Instapaper- now I get it!

Perusing webpages when traveling can be frustrating. Instapaper intends to improve this. It took me a while to figure out how.

Back in the day when the Palm Pilot was the only mobile PDA, I used AvantGo as an RSS reader. Of course that was before RSS! This program ran on your desktop, and saved web pages so when you synced they were in the PDA's memory. I read them later on the road. With all the power of smartphone connectivity and RSS, this idea became academic- why not just get feeds and read items in real time? Well, sometimes that won't work. No connection.

I had eschewed many offers to sign up for yet another webservice, especially one I didn't understand. After a few tangential references from blogs, I was intrigued enough to dig into it.



Instapaper steps in to step backwards. It saves web pages for you to read offline. Simple. And it steps forward, syncing all your saved webpages to every device you have via the cloud.

So once I grasped the idea, I was sold, I signed up. Then it got better.

I downloaded the Instapaper free app to my iPhone, which gave me a good, clean way to read my saved pages, and thought it was cool. But that is only half the cool.  While messing around with Instapaper in Safari, I noted that I their webpage showing my bookmarks has an option to look at my saved pages in printable format, or Kindle, or as ePub.  Ironically, I had just learned via the TIPB podcast that Apple now offers ePub format books.  So, what the heck! I clicked on the link to save my saved pages as ePub documents, hoping to later read them in my iBooks app.  Magically, they were saved, and I was given the option to view them in iBooks.  So I did.  Now it got really magicky.  There were my pages, in ePub format, in iBooks, the beautiful reader from Apple.  Dang!  This is cool, way cooler than AvantGo.  Really.

Next I compared the reading experience in the Instapaper app with that of the iBooks/ePub app.  Instapaper is good, and if I pay, I can get tilt scrolling and more than 10 saved pages.  OK, I like pay apps, but I already had the Apple way.  And it looks beautiful.  For reading it is unbeatable.  No managing the pages, no function other than reading, but that is what I want anyway.