Not an immediate suggestion, but maybe soon. Readwise announced it was working on Readwise Reader, and the notes mention a browser extension for “web highlighting”. Could be worth waiting for.
For now, I used hypothes.is – the login is friction, but it only takes one click to log in. In the background, however, Readwise does not regularly sync with hypothes.is, unless I explicitly force a sync.
In the mean time, I’ve created a set of rules in OpenIn so that pages from domains which I most frequently want to highlight (Substack, Stratechery, Every.to etc) automatically open in Brave instead of Safari, so that I can use the Readwise browser extension.
I stick to Chromium but if you have Popclip on MacOS then there’s a Readwise plugin that works systemwide (but probably missing some extended info you get with the Chrome extension).
You need the PopClip app, and the Readwise extension for PopClip, and your Readwise Access Token. The Token gets installed into the Readwise extension for PopClip the first time you install that PopClip extension. Otherwise, no macOS app for Readwise – PopClip sends the data to your Readwise account on the internet.
That’s weird. It didn’t ask me for the token. When I click it just makes an error sound. But does anyone know whether it is possible to open settings and maybe even extension settings? Nevermind, re-started and Popclip appeared in the menubar
You cannot send data to Readwise via their API without the token – otherwise no way for Readwise to associate the data stream PopClip is transmitting with your account. So, something else is going on.
Pretty slick innit? I use the Chrome extension a lot by habit but Popclip is great cuz it works systemwide. Sadly you won’t get much metadata outside the browser (last I checked) but its great to have!
I just tried to download the Readwise popclip extension and it is throwing up an error when trying to open it. Has anyone else had a problem similar (it is happening for the todoist extension as well).
I’m prepared to write it off as that I’m on MacOS Beta if need be for now.
PopClip is in the process of making a lot of changes to be ready for macOS 12 and future improvements to the extension – I had the same issue with Readwise failing at first. The most recent beta version will work with the extensions you’re having issues with. What I did was get in touch with the developer (support@pilotmoon.com) and get the beta.
I’m thinking about how this pop clip script might be adapted for Alfred Universal Actions (I don’t use pop clip) and maybe some extra logic could be added so that if one isn’t adding content from a browser, it prompts for you to add more metadata. I’ve done something similar with Drafts (adapting this action somewhat) but would be more useful as an Alfred universal action. I may try to hack on this in a few weeks when I have time.
Or prompt to edit the metadata before committing it to Readwise? That would be helpful – often the PopClip action will fill in “author” with the name of the website, so editing the author field to the real name of the author before committing the data to Readwise would be great.
You don’t need an extension for that. Simply install the bookmarklet (see official instructions) and when you want to add highlights, just click the bookmarklet on your favorite bar and the Hypothesis sidebar will appear (it even works on iOS). Indeed this is my primary use case.
Yes and I guess that’s possibly due to Safari’s overkill sensitivity against cross-site caches. However once logged in you don’t actually need to provide credentials every time - tap “login” and Safari will redirect to hypothesis, when it realizes you have already logged in and redirect back with the highlighter ready to go. True, it’s still annoying, but at least acceptable to me and faster than, say, save to Instapaper and make highlights there.
The official Readwise iOS/iPadOS app works on M1 Macs! I just installed it from the app store on my MacBook Pro, and then enabled the Readwise share extension in the Safari share sheet. Seems to work exactly how you’d want it to.
Afaik, this is not ‘officially’ supported (It’s not mentioned on the readwise website: maybe even they’re unaware it works?)
