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Read it Later – Digest

Mar 10

PhilTechnology, Web Apple, beta, browsing, free, Instapaper, ipad, lists, readitlater, services, video, Web No Comments

I don’t know about you, but when I am online, specifically when I am on Twitter I see numerous links every day to articles or blog posts or just sites and services that I want to check out, and usually I don’t have time to look at them. So I have become an avid user of the Read it Later service.  But it is just about to get better!

In case you don’t already know, Read it Later is a site that will collect all those links that you hope you can read sometime, and adds them to an ever increasing list.  It is similar in this regard to Instapaper, and both of these sites integrate with a number of Twitter clients, allowing you to add to your list on the go.

The really useful part about both of these free services is that you can download the content of the linked pages to your mobile device and then view them offline at your leisure if you want to. You don’t have to download the whole page either, with Read it Later you can choose to download just the text so that it loads quicker and uses less space on your device, or go the whole hog and download the images and graphical elements too (Instapaper tends to work better with just text at the moment, but they have just added an image download element too that is under active development).  Both offer a really great service and for free too.

Up and coming (and the iPad)…

Read it Later however, has a new feature currently in Beta that I am really looking forward to, the Digest! The video below explains the features of Digest, and it looks like just what I need to browse my list of links more effectively.

However, the key thing to me is that the developer, Nate Weiner, mentions in this video that he is working on a new version of Read it Later for the soon to be released Apple iPad!

Now this is where I get excited, sadly.  Reading and browsing the Internet on the iPad is promising to be a really lovely experience (Flash-based sites excepted).  But being able to read these pages offline on the iPad, say on a plane or train or bus, etc., is a really exciting prospect, especially if you have the non-3G version without a connection to the Internet.  Yes, I know I can already do this on the iPhone, and I do, but the iPhone screen is not that easy to view longer articles on, and a lot of scrolling around is required for sites rich in images.

The Digest feature from Read it Later has the potential to be a really nice way of viewing sites stored on the iPad and I hope the developer is going to be allowed to develop it in the way he wants to, in order to take full advantage of the iPad’s features.

I have signed up for the Beta programme, and hope to get on soon, but I can’t wait to see this working on the iPad in whatever form it takes. Not long now!

In the meantime, check out the video below, and go and sign up for the Beta if you are interested.