Read Later, An Instapaper Client For OS X

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Read Later lets you... Read later
Read Later lets you... Read later

Y’all know Instapaper, right? It’s the amazing read-later service from Marco Arment which lets you save anything your find on the web to read at your leisure on your iPhone, iPad or Kindle. Now a new, free, Mac App Store app called Read Later will let you read your articles on your Mac.

Maybe the best thing about Instapaper — apart from it’s distraction-free interface — is the fact that it is baked into just about every iOS app that deals with the web. Browsers, RSS readers and even the excellent Guardian Newsstand app will let you “read later.” And that’s great if you actually want to read later. But what if you want to use your Instapaper library as a big research center?

Enter Read Later, a three-pane app which is ostensibly about reading articles on your Mac, but is actually better suited to searching and processing your saved bookmarks. Designed like Mail, or any number of desktop RSS readers, the interface has your folders in the left pane, the article list in the centre and the article itself on the left.

Search is instantaneous, with the list changing to match your enquiry as you type, and you can do pretty much everything, from switching folders and articles to archiving and un/liking via the keyboard.

It also has a very good looking text view which will make reading very comfy in full screen mode on a MacBook Air (full screen on a 27-inch iMac shrinks the article into a tall column).

Use cases? Reading later, of course, but as Instapaper has a one-touch save from most iOS apps, it’s a great way for writers and bloggers to collect links/posts for processing later. It’s also just nice to have an archive on your desktop.

Downsides: The “Find in Article” search never seems to work, and the app doesn’t yet support services in anything but the article text. So no sending an article to Omnifocus, for example. Then again, there are a host of export options.

Don’t dally. This app is great, and free. If you have an Instapaper account you should be downloading it now.

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