixed a web app bug where Twitter avatars would sometimes show as ovals
• Fixed a mobile bug where URLs missing an http start couldn't be saved

Creator Content 📼

CortexFutura

In case you missed it above, Readwise now has an official integration with Tana. The inimitable CortexFutura wasted no time in producing a video 🙏

William Meller

If you’re still thinking through your end-to-end workflow, agile coach William Meller just dropped two tutorials on how he uses Reader and Readwise.

Sergio Petisca

In his latest tutorial, Sergio shows you how to use your Reader tags to supercharge your Obsidian workflow.

Brandon Boswell

Readwise isn’t the star of Brandon's latest video, but plays a supporting role in his new Boox Palma review. (Unlocking these Boox eink devices through the performance refactor above is something our entire team lusts for! It's only a matter of time...)

Jessika Rocha

Shoutout and muito obrigado to Jessika Rocha, who just created the first Reader tutorial in Portuguese! 🙏🏻

Farewell 👋

Last update, we posted roles for a Customer Success & Technical Writer and Senior Growth Engineer. While we're still hunting on the engineer front, we're delighted to welcome Cayla Fronhofer to the team as our technical writer!

As mentioned in the intro, we've got a new open role for a Generalist Startup Writer. We have some immediate, recurring publications to own and once we establish the right relationship, the writing opportunities are unbounded. If you or someone you know might be a good fit, we'd love to hear from you!

Thank you again for your continued support and please reach out any time 🙏
– Dan, Tristan, & the Readwise team