jotlog vs ScholarSide

Jotlog allows users to take notes whenever, wherever. Interactions are kept to a minimum so users can keep moving. There are no servers or databases, you own your data. The app offers to back up your notes to your own email inbox.

ScholarSide turns a pile of papers into a reading plan. It's a focused reading system for researchers, grad students, and anyone who reads academic papers with purpose — not another PDF dump, but a way to decide what to read, how deeply, and what you got out of it. Add a paper by arXiv link, arXiv ID, or DOI and ScholarSide fills in the title, authors, venue, and abstract for you. Every paper gets a card built around one simple idea: a reason you saved it. No more folders of mystery PDFs. TRIAGE, DON'T HOARD • A pipeline board from Inbox to Finished, with drag-and-drop and one-at-a-time triage • Give every paper a reason: background, method, baseline, to implement, assigned, or just curious • Flags for meeting prep, relevance, and how well you actually understand it READING MODES Not every paper deserves a deep read. Pick a mode and ScholarSide guides you with a timed checklist: • 5-minute skim — should I read this at all? • 20-minute structured read — understand the contribution • 60-minute deep read — own the method and the math • Implementation read — extract everything needed to reimplement STRUCTURED NOTES Capture a paper the way you think about it: problem, method, key equations, algorithm, experiments, results, limitations, and open questions — plus a confusion tracker, so "I don't get this part" becomes a to-do instead of a dead end. PROJECTS & REVIEW • Group papers into research projects with a reading order and open questions • A weekly review that surfaces stale papers, unresolved confusions, and what to read next • Lab-meeting prep built from your own notes OPTIONAL AI ASSIST (BRING YOUR OWN KEY) Add your own Anthropic API key and Claude can draft a summary, fill in the structured notes, or explain a paper at the level you choose — always as an editable draft that sits beside your own notes, never replacing them. Your key stays in the device Keychain and usage is billed to your account. The app is fully functional without it. PRIVATE BY DEFAULT No account. No ads. No tracking. Everything lives on your device. Export notes to Markdown and your library to BibTeX any time.