Instapaper

Read Cult of Mac’s latest posts on Instapaper:

Best apps to download now for your new iPad

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Best apps for your new iPad
The iPad, home of some of the best apps in existence.
Image: Killian Bell/Cult of Mac

Cult of Mac Year in Review 2018The iPad can be so may different things. I use mine for reading, writing, making music, watching movies, and if I have any time to waste, I might play a game. The iPad is pretty much the ultimate creative tool, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t sit back and “consume” the odd “content” every once in a while.

Forget Twitter, Fiery Feeds is the best way to read the news

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Fiery Feeds adds Pinboard support, finally lets you ditch Instapaper.
Fiery Feeds looks great in black.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Fiery Feeds is an iOS news-reading app that lets you subscribe to any sites you like, and read all their new stories in one place. It’s way better than relying on Twitter for you news, because important stories never get lost in a sea of doggy GIFs. And the new v2.1 gets a visual overhaul, plus support for using Pinboard as a read-later service. I love it.

Indiepaper, an open alternative to Instapaper and Pocket

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This book is definitely meant to be read later -- it's not even written yet.
This book is definitely meant to be read later -- it's not even written yet.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Instapaper and Pocket are the big two read-later services. The former locked out European users for months and months earlier this year, and the latter is, well, it’s fine I guess. Both of them do a great job of letting you save articles from the web and read them later in a clean, text-and-images-only format.

But what if you want something controlled just by you? A read-later service that doesn’t mine your saved articles to make recommendations — one that just turns your read-later list into nicely formatted, text-only articles. Then you should try Indiepaper. Let’s check it out right now.

Save your reading list for later with Pocket [50 Essential iOS Apps #49]

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Pocket app article view
Pocket makes it easy to catch up on the articles in your reading list on your own schedule.
Photo: Ian Fuchs/Cult of Mac

50 Essential iOS Apps: PocketStaying informed and up-to-date with the latest news is tough. Scrolling through Twitter or browsing the web can often lead to news stories that you want to read, but can’t be bothered to read RIGHT NOW. With Pocket, you can save those stories for later and catch up on the stories you want to read on your schedule.

Instapaper’s new Premium plan goes live on return to Europe

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Instapaper punishes its European users use
Instapaper Premium unlocks awesome features.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Instapaper has finally returned to Europe following a GDPR blackout, and users can now subscribe to its new Premium plan to unlock additional features.

The service was pulled in the E.U. following the introduction of new data protection regulations, but now it’s fully compliant and ready to do business again. Here’s what you can expect if you upgrade with a Premium subscription.

dotEPUB is the best way to save and annotate websites in iBooks

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dotEPUB turns web pages into fantastic-looking ebooks.
dotEPUB turns web pages into fantastic-looking ebooks.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

In my constant search for a way to save and annotate webpages like I used to do with Instapaper before it cut off access to Europe instead of complying with GDPR laws, I came across a great service called dotEPUB.

This quick-and-easy service lets you save and convert any webpage into an EPUB document. Then you can open the file in Apple’s Books app and mark it up just like any other ebook. Let’s take a look at how dotEPUB works.

Instapaper kills its Apple Watch app

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Instapaper for Apple Watch
Instapaper on Apple Watch was surprisingly decent.
Photo: Instapaper

Instapaper has become the latest big service to ditch its Apple Watch app.

The most recent Instapaper app update removes the Apple Watch component, and there are apparently no plans to bring it back. One Instapaper developer explains that it didn’t prove popular enough to warrant a required rebuild for watchOS.

How to replace Instapaper with Pinboard

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Instapaper punishes its European users use
Instapaper Premium unlocks awesome features.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Instapaper has shut down in Europe. Instead of complying with the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, which forces internet companies to stop hoarding your data, the read-later service has closed access for anyone trying to access their account from Europe. Clearly the two-years since the GDPR was announced wasn’t enough time to get ready.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that you can still download all your saved articles from Instapaper, and you can import them into am alternative. One option is Pocket, another read-later service, but that might leave you in a similar situation sometime in the future. Better to take care of business now, and move everything to Pinboard.

How to send articles from iPhone to Kindle

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Kindle in the hot hot sun
Try this with an iPad
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

If you’re hanging out on the beach this summer, or kicking back on the porch with a beer and one of Cult of Mac’s amazing how-to articles, you might notice how hard it is to see the iPhone or iPad’s screen in the sunlight. How about sending that long article to you Kindle instead? Not only is the e-ink screen perfect for reading in bright light, but the battery lasts forever, saving you from burning through your iPhone’s juice even faster than usual because you have the screen brightness all the way up.

Happily, it is now easier than ever to send an article to you Kindle from your iPhone. Today we’ll see two ways to do it.

Great travel apps to make your trip easy and fun [Tech Travel Tips]

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Rome vacation travel apps
Travel isn't all about visiting amazing places. Sometimes it's about using apps on your phone, too.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

tech travel tips You already have all the travel gadgets you need for a successful and relaxed trip. Today we’re going to look at travel apps. Specifically, apps that make your trip better and easier, like great city guides.

