A beautiful and local-first PDF reader for studying dense things
Details
- External ID
- 48429735
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- A beautiful and local-first PDF reader for studying dense things
- Website domain
- tryquincy.live
- Launched
- June 6, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 6
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.31420765027322406
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Recently, I found myself having to read the book "C++ primer" and I just couldn't do it. Maybe my attention span is too little now with Claude and Codex, maybe I'm lazy... but I just couldn't get myself to focus.While reading, I needed something to do. I wanted to talk to the text, I wanted to leave notes, I wanted to use to use my keyboard to quickly flip through pages.The only good available option on a Mac was "Preview" and it was ok, but definitely not there. So I built Quincy primarily for myself.With it you can - "Talk" to the page you're reading, create a quiz about the page, and get a good summary - "Read" the page out-loud. Have your Mac read to you while you follow along. This helps with comprehension. - Copy text (to paste into an LLM), leave notes, bookmarks, etc.... - Anything else you'd want with a nice PDF readerIt's fully local. No cloud-sync (yet). All LLM calls are based on your keys. And TBH, you don't even need to use the AI features for this to be useful.Try it out. Let me know what you guys think. This has been a quick project, so very rough around the edges. I plan on keeping it going (still haven't finished my book), and potentially open-sourcing down the line.
Enrichment
- Theme
- lightweight and on-device AI runtimes
- Vertical
- Education
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Prosumer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- local-first pdf reader for study
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes It is a desktop PDF reader wrapper that utilizes Apple's native PDFKit, on-device Vision OCR, Speech synthesis, and calls an LLM API for summarization and quizzes.
Discussion
9 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Claude (direct conversation without tool), Browser extensions for reading assistance
Concerns raised: Badges/gamification may not actually improve attention span, Limited context - can't answer questions requiring cross-page reference, Offline/flight use requires local-first approach, Technology alone won't solve all learning/attention problems
Feature requests: Awards/badges and custom per-session progress system for attention management, Context/memory layer to track what user has already read, Cross-page context awareness for complex documents and professional books, Online-capable version for use on flights without internet
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 170 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #119 of 171 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 220 days after the earliest competitor.
- I wrote a technical history book on Lisp · hn · 2026-02-17 · 252 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- I built an opinionated minimalist ePub/pdf online reader · hn · 2026-06-28 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Shoehorn, a library to quantize an LLM to fit your Mac's VRAM · hn · 2026-08-14 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- A fast, offline Markdown viewer for macOS built in Swift · hn · 2026-09-22 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Early Reader · hn · 2026-04-14 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Now I Get It · hn · 2026-02-28 · 305 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- List stuff to borrow for your people, anonymously · hn · 2026-08-12 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- I made a browser TUI with its own layout engine · hn · 2026-07-07 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.43
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
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