A piece about buckyballs catches your eye on the ABC web site. As you read it, you find a link to a Wikipedia article about carbon nanotubes. Opening that page, you find yourself clicking on references to buckypaper, nanoflowers, tensegrity spheres and a biography of Buckminster Fuller. Soon, you have half a dozen tabs open in your browser, filled with fascinating information and no time to read any of it. The old solution would have been to bookmark each of those pages in the hope that you’d eventually find time to sit down at your computer and read them. The new solution is to have those pages follow you wherever you go, ready to be consumed whenever you have a few empty minutes.
Apps such as Read It Later and Instapaper let you save entire pages — not just links to pages — and synchronise the saved content between all your devices: across browsers on multiple computers, on your iPhone or iPad, or on other smartphones. So when you’re standing in line at the post office, riding the train to work or lolling on the beach on the weekend, you can whip out your phone or iPad and catch up on your reading.
Both Instapaper and Read It Later have their avid fans. Read It Later has the more polished style, while the ease with which you can share ‘liked’ articles on Facebook and Twitter is one of Instapaper’s strengths. Each provides the same core service and both apps integrate with a plethora of other iOS apps, from browsers to note-takers and social networking apps.
Usering Read It Later
To use Read It Later, first create a free account at www.readitlaterlist.com. When you create an account and mark some articles for reading, a copy of your reading list will be saved on the Read It Later servers, allowing you to read your articles from any device that provides browser access.
If you use Firefox, install the Read It Later add-on, which integrates all its features into your browser. If you use a different browser, install one or more of the Read It Later bookmarklets, which will give you single-click access to many of its features. You can grab the app from the App Store.
With the Firefox add-on installed:
- Click the ‘Read It Later’ icon located at the end of your address bar. It transforms into a red tick to indicate the page has been saved.
- Right-click any tab and select ‘Save all tabs for later’ to quickly add all your open tabs to your reading list.
- To see items in your reading list, click the icon displaying the number of articles saved, located beside the ‘Read It Later’ icon. A sidebar containing your reading list will appear. From this sidebar, click the Settings icon to adjust any program settings.
- Click the Download icon (a down arrow) in the sidebar to save your readling list for offline reading on your computer.
When using Read It Later on your iOS device, the interface is pretty similar on the iPhone and the iPad. On the iPad:
- Read any saved article by tapping it in your ‘Reading List’.
- Tap the Tick icon to mark an article as read.
- Switch to landscape view to get easier access to Read It Later’s settings, as well as your article archive and topics (folders for related content).
- Swipe right on any article in the ‘Reading List’ to display a menu of options, including the ability to categorise an article and sort it into a folder, edit the item’s tags, download the article for offline reading, share the article via social networking sites or any number of iPhone apps, and mark the item as read.
- Swipe right or left when reading an article to navigate between articles.
Using Instapaper
To install Instapaper, visit www.instapaper.com, drag the bookmarklet into your browser’s bookmark bar and add to your devices from the App Store. Once you’ve done this, you can synchronise your bookmarks between your computer, iPhone and iPad to add the same bookmarklet to your i-device. When you find a page you want to read later, click or tap the bookmarklet.
Here are some other Instapaper tricks:
- Tap and hold a word in an article and then tap Define to look up its meaning.
- Highlight a section of text in an article and then click the Instapaper bookmarklet. Your highlighted text will be used as the article’s description in your reading list.
From Instapaper to your Kindle
Install Wordcycler (www.wordcycler.com) and then connect your Kindle to your computer via the USB cable. Wordcycler will sync your Instapaper reading list to your Kindle, with each item saved as a separate article. When you delete an article from your Kindle and then sync, the article will be archived in your account on www.instapaper.com.
