The main news from the last two months is that Acorny is on Android. On the web side, Kindle imports now read the Chinese clippings format, WeRead can sync without you exporting anything, and duplicate cleanup is easier to undo. The review loop picked up a few fixes as well.
Here is what shipped in August and September.
Acorny is now on Android
Acorny is live on Google Play. You still save highlights with the browser extension or the web app. The phone app is where you review them, and your library shows up there without any extra setup.
The Today screen builds a short session out of whatever is due. When you finish it, you are done for the day. If you want more, you can start an extra session, and if you leave one halfway through, Acorny picks it up where you stopped.
Review sessions are cached on the device, so you can reveal and rate cards without a connection. Your ratings sync once you are back online. You can also browse sources and highlights, search your library, refresh it to pick up recent changes, and open any highlight to see its details.
The app has an optional daily reminder and comes in English and Simplified Chinese. You can register with email and verify it, reset a forgotten password, sign in with Google, and delete your account from inside the app. Layouts hold up when your phone is set to a large system text size.
The app does not save new highlights. That still happens in the browser, and the phone is for finding and reviewing what you saved.
Reviewing on your phone
The version on Google Play is 1.1.0. A few things about its review screen are worth calling out.
Delete a highlight mid-review. Open the actions sheet on a card and confirm, and that highlight's cards drop out of the current session right away. This works offline too: the deletion waits on the device and syncs when you reconnect.
Markdown and formulas render. Review cards and highlight details show formatted Markdown rather than raw markup, and inline and display LaTeX render as formulas. If you highlight papers or textbooks, you will notice this one.
Quotes fit the screen. The quote typography is tighter, so more of a passage fits on each line and long highlights are easier to read through.
Finished means finished. Once you complete the day's session, Today shows the day as done. New cards joining the review pool later in the day do not flip it back to unfinished.
Chinese Kindle clippings
Kindle file imports now accept the Chinese My Clippings.txt format, including
the location ranges it uses. Clippings from a Chinese-language Kindle could
previously fail to pair their text with the right book and location. They now
come in with the same book, location, highlight, and note fields as an English
export, and they land in the same library and review queue as everything else.
WeRead, without the repeated export
WeRead can now stay connected. Add your WeRead API key once on the Extensions & Apps page, and Acorny checks for new highlights and thoughts every day. If you don't want to wait for the next run, press Sync now. It doesn't matter whether you highlighted in the WeRead phone app, the tablet app, or on the website, because everything goes through the same WeRead cloud library.
The one-time API key import and the JSON file import are still there if you would rather not leave a key connected. Disconnecting stops future syncs and keeps everything you already imported.
Sync only adds. It does not mirror deletions, so removing a highlight in WeRead leaves the copy in Acorny alone.
More control over your library and review
On the web review screen you can edit a card's tags, or add an existing tag, without leaving the card. The AI Recall dialog now links to the cards you have already generated, so it no longer only offers to generate more.
Duplicate detection compares a normalized version of each quote. HTML entities, Markdown emphasis, escape characters, and stray whitespace are much less likely to hide two copies of the same passage. You still see the candidates before anything is merged, and merging still moves notes, tags, and links onto the copy you keep.
Choosing Keep all can be undone now. Ignored groups have their own view, and you can send any of them back to the pending list.
Sessions also renew while you are active, up to a fixed security limit, so you are less likely to be signed out halfway through a note or a review.
Fixes and polish
- The sign-in and verification screens have a button to resend the verification email.
- When an import fails because of an upstream or edge service, the error shows the HTTP status and a Trace ID instead of a generic "try again".
- Account deletion tells password, Google, and mixed sign-in accounts apart more reliably, and gives password users a reset path when they need one.
- A long account name no longer pushes the Pro badge and navigation controls out of the web sidebar.
This post only covers what you can use today. More is in progress, and it will show up here once it ships. Download Acorny for Android, or follow the RSS feed for the next update.