![]() You can look back in time and know what you read and when. Each can also be leveraged to build an external, digital memory of the things you read. Each of these lets you save articles and then read them offline on a mobile device or computer using their app.Īt their most basic, each make article reading experience better and less distracted. ![]() The three most popular approaches today are Pocket, Instapaper and Evernote. They are largely intended as a way to capture stuff that comes up while working on one thing, avoid distraction, and read it when it is more convenient. They generally give you a better reading experience without all of the ads and distractions too. My tool of choice is Instapaper, and with a few additional tweaks, as I’ll go into below, it can be even better.Ī read-it-later app enables you to save articles from the web and (surprise, surprise) read them later. One empowering approach to reading and learning in the internet age are read-it-later apps. However, until a perfect solution presents itself, either in the form of an update or a brand new app, sticking with Pocket feels like the right move.Are you facing a never ending pile of articles to read? Have you ever remembered this amazing post you recently read but forgotten the title or URL? Or are you just hoping to augment and improve how you read and learn stuff online using technology? It’s been hard to break away from Instapaper after so many years, an app of which I am still admittedly a fan. I used a website called EN2Kindle, but still didn’t feel like a good workaround because it sent each individual article to Kindle instead of one single “e-book.” As you can imagine, this would have quickly cluttered up my Kindle home screen if I have quite a few articles in my Pocket queue.Īfter spending close to two weeks with Pocket, I’ve only come across about two instances where it didn’t save the pictures from the article, so I’ll keep using it for now over Instapaper. You can schedule when you wanted to send your queue to your Kindle easily with Instapaper, but you can’t do that with Pocket. My biggest issue with Pocket so far has been the lack of Kindle support. Pocket isn’t a perfect solution for me yet though. ![]() Sometimes, I would need to scroll down a few times just to get to the article. With Instapaper, it would save the related links that are added in the page from websites like ESPN, Sports Illustrated, and Buzzfeed. One thing I really like about Pocket is that it only saves the main text or the article and nothing else. Sometimes, it would just hang and I had to exit out of the app to reset it. There were times on Instapaper where I had poor cellular reception and it took a while for it to save an article. One thing that was noticibly better was that articles saved significantly faster on iOS and on the desktop regardless of how fast my internet was. It took me a while to get used to this because I like to put articles in different folders if I’m researching something instead of cluttering my archive and queue.Īfter that, I switched all my API’s and didn’t come across any service that didn’t support Pocket. Instead, they use a tagging system much like Evernote. The first thing I noticed right away was that Pocket didn’t have any folders except for the archive. If you choose the grid view, Pocket will display a thumbnail from the saved article and if it doesn’t have a picture, then it would display the headline instead, which already seemed like a good remedy to my issue with Instapaper. A few clicks and everything I had saved was in my Pocket’s queue. One day I finally broke down and decided to give its biggest competitor, Pocket, a try.įirst off, it wasn’t hard at all to export the articles I’ve already saved with Instapaper. I’ve overlooked this flaw many times before but recently, it’s been bothering me more and more. The only reason I decided to try Pocket and inevibitably stick with it, is because Instapaper has a hard time saving pictures. I could save an article I found on my MacBook and read it on my iPhone while waiting in line at Target. Over the years, the app has gotten better while keeping its simplistic user interface. I believe the app cost a whopping $9.99, which was pretty steep for an app at that time and my minimum wage salary. Come to think of it, it was probably one of the first apps I’ve ever bought just so I can unlock the “save unlimited articles” feature. I’ve been a loyal Instapaper ever since 2007 when I got my hands on the first generation iPhone.
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