Winter 2020 Updates

We’ve been quietly shipping all kinds of new features throughout 2020. Aside from wishing you & yours a merry conclusion to this crazy year, we want to make sure you're taking full advantage of everything Readwise has to offer!

Let’s get into it:

🎨 Readwise Brand — Believe it or not, we originally shipped Readwise in 2017 without a logo and we never bothered to make one... until now! We hope you like it 🤞 (props @sara)

👩‍🎨 Massive Redesign — Along with the logo, we developed a whole new design system and overhauled our web & mobile apps. Let us know how it works for you 😁 (props @artem @sara @dan)

📤 Export Integrations — You can now automatically sync your highlights with a variety of note-taking apps including Roam, Notion, and Evernote. There's also now a bulk Markdown option for Obsidian and others. (props @mitch @tristan)

💰 Cheaper Sync — For those of you who primarily use Readwise to export to Notion, Roam, or Evernote, we will soon ship an "instant syncing" process for our Full tier customers. As part of this, we will move the export integration feature as you know it today to Readwise Lite (lower price).

📥 New Sources — We continuously add additional sources from which you can import highlights including:

🔄 Public API — In addition to our hand-coded integrations, we now offer a public API which developers have started to harness for all kinds of creative applications including Airr, Command Browser, AnnotateTV, Notado, and Worldbrain Memex. (props @tadek @tristan)

🍎 Apple Books — Our MacOS app was seriously busted, but we just shipped a brand new, completely rewritten app you can use to quickly import all your Apple Book highlights. (props @mitch)

💨 Database Performance — We reached the point where certain database queries were getting a little sluggish, but thanks to some backend wizardry, you hopefully notice the entire app is now much faster! (props @tadek)

🆘 Help Center/FAQ — Our product became sufficiently deep that we needed to migrate to a proper help desk solution with a robust FAQ where you can find answers to most of your questions. (props @dan @angie @tristan)

🤙 Customer Support — We started receiving more emails than we could handle so we were lucky enough to bring on our first rockstar customer support specialist who has brought our average response time to under one day. (props @angie)

📕 Edit Metadata — To accommodate messier import sources such as PDFs and web articles, we added an option for you to clean up the title, author, cover image, and category of each item. (props @tadek)

✂️ Edit Highlights — In addition to editing a book or article's metadata, you can also edit the highlight text directly to shorten passages, clean up broken formatting, and add context. (props @mitch)

🖍 Hyperhighlighting — As part of editing highlights, you can also add Markdown formatting such as bold, italic, and — neatest of all — highlights to your highlights (what we call hyperhighlighting). (props @mitch)

🍏 iOS Mobile App — We officially shipped the iOS mobile app this year and continue to add improvements including an Action Extension for saving highlights from your mobile browser and (very soon!) a nifty iOS 14 widget. (props @arek @tristan)

👽 Android Mobile App — We also ported our iOS mobile app to Android in full. (props @arek)

This list doesn't include dozens of small improvements and hundreds of bug fixes!

🥁 COMING UP

Here's a preview of just some of the features on our near-term roadmap:

Themed Reviews — Create custom reviews based on "themed" subsets of your highlights
Precision Frequencies — Control precisely when your Daily Review and/or Themed Reviews are delivered
Stats & Notifications — Track all kinds of reading & review stats and recover streaks
Web Highlighter Extension — Highlight websites natively in the browser with no middle step

Once we ship all these feature, then we begin work on Something Big™️

💪 RECRUITING

This year we began growing our fully distributed Readwise team from just Tristan & Dan to Tristan, Dan, Meghan, Tadek, Angie, & Artem with part-time help from Mitch, Sara & Arek.

As of December 2020, we're still on the hunt for two more team members:

Principal Product Designer — Will design the UI of a new, productivity-oriented reading app from design to delivery (more here)

Senior Front-End Developer — Will lead development of a blazingly fast, productivity-oriented reading app from design to delivery

If you or someone you know would be a good fit for both Readwise and one of these roles, please please let us know by emailing hello@readwise.io!