This week it’s all about awesome updates. Spark adds Siri shortcuts to your email, Halide adds Smart RAW to make your iPhone XS camera even better, and Fiery Feeds gets a makeover and Pinboard support.
Hear about all that and more in this week’s app roundup.
Reading is a skill, and like all skills, there’s always room for improvement. So if you constantly find yourself re-reading paragraphs, or just staring at a book but never finishing it, these courses can help you out.
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.
Being online means finding content that you’ll want to read later or share with friends. But depending on the device used, browser plugins, and other factors determine whether it’ll load correctly, or at all. Luckily there’s an easy way to make sure that never happens.
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.
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 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.
Keeping track of news articles you want to read later is finally getting a lot easier in Google’s Chrome app for iOS.
Today the company finally added a new feature that is similar to Safari’s Reading List option that allows iPhone and iPad users to save stories to read while offline.
Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox web browser, just snapped up Pocket in its first ever acquisition.
Pocket will remain an independent subsidiary and promises to continue delivering the service fans know and love. However, the Mozilla takeover will allow it to add “fuel to the rocketship” and build an even greater product.
Pocket updated its apps for Android and iOS to version 6.0, which now tailors to your interests. The release brings a new Recommendations tab that scans your activity in Pocket and, armed with that knowledge, presents you with new stories and other content you might find interesting.
