December’s Updates from the Omnivore team and community

Latest updates on web and mobile, iOS beta, and some reading suggestions

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Greetings fellow Omnivores,

Welcome to our December newsletter, with app updates, community news, and reading recommendations.

If you stumbled upon this page and are confused, Omnivore is a free and open-source read-it-later service. You can sign up for a free account here.

Updates

PDF

In October we started doing updates on the PDF reader. We continued with those, and in the process, we added several new improvements:

• Keyboard shortcut improvements for the PDF reader on the web:

'u': up (go back to the library)

'e': archive this document

'#': delete this document

'h': highlight selected text (if any text is selected)

't': open sidebar

'i': edit document info

• PDFs will now always return to your most recently open page, rather than the furthest read page as before.

• In the PDF viewer, there’s a new thumbnail sidebar you can use to quickly scan documents.

• The toolbar in the PDF viewer can now be hidden in the display settings.

Label flair

A small feature, called label flair, replaces the system labels (RSS, Newsletter, Favorite, Pinned, and Recommended) with smaller icons. The search filters are not impacted by this change, but it makes for much better readability when an item has both system and user-created labels. Available on the web and mobile.

iOS Beta updates

The iOS Beta got quite a few updates.

• A new share extension view that makes it easier to add notes while saving, edit item metadata, and create labels

• Updated the label control to allow creating labels while typing (just hit enter to create a new label or add the existing named label)

• Fixed some bugs with setting labels while offline

• Fixed the error alert in text-to-speech

• Added a new preview of your notes to the library view, making it easier to see the notes you jotted down while saving an item

• Fixed some bugs with offline PDFs

• Added a "Downloaded" filter so you can see all the items that are ready for offline reading

• A new `following` tab

• The bottom reader buttons have been replaced with a toolbar that should be easier to operate

Discover all the updates in the dedicated article, here.

Backend

We made a large backend update that worked well, and no one noticed, which is the best way for a backend update to go. Internally we changed how we store a lot of our data and migrated everything to this new format. This change was made to help us scale, make creating complex filters simpler, and simplify self-hosting scenarios.

New search filters

After the backend work, we added three new filters:

is:reading: will return items that you have partially read.

wordsCount:<=1000: will return articles with less than 1001 words. 

wordsCount:>=1000: will return articles with more than 1000 words.

With the last two filters, you can now easily create saved searches such as "Short Reads" or "Long Reads".

Web labels side menu

We added two new interactions on the labels menu that will improve working with them. Now, when you click on the label, the menu will search for only that label. Also, now when you click on the checkbox, that label is added to the search list.

Android update

The last update on Android brings Chinese translation and Non-Feed Items saved searches. Non-Feed Items will show all items, including files, that are not from newsletters or RSS feeds.

Other

• We fixed an issue when saving with the PWA share extension wherein it would give an error message after the save.  

• We fixed unsubscribed items still showing in the left sidebar.

• Subscriptions are now sorted alphabetically in the subscriptions view.

• There's a new account page (tap your name in the dropdown) that allows editing your Name and username.  (the option to update the email is coming soon).

Community tips and integrations

It’s always nice when the community discovers new ways to use Omnivore. Mediapathic shared in our Discord how to save items from Feedbin, and on Reddit, Civil Exception wrote how to save your Kindle highlights to Omnivore. Also, Karol Podżerek has created a Raycast integration for Omnivore that allows easy searching of your saved items or saving of a URL.

Saving items from FeedBin to Omnivore

In FeedBin under Share and Save set up a Custom Service and just give it the URL https://omnivore.app/api/save?url=${url}

Save your Kindle highlights to Omnivore

Start on the Kindle app (on your Kindle device) and follow the steps below:

Launch the app

Open the document you want to import into Omnivore

Tap the Share button

Select Email

Add your custom Omnivore email

And send

The shared content will show as a newsletter with the highlights of the document/book.

Raycast integration

Thanks to Karol’s integration now you can view and search your saved Omnivore items directly with Raycast. Here is the code.

Miniflux feed reader

In their most recent update, the minimalist feed reader Miniflux added an Omnivore integration. Find the official update here.

Later edit: Thanks to our community member, Riiku, we have more details about the integration. You can create a new Omnivore API key and leave the Omnivore API Endpoint blank if you're using the main instance (not self-hosted).

If you are testing this setup, let us know how the process is going.

Reading Recommendations

Last month we wrote two articles on Omnivore’s sync options with Obsidian. The first guide presented a way to sync the highlight colors from Omnivore to Obsidian, while the second one showcased a workflow to automate your note’s organization in Obsidian.

Also, in this article, we tried to cover all possible scenarios regarding the subscription to RSS feeds, and newsletters. If we missed something or have any suggestions feel free to comment here or on Discord.

We analyzed the web clipper capabilities of Notion, Evernote, and Omnivore. Omnivore’s integration with Obsidian and Logseq makes it a good companion for those who are building a “second brain” and need a fast way to save items across the web. Find the result here.

In articles not written by us, a new start-up called Vectara is analyzing how often chatbots hallucinate in conversations. Their estimates show that “chatbots invent information at least 3 percent of the time — and as high as 27 percent.” Here is a gift link to the New York Times article.

If you want a five-minute daily newsletter with international news, then “The Knowledge” is potentially a good choice.

Metaphor is a new LLM-powered search engine. It can be tested for free here.

Until next year

Thank you for being part of Omnivore’s journey. It’s great for us when the community is there to support us, and one another, with ideas, feedback, and good code. We appreciate you being here. Please tell others about Omnivore, and bring your friends on board! You can join us on Discord to be part of the community and find out first about improvements. 

Editing and proofreading by Steen Comer.