Ryan Niman
John GruberProposed feature for Safari: Markup.
Highlights and notes, with Pencil support, as an overlay atop the original page. Personal, not public, but synced via iCloud. I’d use this every day.
T L HoladayNow I have to use Quick Notes for the first time, so I can appreciate your proposed feature’s value.
Matt Fusfield@gruber have you played with Arc? They have some interesting ideas somewhat along these lines that I’d love to see safari incorporate too.
@mattfusf I’ve played with Arc on and off for a while. I’m deeply impressed by their design and originality, but it just doesn’t fit my mental model for a browser should be arranged. I actually like Safari very much.
elle mundy@gruber would be interesting to see how it deals with page edits over time
Robert McNees@gruber I think about this all the time, but the various extensions I've tried just aren't worth it.
Jimmy Coyne@gruber +1 , and can they add that overlay feature to iBook as well.
Warren@gruber omg that would be awesome. Wonder how hard an app extension would be for that?
Dan Taylor@gruber would it save your annotations to the safari page and you’d have to like keep the tabs open? (Don’t make us have as many tabs open as you do😂) or have it like save to files?
Paul McGrane
stilescrisis
Stefan Scholl@gruber Sounds familiar.
David Hibbs@gruber I would absolutely use this as well! Great way for notes, highlights, and reminders.
BrianarySidewiki was killed because admins didn't want their sites "vandalized".
This has been tried once or twice since then, too.
@brianary Well that’s one reason why I’m proposing that the feature be personal, not shared.
@gruber Ah, yes.
Seems like a good Safari feature for parity with native Edge functionality, and some Firefox extensions.
Per Wikipedia entry and personal recollection, SideWiki was public. @gruber feature request is author-only.
Joey van der Poel@gruber that would be a killer feature 🤯
Eric J@gruber lots of startups tried this — albiet with sticky note uis — 10-15 years ago
@Eric_Neue I recall seeing and playing with some attempts at this. But I think it has to be built into the browser to work well. And I definitely want highlights, not just sticky notes. (But sticky notes are essential too.)
Colin Devroe@gruber I would really like this feature as well. To stay my hunger for this feature, a pretty nice Mac app called Shottr is what I use: https://shottr.cc
Shottr – screenshot app for pixel professionals
Shottr is a free macOS screenshot app with scrolling screenshots, OCR, annotation and measurement instruments.
Bryan Culver@gruber it could piggyback off of the Notes improvements. Make Markup an SDK to integrate to all apps? It would probably help a lot of students who don’t want to go all-in on Obsidian or other PKM tools.
@bryanculver Oh, definitely, would play off the features Apple already has for Notes and for Markup in images.
Rafa Campoamor 🇪🇺🌹@gruber I use an extension for highlighting but complete markup would be awesome!
Mathias Eichler
George Penston@gruber While it doesn’t address your desire for markup with pencil support, I’m find Readwise Reader doing a great job for highlighting on and off Safari. It’s also just a really well done app.
davis silis
James@gruber I thought this was already possible? I was sure I saw something *like* this in last years keynote.
Sumocat 🐈⬛@gruber What about the existing feature called Markup? Iterate on this or replace?
Moritz Sternemann
Josh Stevenson@gruber oh man. This would probably drastically improve my life.
PB Pro Clean@gruber been wanting this ever since the Apple Pencil came out! So many things Apple could improve with better pencil support
Space Invader@gruber I’d use it everyday and twice on Sunday.
marca56@gruber me too. I would want to be able export the markup and links to the actual text. Sort of a footnote style reference.
Gordon Meyer@gruber This is one of the reasons I am using Arc more and more. The “easel” feature is essentially this.
Gavin Nelson@gruber you get most of this right now (with a lot of tradeoffs) through Readwise Reader and it's A+. Should absolutely be a native + iCloud feature in Safari.
Michael Knepprath@mknepprath @gruber big +1 to this haha. same with hackernews articles. constantly driving me crazy.
@gn @gruber I'd love a functioning @daringfireball account over here. You can append `.rss` to any Mastodon profile URL to get the feed: https://mastodon.social/@mknepprath.rss
Greg Rogalski@gruber Instapaper
Don Melton@gruber We actually prototyped something like this over a decade ago but we didn't think anyone but you would use it.
Chris Finazzo@donmelton @gruber Mosaic, anyone? 😉
The “S” stands for supercomputing. 😂
Elliot Ronen@donmelton @gruber As a product person who would also use this on a regular basis, it always shocks me when a new browser includes fancy screenshot and sharing tools. (Lookin’ at you, Arc.)
Jason Allen 
@donmelton @gruber Maybe Apple News as well? Would definitely incentivize me to use my iPad for web browsing.
Maciej Chojnacki@donmelton @gruber Count me in then, I would kill for such feature. That’s two of us, how soon do you think you can ship it? 😁
Chris Coleman@donmelton @gruber Wasn't there a Firefox plugin or some service that did something similar, but public, circa 2004 or so? I seem to recall something about user notes totally covering every site for users of it almost instantly.
Bill Lloyd@Chris @donmelton @gruber yes! The web sites sued the pants off of them. It was more like 2000 than 2004.
Chris@donmelton @gruber I’ve wanted a system level “take notes about this” feature for years. Email, apps, webpages. I’d love to be able to attach a few notes/thoughts about all sorts of things. #allthenotes
Fabio Bracht@chriscioffi @donmelton @gruber Keep an eye on https://tana.inc — it’s on closed early access now, but I started using it a couple months ago and it has definitely become my second brain. It’s stupidly good.
Charanjit Chana 👋@donmelton @gruber this would be a great feature to have!
Marc Bizer
@odysseus @donmelton @gruber Readwise is outright transformative.
Along with Arc and Tana (https://tana.inc), it’s in the trifecta of apps that transformed my usage of the internet in the past year or so more than anything else in the past decade.
Jaap-Henk Hoepman (@xot)@odysseus @donmelton @gruber Not really ;-) https://blog.xot.nl/2021/05/12/readwise-unwise/index.html
Because of this I still convert ebooks and web pages that I want to keep and annotate to pdfs first. I want my annotations local, and not depend on availability/subscription to a service.
Because of this I still convert ebooks and web pages that I want to keep and annotate to pdfs first. I want my annotations local, and not depend on availability/subscription to a service.
@xot @donmelton @gruber The article you reference is outdated. Thanks to the Readwise to Logseq plug-in, highlights / notes appear automagically in my *local* Logseq journal entries. Works also with other PKM solutions (Roam, Obsidian…).
@odysseus @donmelton @gruber Thanks, I'll check that out. That still does not change the fact that Readwise itself turned a purely local problem (storing annotations) into a cloud based service.