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Filed under: Utilities, Productivity, iPhone, Web

Read it Later introduces iPhone app

Read It Later is a service that lets you bookmark webpages to, as the name would suggest, read later. We first covered it when it was just a Firefox extension, but it's evolved quite a bit since then. The new iPhone app is particularly nice, offering offline reading of your saved pages, and a text-only reading mode that brings to mind the similar Instapaper app.

Read it Later's iPhone app brings all of the web features of Read It Later elegantly to the iPhone. Even without an Internet connection, you can view saved pages in their original form or as plain text. Quite importantly, the iPhone app also syncs article with the web version. If you buy the pro edition of the app, you can also save things from Safari in your iPhone via a bookmarklet.

Filed under: Text, Web services, Commercial, Freeware, iPhone

Instapaper iPhone app

Instapaper for iPhoneWe first mentioned Instapaper back in January of this year. Back then it was certainly an interesting tool, but one of many. Now, with the introduction of an Instapaper iPhone application (iTunes links), this site has gone from "interesting tool" to "must-have utility".

Like other read-it-later type bookmarking tools, Instapaper lets you use a bookmarklet to flag articles that you'd like to read later, then gives you a web-based interface to go back and find those articles. The Instapaper iPhone app goes one further - it syncrhronizes offline copies of your saved articles so that you can read them even when you're not online.

Instapaper comes in both free and pro versions on the iPhone. The free version has met my needs perfectly so far, but I imagine if I was to go on a long flight, I would pony up the $10 for the full version, as the free version only synchronizes 10 or so articles at a time.

[Update]
Marco, the developer of Instapaper for the iPhone, chimed in in the comments to let me know that I was mistaken about the 10 article limit. I just re-tested on my copy, and sure enough there are 24 articles in there right now. My apologies, and thanks for letting me know, Marco!

Filed under: Internet, Browser Tips

Read it Later gets Firefox 3 update, adds RSS feed

Read it Later
Read it Later, a bookmarking plugin for Firefox that we first covered last year is now Firefox 3 compatible. The new version also adds a handful of new features that make it even more useful.

What makes Read it Later different from other bookmarking tools like the del.icio.us plugin for Firefox is the fact that Read it Later makes it easy to bookmark pages, but makes it just as easy to delete those bookmarks. While other services let you save pages forever, Read it Later is designed to let you come back to pages you just don't have time to read fully right now.

The latest version features:
  • Offline viewing
  • An RSS feed so you can subscribe to your bookmarked pages and keep track of them in a reader
  • Synchronize your saved pages with other computers
You can also activate a new "click to save" mode by hitting Alt+M. In this mode, any link you click on a web page will automatically be saved to your reading list. Hit Alt+M again to deactivate this feature if you actually want to open up pages by clicking on links.

Filed under: Internet, Browser Tips

Read it Later - Firefox add-on of the day

Read it Later
Ever come across an interesting headline that you just don't have the time to read? If you're using Google Reader, you can just star an item to come back to it later. But if you're just browsing the web, you might want to mark a page for coming back to without going so far as to create a bookmark.

Read it Later
is a Firefox add-on that lets you create a reading list from interesting links. Once it's installed, you can right-click on any web site or link to save it to your reading list.

The add-on also installs two buttons in your Firefox toolbar. You can click Read Later to save the page you're currently on. And when you click on Reading List you'll cycle through saved pages. Clicking the little black arrow next to it will bring up a list of saved stories.

When you're reading a saved page, the Read Later button turns into a Mark as Read button which you can use to remove pages from your list.

Sure, you could always save pages as bookmarks, add them to del.icio.us, or use Google Notebook to save pages for later. But we like the clean and easy to use interface of Read it Later. Of course, if your Firefox Toolbar is already overloaded with add-ons, Read it Later might add more clutter to your life, which kind of defeats the purpose.

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