The fact that it piggybacks on existing reading and saving services to get its content seems a little “short”-sighted if you ask me, since it requires using more than one service, but the team clearly wanted to focus on delivering a quality user experience first, and not have to worry about building out an entire save-for-later layer of their own. It’s a philosophical contrast to apps that aim to bring you the best long reads on the web, and one that likely makes more sense for the increasingly clipped attentions spans of most mobile readers. ![]() The app is free, and is designed to work on both iPhone and iPad devices. Sharing via iOS 8’s share extension support and share sheet is also built-in, and it incorporates any images contained in articles in-line. It also works with Pocket, Instapaper, Readability, and Reading Pack, with an option to request additional sources if your favorite save-for-later service isn’t listed. Short is a full-featured reading app in other regards, featuring both day and night modes for light and dark reading themes, a reading progress bar that displays time remaining at the top of your screen persistently, and offline caching for reading when you’re beyond cellular or wireless coverage. Using popular services like Pocket or Instapaper that users are already working with to build up a list of reading material, Short sifts through saved items to bring out articles that require 10 minutes or less reading time, so a user can pick out a 2 minute read while they wait in line at Starbucks, for instance, or a 5 minute piece if they’ve got a few minutes to spare before a friend arrives at a lunch meeting. I love Readable when I just want to focus on a piece of writing, and I use Pocket when I want to save interesting articles to read at a better time.A new app called Short from Enric Enrich, a developer at Todoist, and his friend Alex Muench aims to parse your endless queue of saved articles into something a little more manageable. I personally use both approaches for different reasons. It’s up to your own personal style whether you prefer to have a full-fledged “read-it-later” app or if you’d just like the option to clarify pages as you surf the web. Check out the simple instructions about installing it and you’re ready to go! The great thing– Readable is a simple bookmarklet that runs in any browser. This is great when you’re on an obnoxious new portal (*ahem* HUFFINGTON!) and just want to focus on the content. This technology, which now powers Evernote Clearly, will instantly convert any webpage you happen to be at into a “large type on soothing grey”, ad-free reading experience. For this, I use the wonderful bookmarklet Readable. Sometimes I want to read it right now, but in a more readable format. I love the way these apps bring the content front and center so I can focus on what the author is trying to say, but I don’t always want to jump out of my web browser to read an article in a 3rd party service. Usually these sites will queue the newly-reformatted article in an app on your mobile devices so you can read when it’s more convenient for you. These sites, like Instapaper, Pocket, Evernote Clearly, and Readability strip away all the ads and idiosyncratic blog styling from online articles, leaving only a visually pleasing, text-based view of the information you want to read. In recent years, a few tools have emerged to save websites for later reading in a more readable format.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |