👋 Hi everybody! Thanks @eriktorenberg! Andrew from Highly here.
Highlights are the killer way to share stories with friends (online and off). And since we mostly read on our phones, we need to highlight there, too. So we’re pleased as heck to share Highly for iOS, version one, here today. Now you can highlight wherever you’re reading, including *within* darn near every app on your phone. (See also: Highly for web, Chrome and Safari).
Read our POV on How to Highlight the Internet: https://medium.com/highlight-to-...
And a pseudo-thinkpiece on how the highlight layer will make the web more useful: https://medium.com/highlight-to-...
We’re stoked for your questions, comments and ideas!
@covrter Hi Andrew,
have you heard about https://this.cm/ and that the service is shutting down next month?
Since your aims are pretty similar (making it easier to recommend readworthy articles), it would be interesting if both services would collab.
@covrter any chance the highlighter itself will be open sourced? more so interested on the web. I've been working on a highlighter for the web that could be plugged in to any site, to be open sourced, but still have a ways to go before I can put it out there for folks to use. Great product by the way, very slick!
I'm *so* excited for this. This was something I wanted to build about 1.5y ago and even kicked off the very prelim designs for it but pushed aside.
To see this is honestly a day-maker. I spend so much time ticked at the difficulties of finding hacks to highlight, screenshot and share gems of text I think others would be interested in. Not to mention the difficulty that comes with an inability to consistently highlight in certain apps.
Seriously huge kudos on this. I'm happy Highly exists! It's beautiful.
@covrter for sure! The only thing that would prevent me from consistently using it is how long it takes to convert each article to be ready for highly. Also, the conversion % screen not automatically dismissing once it's finished was slightly funky. I expected it to go away but then realized I have to X out myself. Aside from that, it's awesome.
@nivo0o0 I wish Apple allowed developers to build add-ons to the system highlight pop-over UI like shown in this animation. As it is now, you have to tap Share, then wait for the sharesheet to slide up, then scroll to the app you want, then tap the app.
@theleovogel Leo! This is actual footage :) of my actual thumb in our actual app. The flow you describe is required to enable Highly, and once you've done that, the Highly "!" appears in your context/popover menu.
Highly is a great app. I've been using it since beta and it has been polished so well all along. This really fills a gap between twitter and Pocket. It's kind of lazy to share article links on twitter & Slack, so this is a way to not only prove you have read the article, but your colleagues will appreciate you saved them time (the app even tells them how many minutes to read the highlights versus the entire article). Compared to little engagement before, I find most Highly articles I share are read by my audience.
Strongly recommended.
@rstephens That last sentence — "I find most Highly articles I share are read by my audience." — makes my day. That's the whole goal: actual connection.
One feature request - It'd be great If I can attach notes to the highlights I made (or did I fail to notice this feature?). Great stuff nevertheless, i've been waiting for someone to execute this idea :)
@wuebben "Attaching notes" is the proper direction to be heading for a highlighted web, but keep going from notes to links. We need to reconstitute the promise of the Web of the early 1990s (which wasn't quite realized) in which people could link to a spot in an article on another site. Back then, that only worked if the original writer placed anchor tags within their text (few did), so we never saw it take off. A layer atop the existing web, as you propose, would enable that cross-linking of which the WorldWide WEB is supposed to be composed! Don't give up! [Ebooks, unfortunately, will remain an impossible holdout. Only an all-encompassing repository like Scribd on steroids would suffice, something people would all join because everything's there (don't waste your time to check—Scribd only allows 3 books a month now, so it's useless for scholarship).]
This is so cool! Lately, I've been highlighting the hell out of my Kindle books and syncing them to Evernote (using Clippings.io). This is the missing link for how I can do this with articles/websites! Is the ability to export your highlights in the road map by chance? Totally willing to pay for that as a premium feature :)
@dathowitzer I have thought! Genius is a terrific web annotator where people can go deep and add detail to ... anything. It's amazing and makes the web better. Highly is for highlights only, in hopes to focus our friends' attention. Similar UI, divergent use cases.
See also "What It Ain't" here: https://medium.com/highlight-to-...
@covrter Well put. As a user of Genius, I'm already in love with the fact you've solved the "layer atop a web page" problem for mobile which should invariably stand you in a stronger place for the kind of adoption Genius just can't get without something similar. Really impressive and looking forward to seeing the community grow.
@arecenello If it doesn't ... let me know! Truthfully it's pretty good now and can get stupendously smooth as we build it out. I'd love to hear what works for you, and what's not quite there yet.
Maybe if the default mode for Highly users was to only load text and text and pictures for non Highly shares it would be the best for both worlds. Great tutorial, I like how it shares via text. Wondering what Safari and Chrome are waiting for to release something like this natively. You are ahead of your time!
Been using Highly.co for awhile and the iOS app for a bit too and the care and attention to detail is very high. It does one thing very well; highlight.
This has become my go to highlighting tool. Makes it so easy to share that fascinating tidbit from a Kindle book or Bloomberg article.
Really enjoyed your thought-piece on the highlight layer -- admit that I've never thought about it this way before.
Congrats on the launch, @covrter! Having been a fan for a while, I know you took your time to make sure the launch was just perfect. Can you talk about how you thought about what you needed to be ready for launch, and how that process played out in practice?
@eriktorenberg Great, hard question: when is the thing Good Enough to launch? For us, it was: do we make good on the core promise that you can highlight as you’re reading? Or from a jobs-to-do POV: does our imperfect execution already do a valuable-enough job that people will stick around and help us figure out how to perfect it? We’re guessing yes.
This guess is informed by lots and lots of user testing (much love to our patient, wonderful testers!). The core highlighting functionality was complete long before it was user-friendly-(enough) to ship.
This is a really great, well designed, effective product. Fits nicely between social, curation and bookmarking - would be great to see some functionality built out on the social side and categorisation tools.
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