"Show, don't tell" has been our mantra at eno since we started 9 months ago. Our product vision was borne out of our dissatisfaction with AI chatbot answers that had us searching through our documents manually to verify their validity. We wanted AI to find the information we need in our documents and then get out of the way so we can read it firsthand.
There were many technical challenges to making our dream a reality, but the hardest challenge ended up being the UI. At first, we tried to take heavy inspiration from Cursor but it quickly became apparent that reading PDFs and editing code are very different paradigms. Principally, Cursor is all about generating new code (originating content) and eno is all about finding answers (retrieving content).
Our initial experiments led us to the search panel we have today. It places an emphasis on renderings of the actual PDFs but allows the AI to provide short annotations that help the reader follow the AI's analysis. We liked this for simple questions, but as we made our AI agent more capable, it felt limiting to be stuck in this panel. We wanted the user to have the experience of reading their documents alongside the AI, rather than having the AI read for them.
After a series of UI experiments we began to hone in on something we call Pinned Searches. Pinned Searches allow you to close the search panel and explore your documents freely with AI annotations overlaid as you read. This gives you the experience of reading alongside the AI, allowing you to build your own understanding of the source material directly.
When you are working with longer documents and complex questions, Pinned Searches allow you to easily jump around between sections of your documents to see how the AI's analysis fits together.
The biggest innovation of Pinned Searches is that they are pinned globally across all open tabs. This makes them work seamlessly when your question requires analysis across multiple disparate documents. As you cycle through the annotations of a Pinned Search, eno will use any open panes containing that document, or open the document in the last active pane.
Pinned Searches are available today. We hope you will give them a try and let us know what you think!
Happy pdfing,
Gordon & Seb