Need a Read Later App

General
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@danmills7 @others

The good links is released today in its second version. The long awaited highlighting feature is implemented now. You can highlight parts of the saved text and add your own comments to each highlight. Furthermore you can build now your own template for markdown export. I assume that with a shortcut it probably will be possible to send the exported markdown note directly to bear.

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Another Omnivore user here. It has a very clean presentation. It also allows for article-level notes in addition to highlight notes, tagging, rss, and voice reader.

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I came here hoping this was being discussed. I love good links and have been waiting for a good native way to get readwise>obsidian capabilities. If anyone has written a shortcut and get default Markdown please share

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I am using Reader by Readwise and exporting highlights manually as needed. Let me explain:

  • I used Bear for MANY years back in the day and then switched to Obsidian. I liked Obsidian OK, but it did just not work for me on mobile and iPad (way too slow and clunky) so recently switched back to Bear.
  • When using Obsidian, I had the Readwise sync feature enabled. I thought it was great, except…I RARELY used what I imported via the the sync feature!
  • Even though I work in research and spend my day reading articles and using them in my work, only about 5% of what I read and saved in Reader actually ended up being used somewhere. This meant that my Obsidian vault accumulated a lot of junk.
  • Part of my switch back to Bear was also to simplify things. Obsidian has a lot of cool features that are fun to play around with, but I did not need or use most of them. This included importing stuff.

My workflow now is as follows: I write and take notes in Bear. I read and highlight things in Reader. If I have an article in Reader that really needs to be linked to a note, I can easily export the highlights from that article in Reader to Bear. Then I can link to that information as needed.

Reader has some excellent features that I have not found in any other RIL app, including the ability to highlight PDFs, save YouTube video transcripts, and parse articles nicely from a variety of sources. I also compared how it exports highlights to Goodlinks and other apps and Reader’s format was (to me) preferable.

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Noticed that bear will pick up where you left when you are reading a note of imported web content. Very nice! Makes Bear itself a nice solution for RIL.

1 Like
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Can any Good Links or MarkMark users tell me how they get things out of these apps and into Bear?

Both use the share menu, but I can’t find a share to bear option (nor do I find it listed on the share sheet as an option)

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I am not using MarkMark at all because it seems somehow unfinished. In good links there is a menu -> file -> export highlights ... command which exports the highlights to plain text, markdown or pdf. You also can export the whole article rather than all the highlights and comments. To create a template for export go to the settings -> highlights.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to import the markdown file created in this way directly into bear. You would have to import the markdown file from bear in an additional step. Maybe someone can help you with a shortcut that makes that step a little bit more convenient.