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.
Staying 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 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.
Just in time for Halloween, Pushpin is back from the dead! Pushpin was the best Pinboard bookmarking app on the iPhone and iPad, but it withered and sat in the store without updates since the iOS 9 days thanks, the developer says, to the arrival of a baby. Now, Pushpin is back, and with a few tweaks, it is just as great as ever.
Raindrop.io is a new bookmarking service for Mac and iOS, and the web, and Android. It lets you save your bookmarks into folders, known as Groups, and those bookmarks are then available from anywhere. The main selling point of Raindrop.io seems to be the slick interface, and the myriad beautiful ways you can arrange the bookmarks therein.
Aperture Exporter is a free tool for those fleeing Aperture after Apple shut it down. It’s a beta, but that’s cool because you can still use Aperture for now while you wait for the final version. Aperture Exporter will mirror your collections as folders, save the original files with XMP metadata sidecar files, and even retain your ratings, comments and other metadata. What you won’t get is your image edits, but that’s because Lightroom and Aperture are so different. Free
Welcome to the final part of our series about note-taking for writers (or anyone else). Today we’re going to look at getting clippings and bookmarks into Evernote, to be stored and accessible alongside your scanned, paper-based notes (Part 1) and your text notes grabbed on your iPhone or Mac (Part 2).
We’ll use a few apps and services to get this done – EverClip, Mr Reader, IFTTT and Pinboard are the main ones.
As ever, you could just do much of this using Evernote and its web clipper, but this only works in Safari and Chrome on the desktop. In 2014! Clearly that’s no good. Let’s see how we can do it better.
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.
Today brings a big update for users of Pushpin, the already-excellent Pinboard bookmarking client for iOS. V 3.0 brings a sweet iOS-friendly look (it really does look great), plus a proper iPad interface, plus… well, a lot. Let’s taker a quick look.
Pincase is yet another great Pinboard client for iOS. It’s $2, it’s universal, and it is ready for iOS 7. Oh, and it looks lovely too. What more could you need for managing and reading your bookmarks. What? You want more? Okay…
Paperback is a minimal read-later service that uses your Pinboard account as a source for articles. Any time you check the “Read Later” box when saving bookmarks to your Pinboard account, these items are added to a rudimentary queue. Paperback uses this list to provide you with a nice, clean, Instapaper-like web view of these links.
If you use Pinboard (and if you don’t, you should), then you might also consider using a Mac app to save and browse all those achieved bookmarks. Which brings us to Shiori, a very plain-yet-pretty iOS 7-inspired Mac app for your Pinboard.
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Remember bookmarks? It’s how we used to save sites to go back to later. In theory anyway. Browser bookmark search was pretty terrible, and you had to remember the name of the site to find it again. So we mostly just used Google to search for a site every time we wanted to go there.
And then came Del.icio.us.
Pinbook is an excellent iOS client for the excellent paid anti-social bookmarking service Pinboard. Imagine if De.licio.us had never been sold to Yahoo and had instead started charging money to keep your bookmarks tagged and organized online. Further, imagine that the developer kept a Twitter stream that read something like the crotchety ramblings of your drunken (and outspoken) uncle. That service would be Pinboard.
The (non-affiliated) Pinbook client has just been updated to v1.3, and with the update come some fantastic new features. Let’s take a look:
ThumbTack is a Menu Bar utility for OS X that puts your most recent Pinboard bookmarks in easy reach, no matter what application you’re using.
