Instapaper and why I love it
I’d tried to use Instapaper before, but never got to grips with it. After seeing the preview of the iPad version, I decided to go back and buy the Pro version. Instapaper allows you to save web pages and read them later. It’s killer feature is formatting the articles in an easy to read text format which makes reading articles on the iPhone a lot easier.
As an example, here’s a recent Slate article on YouTube, first as it appears in Mobile Safari:
After double tapping:
And in Instapaper:
As you can see, it’s pretty awesome. It’s also pretty easy to save webpages. My most used method is with the bookmarklet, just click it when you’re on a page you want to save and it’ll be saved to your account, which can then be synced to your iPhone next time you run the app.
One thing you will have to remember to do is to choose the full page or print option on articles that span multiple pages. Here’s the original Lady Gaga article, and the printable version.
You can also send any article in Google Reader to Instapaper:
This is turned on in the Send To section in your Google Reader settings.
A bunch of other iPhone apps come with Instapaper integration and are listed here. Although annoyingly, Reeder, my new favourite Google Reader iPhone app doesn’t have support for adding articles to Instapaper offline.
So now my commutes to work are spent reading articles I’ve saved previously. This has made a big difference for me, I’m finding it increasingly hard to read long articles on my computer - my attention span is terrible nowadays, my ADD nature prevents me from staying on one web page without tabbing in to Hacker News or Reddit to check for new articles, and it’s impossible for me to ignore new Tweets and emails.
Reading on my iPhone eliminates all of those issues, bar receiving a text, but the lack of multitasking on the iPhone is a big plus for me right now - I’m forced to sit there and read, and it’s made it really enjoyable. I’m expecting the iPad to re-enforce this.
