MarkGlance vs ScholarSide

MarkGlance is a minimalist Markdown viewer for iPhone and iPad — built to read documents calmly, without the visual noise that fills most editor apps. Open any .md file from the Files app, an email attachment, AirDrop, or the Share Sheet. Tap. Read. That's the loop. WHY MARKGLANCE • Editorial typography. Body text is set in a serif designed for long-form reading (New York / Iowan / Charter on iOS). Headings sit clearly in SF Pro. Code blocks render in SF Mono with syntax highlighting for 190+ languages. • Reflowing zoom — not pinch-to-zoom. The size slider re-wraps the document to your chosen size, the way a book does. Lines stay crisp at every step. No blurry magnification. • Light, Dark, and Auto themes. Your choice persists across launches. Auto follows iOS. • Print-quality PDF export. Tap Share to produce an A4 PDF with vector text, embedded fonts, justified body, real per-page margins, and content-aware page breaks. Selectable, searchable, AirDroppable. Around 10–18 KB per page. • Fully offline. No network calls. No analytics. No telemetry. No advertising. No accounts. The bundled rendering pipeline (marked.js, highlight.js, Open Sans) ships inside the app and runs on-device. • File association. Markdown files (.md, .markdown, .mdown, .mkd, .mkdn) open in MarkGlance from anywhere iOS can hand them off — Files, Mail, AirDrop, Messages, the Share Sheet, iCloud Drive. WHAT'S RENDERED • GitHub-flavored Markdown • Syntax-highlighted fenced code blocks • Tables with column alignment • Task lists with checkboxes • Multi-line and nested blockquotes • External links open in Safari; in-document anchors stay in-app WHAT'S NOT IN MARKGLANCE No editor. No syncing. No collaboration. No accounts. No subscription. MarkGlance does one thing — render your Markdown beautifully — and gets out of the way. PRIVACY Zero data collection. MarkGlance never sends anything to any server, period. Read the full policy at https://parzival74.github.io/markglance-privacy/ CONTACT Questions or feedback: zugzwang74@gmail.com

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.