Jot vs ScholarSide

Jot is a fast, minimal note-taking app built around one idea: capture now, organize later. Most note apps force you to decide where something goes before you can write it down. Jot flips that. New notes land in your main feed by default, no folder required, no decision needed. Organize them into categories when you have the time and mental space. Perfect for: • Quick notes and ideas - tap +, type, done. Out of your head in seconds. • Grocery & shopping lists - group items by store, check things off as you go. • Journaling - automatic timestamps on every note, toggle on or off whenever you need them. • To-do lists - simple checklists for tasks, errands, and anything you need to remember. • Custom categories - create your own with a name and emoji to organize everything your way. Your notes stay yours. No accounts. No social features. No unnecessary data collection. Just a simple place to jot things down.

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.