Here at Toucthip we spend a great deal of time reading on the web. In fact, we read so much that our system for marking web pages for reading at a later time has completely failed us. Browser bookmarks don’t work because we have go back and delete them using the bookmark manager. Sending items to social bookmarking apps like Delicious has the same problem, we’ve got to constantly delete pages we’ve already read but don’t want to save any more. For the longest time now we ended up loading pages into separate browser tabs that we can come back to, but having lots of tabs open can eat up system resources. These tools just weren’t designed to do the one thing we need to do; to flag a web page that we want to read but don’t have time at that moment. Enter Instapaper, sublime in its simplicity and focused on doing one single thing very well; mark web pages for later reading. This is one of those web apps we’ve come to depend on so much that we really couldn’t live without it. If you use the web for reading or research, you should try out Instapaper. It’s free, and after the jump we’ll tell you how it works.
Instapaper works as a bookmarklet, a link that you drag and drop onto your browser’s bookmark bar. When you come across an interesting web page you want to read later, just tap the bookmark “Read Later” on your browser and the link to the web page is automatically sent to your Instapaper page in the background leaving you on your current page. Continue surfing and saving just like that. No more bookmarking, or opening pages in new tabs.
When you’re ready to start reading, go to your Instapaper page and see the list of all the links you sent to “Read Later”. The links are categorized for you as “Unread”, “Recently Read”, and “Recently Skipped”. For each unread link you can tap the url to read that page, or you can tap “Skip” which moves that link to the bottom category, “Recently Skipped”. Likewise, you can mark any “Read” item as “Unread”. You can also add a summary desciption for each link, or you can delete them entirely if you wish.
If you highlight text on a web page before submitting it to Instapaper, that text will be used as the summary description for that url. Also, if you submit a url that you’ve already subitted in the past, Instapaper will update it and marked as “Unread”. And like Touchtip.com, Instapaper has a custom icon for your mobile device so be sure to create a web clip for it on your iPhone or iPod touch
Instapaper’s layout works great on any desktop or mobile browser, but was designed with the iPhone and iPod touch in mind. The bare-bones design allows you get to your links quickly without having superfluous content surrounding the main column. The links and buttons are not crowded like most sites making it ideal for tapping on the touch screen interface.
Kathy Sierra who writes one of our very favorite blogs, Creating Passionate Users, has a mantra for anyone creating a product. She says that you need to create a product that enables your users to kick ass. We’d like to say thanks to Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, for giving us an application that helps us kick ass!
Now it’s your turn. Go to Instapaper now and start kicking some ass.
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