I have a habit of highlighting while reading. It has been my habit since high school, and helped me remember the important content when I was prepping for a quiz.
Now that school is over, I don’t have to remember all the details while reading, but I still run into those occasions when I want to highlight phrases just because I want to remember them or share with others. Amazon knew about these needs, so they implemented the feature in their Kindle App, quite nicely.
Nowadays, I read more on Twitter newsfeed or Safari browser than on I do Kindle, but somehow there is no way to highlight there. Moreover, when I share articles with friends by email, Twitter or Facebook, I want them to focus on what I think is interesting. How do I do that? I copy the phrase on Safari, tap on ‘Share’ button, paste the phrase, and send an email. At least four cumbersome steps. It gets far worse if I have more than one sentence to emphasize.
Of course, we did a research on the existing applications. First, there’s Repaper Web and PDF Highlighter. Don’t get me wrong. It is a great application, but the UI looks old, and there is no way to send articles directly to Repaper from other apps.
Instapaper another great application loved by many, but I have to pay $2.99 per month or $29.99 a year if I want to make more than five highlights a month. It’s a bit steep price to pay only for the highlighting feature.
So we built an app, called the Liner.
Liner: a fine paintbrush used for painting thin lines and for outlining.
So, what’s the Liner App? It’s a lightweight, simple app you can use whenever you want to highlight something. Think about it as kindlifying web pages. You either launch the app first and go to the link (that is copied in the clipboard), or use the Safari browser extension to launch the app right away.
Here’s how you do it. It’s the same user interface you use when you select phrases on Safari browser. Tab and hold the word or sentence you want to highlight, and then choose the highlight color. If you want to remove a highlight, tab and hold the highlight, and tap the ‘x’ button.
You can share your highlights through email, Twitter, Facebook, or save them in your Evernote account. Highlighted pages are stored in the Collection, so you can go back and refer to them whenever.
Not only can you search for the highlights, but you can also share them publicly, so others benefit from your highlights as well. Going forward, you’ll be able to follow others’ highlights and discover new and inspiring articles.
It all sounds like a simple idea, so you might think, “How hard can it be?”
Well, it is one thing just to build an app that works. It is another thing, however, to build a great application that solves a problem in a beautiful way. As Jeff Weiner put it, one of the qualities of a great product is “delivering on a singular value proposition in a world-class way”. That’s where it gets incredibly hard and time-consuming since you have to go through lots of iterations for perfection.
In the next article, I will talk about how we iterated from one UI to another, and explain our thought process.
Coming up: How We Built Liner App