We’ll also showcase apps that work around limitations you face while traveling, like a lack of bandwidth. Let’s get started!

Instapaper for Apple Watch is surprisingly not terrible

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Instapaper for the Apple Watch is here. Photo: Instapaper
Instapaper for the Apple Watch is here. Photo: Instapaper

The Apple Watch may be good at telling you how healthy you are, tracking your steps, propelling you to move, and reminding you of upcoming appoints, but conventional wisdom says it’s rubbish for reading. The 38mm and 42mm screens are just too tiny to read anything more than a sentence or two long on, and certainly not any longreads.

So on paper (no pun intended), Instapaper for Apple Watch is a terrible idea. Amazingly, though, it looks like the Instapaper team at Betaworks has made it work.

Instapaper for Apple Watch lets Siri read to you

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Instapaper for Apple Watch lets Siri read to you. Photo: Betaworks
Instapaper for Apple Watch lets Siri read to you. Photo: Betaworks

The Apple Watch may be good at telling you how healthy you are, tracking your steps, propelling you to move, and reminding you of upcoming appoints, but conventional wisdom says it’s rubbish for reading. The 38mm and 42mm screens are just too tiny to read anything more than a sentence or two long on, and certainly not any longreads.

So on paper (no pun intended), Instapaper for Apple Watch is a terrible idea. Amazingly, though, it looks like the Instapaper team at Betaworks has made it work.

Instapaper gets faster than ever in latest update

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Reading articles in Instapaper just got faster than ever. Photo: Instapaper
Reading articles in Instapaper just got faster than ever. Photo: Instapaper

If you haven’t used Instapaper for awhile, it might be time to dig the app out again. It’s just received a great new update to version 6.2, adding some slick features like speed reading, the ability to tweet screenshots of text, and more.

Instapaper’s new highlights feature revitalizes the app. Here’s how to make the most of it

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Instapaper v5.2 adds familiar yellow-marker highlights to your saved articles. This doesn’t sound like much, but it will change how you use the read-later service. Instapaper is the O.G read-it-later app, letting you save those longer articles you find on the web, in Twitter, in your RSS reader or anywhere else. You send these articles off to Instapaper via a bookmarklet (or using the third-party integration from many apps), whereupon they are cleaned of clutter and saved for you to read off line.

This seemingly small update changes the game. Before, Instapaper was a transient place for long-form articles — you’d read them and then archive them. Now it’s a place to organize and revisit articles, turning your collection of clippings into a library of annotated notes. And for the makers, it represents a way to make more money for the app, by finally adding a killer reasons for us to buy the $1-per-month subscription.

 

Instapaper Updated With Kindle Support, Trending Stories And More

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Screen Shot 2014-02-27 at 9.08.16 PM

Ever since Digg purchased Instapaper from Marco Arment, the news aggregator super site has been adding new features to the somewhat neglected service to better compete with the likes of would-be challengers like Paper.

Continuing that trend, Instapaper for iOS was updated to version 5.1.5 today, bringing some new features, including support for Instapaper’s trending stories, a new send to Amazon Kindle function for subscribers, better AirPlay support, gestures and more.

Instapaper Daily Shows The Day’s Most Popular News Story

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Screen Shot 2013-12-24 at 09.12.24

 

One of the best things about Instapaper now being owned by Betaworks is that the developers spend their time adding new features and services instead of complaining about things on their personal blogs.

And today that ethic has paid off, bringing us Instapaper Daily, a new site which shows the most popular story in Instapaper today. And of course, because Instapaper is all about reading later, you can browse back to any day in the past and see the headline story form that day, too.

Instapaper Updated For iPad, Finally Rivals Pocket Again

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instapaper

Instapaper was once the king of the read later services, but was usurped by fuller-featured upstarts with better features and more liberal sharing policies (Instapaper, unlike Pocket, has no IFTTT triggers for instance). But it is slowly pulling itself back into the future, and this latest iPad update adds support for video and a new Browse function.

Is this enough to pull me back to Instapaper from Pocket? Actually yes, but not for the reason you think.

Words App Puts Instapaper, Pocket, RSS On Your Desktop

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Maybe I’m a big dummy, but I always thought that the whole point of “read later” apps was that you could shunt long-form articles off the desktop and onto a device that was better suited for reading for extended periods. After all, on the desktop a combination of bookmarks and Safari’s Reader view takes care of things.

But what do I know? Clearly there’s a place for reader apps on the Mac, and the $10 Words looks to be a very nice example.

Instapaper 5 Is Ready For iOS 7

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iOS 7 is launching on Wednesday September 18th, and with it will come a whole slew of neat (and sometimes eye-searing) features. But what will there be for us poor bloggers and developers who have (maybe) been running the beta for so long now it doesn’t even seem new anymore? The answer is app updates. Lovely updates to some of our favorite apps to make them play nice with the new, clean OS. And the one of these will be Instapaper.