It's been a real busy week in Skyreader land! We now have saved searches (building on last update's full-text search), support for PDFs and EPUBs along with a revamped library, notifications of @semble.so connections being made on your saved articles, and a bunch more.

Saved Search

Saved Searches are a supporter feature that let you create a channel filtered to show articles that match a specific search query. They are a great way to stay on top of a particular topic across all your subscriptions and work on RSS, standard.site, newsletters, links your Bluesky follows share, and all your saved items.

You can make one by creating a new channel, selecting the sources you want the search to run over, and then entering a search query:

Items are shown in the channel with the matched words highlighted so you get a sense of the context.

PDFs/EPUBs

Supporters can now upload and save PDFs and EPUBs to your library. Just drag in a file or use the File tab of the Add to Skyreader dialog.

PDFs can be viewed in their original formatting or with just the text extracted (more convenient for reading on mobile but it doesn't work perfectly for all PDFs).

Of course you can make highlights and notes for both PDFs and EPUBs just like normal articles (and highlights stay consistent between text and original mode in PDFs).

The Library

With the addition of PDFs and EPUBs it became clear the existing method of managing saved articles needed to be reworked. Previously the Saved list had an inbox/archive workflow, which worked fine as a read-it-later list but was limited for actually organizing your collection of articles.

Now all your saved items go into the "Library", which has two views you can toggle between: the Queue and the Shelf. The Queue is the classic read-it-later inbox/archive workflow where all your saved articles initially land. If you want to keep something around after you read it, you add it to the Shelf (uploaded PDFs/EPUBs always land in the shelf).

The Shelf lets you organize everything that matters to you into collections. Collections are named groups of articles/pdfs/epubs that let you quickly filter to just the reference materials you need.

At the moment PDFs/EPUBs/collections are all stored privately on the Skyreader servers but with atproto spaces soon you'll be able to (optionally) make them more social.

Semble Connections

So this is lowkey my favorite feature. While you sleep, people on @semble.so are doing incredible sensemaking work by creating connections between articles. Previously Skyreader could show you these connections but you had to check each article's discussion panel.

Now the home view and the library shelf have a "New connections" lane that shows new connections made by people on Semble for every article you've saved. It shows who made the connection along with how it's connected (supports, opposes, leads to, etc.) and in one tap you can open or save the connected article in Skyreader and start forming your own connections.

Note that you can see new connections even if you don't use Semble because Skyreader just checks the public links people are making on Semble against the links you've saved in Skyreader.

This is an incredible way of discovering new ideas based on what you are already reading. Harness the sensemaking power of everyone!

YouTube Transcripts

Saved YouTube videos now come with a timestamped transcript that auto-advances as you watch. Each timestamp is a link you can jump to.

This is particularly great for highlighting and taking notes as you watch.

And More

• You can add your Bluesky likes and bookmarks as sources. Great for adding articles to your library while doomscrolling
• Images in articles now expand when you tap them
• Table of contents for articles, EPUBs, and PDFs
• Discussion panel reworked to load faster and look nicer
• Channel editor redesigned to be less confusing
• YouTube channel subscriptions are more reliable
• Export your saves/highlights/notes as markdown or BibTeX
• Performance improvements so loading and interactions should be snappier
• Many bugs squashed

As always if you run into any issues or have suggestions for how to improve the new features let me know on the feedback board!