It’s not a secret that there’s so much interesting stuff on the web that you just can’t read it in one afternoon. Or in a whole day. Tutorials, reviews, previews, there’s a lot of pages I would like to read just as I discover them..but I can’t.
And that’s the main concept behind Read it Later: save your pages for future reading sessions keeping them easily accessible too. So, with just one click on the “Read it Later” button, you’ll be able to check that page again whenever / wherever you’d like. Here’s my review of Read it Later Pro for iPhone.
Read it Later (RiL, from now on) was born as a Firefox extension but it became so popular that the developers (IdeaShower) decided to extend it, creating many bookmarklets for cross- browsers compatibility and, finally, an official iPhone application.
RiL for iPhone is dead simple: you start the application, sync with your RiL account (username and password, nothing more!)and you have all of your saved pages right on your screen. But you don’t have to necessarily import the pages you saved on your Mac/ PC: thanks to a simple bookmarklet, you can even add bookmarks to your reading list while in Mobile Safari. And this really comes in handy is you usually browse from your iPhone.
Once you’ve decided which page you want to read, just tap on it and RiL will open the page through a built-in version of Safari Mobile. Then, you could mark the page as read and delete it from your reading list.
That’s it.
The coolest thing about RiL for iPhone lies in it simplicity: thanks to a sleek interface (which is gonna change in 1.3 version, already submitted to the App Store but currently under Apple’s reviewing process..we’ll know more in a few days, I think) everything is there in the right place, providing a lot of features that will surely make your life easier if you (just like me) usually open a lot of tabs and add them to the reading list to “read them later” on the bus.
As you can see in the screenshot above, you can sort your pages by title, site or date; moreover, if you have a lot of saved pages, you can even filter your results thanks to a search box in the top right. Once you’ve opened the page, you’ll see three tabs on top: “online” for online view, “offline” to download the entire content of the page for future offline reading sessions, “offline text” to download text without images.
Very useful. The process is simple and fast (very fast under a wi-fi connection, a little bit slow with EDGE. and yes, I still have an iPhone 2G), I hope that the developers will add more features in the next updates (thumbnails for downloaded pages? EDGE/3G optimized download process?).
If you download the text only, you can even change the background color to black for late night sessions. My eyes thank Idea Shower for the great idea they had.
On the other hand, if you’re in online view, you can zoom and scroll the page just as in Mobile Safari, but without any kind of address bar.
As you can see, while in Offline mode, you can still increase / decrease the font size.
Other features:
- Remembers your scroll position on every page, for every view
- Downloads Offline content in the background so you can read in the meantime
- No limit on number of articles
- PDF, .doc, .xls, .ppt support
- Scroll to top of page by tapping the top of the status bar as in Mobile Safari
- Option to include offline data in iTunes backups
Free or Pro?
Read it Later comes in two version: Read it Later free, which offers all the features mentioned above, and a Pro version which has some exclusive stuff worth a check out.
Pro Features
Tap to save bookmarklet: while in Mobile Safari, open your bookmarks and click ‘Tap to Save’. Afterwards, tapping any link on the page will save it to your reading list. Perfect for Google Reader.
Sharing: share pages on Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, Facebook, Reddit, and a lot more.
Full screen: this hides the top and bottom toolbars for optimal viewing area. When you are ready to move on, tap the edges of the screen and your toolbars will pop right back.
Rotation settings: landscape support.
Unread count: home screen badge.
Auto-mark as read: perfect if you want Read It Later to mark pages as read automatically as you view them. After 5 seconds of having a page open, RIL will mark it as read. Functions more like an email inbox this way.
I definitely suggest you to purchase a Pro version of RiL: it’s got so more options than the Free version that really make it a killer-app for your iPhone and ,in my opinion, it fills the void that’s left by Instapaper.
But if you want to buy RiL NOW,you can purchase a Pro version at $2,99 here.
