Read It Later, the popular service that helps you strip and store text from awesome articles for later reading, recently sprouted a kick-ass new feature: the ability to stitch multi-page articles together for a seamless reading experience. I found this update so exciting that I decided to drop Instapaper for a while and give Read It Later another shot, despite the fact that I’m still a perfectly happy Instapaper user.
High Contrast
It turns out that there is a lot to like about Read It Later right now. There are batch delete options for users who leave the service for a while and come back to a set of very old and outdated articles. There’s a slick high contrast interface complete with search, tags, and multiple sorting views for articles. Then there’s a very convenient bookmarklet setup that copies the JavaScript onto your clipboard for you so that all you have to do is paste and press next (Instapaper also has a bookmarklet for adding articles, of course, but the setup isn’t quite as easy).
Once RIL is all set up you can get articles into it by simply using the bookmarklet, a Twitter or RSS app, Instapaper import, or e-mailing the article to a specialised e-mail address.
Basically, the RIL experience of collecting articles is nearly indistinguishable from Instapaper’s, and that’s a good thing.
There has really only been one major element of the RIL interface that I have found annoying: the dual scrolling system. You’re free to scroll through articles by swiping vertically (as in any other iOS app), but tapping along the right side of the screen can also trigger a secondary scrolling system that works just like the scrollbar is most desktop apps. It’s very easy to accidentally tap on the scrollbar and completely lose your place within the app, so I turned this feature off as soon a I found the option to do so.
Multi-Page Article Rendering
The features I pointed out above are interesting, but they really pale in comparison to the promise of seamlessly stitching multi-page articles together with one tap, which is the main reason I opted to try RIL again. Unfortunately, I’ve found the results here to be quite mixed.
Multi-page articles that are actually numbered (e.g. Ars Technica articles) work out most of the time, but I had no luck with articles from Anandtech and LaptopMag that used a drop-down list to display different pages. I didn’t specifically seek out multi-page articles for testing, and yet the ones that I did come across really made this feature feel hit-and-miss.
I’m certain that this kind of text stitching must be incredibly difficult to implement properly, especially when you consider how different web layouts can be, but it was still a little disappointing to add articles to RIL, only to find that I needed to return to the browser to read all the subsequent pages.
Missing Instapaper
These past few days with RIL have been a fun experiment, but I simply don’t love the app in the same way that I do Instapaper. I miss progress bars for articles in list view, having an in-app dictionary, and Instapaper’s minimal UI.
To state these as complaints about Read It Later would be unfair – they’re simply Instapaper features that I came to love – but I also haven’t found anything about Read It Later that has grabbed me and convinced me to abandon ship. Multi-page article rendering would have been a major feature (and still could be), but it just doesn’t seem quite up to snuff yet.
I may give Read It Later another shot later on down the line, but at this very instant, I think I’m still very much an Instapaper user.
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Note: the Read It Later basic service is free and there is also a RIL Free app, but I reviewed this app on my iPad using the $5 Read It Later Pro from the App Store.
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TAGS: instapaper, read it later
