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.
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.
Apple might have tried to kill read-it-later services by adding Reading List to Safari, but iOS 8’s new Extensibility feature is bringing new life to bookmarking services like Pocket, which said today that its updated app will make it faster than ever to save everything to Pocket.
iOS 8’s Handoff feature looks totally rad. Imagine starting off a task on your Mac and then being able to continue where you left off on your iPhone or iPad without waiting. Just pick up the device and everything has already synced.
But wait! There’s no need to imagine this, because you can already do it right now, and you don’t even need iCloud. Handoff looks truly useful, and will blur the lines between our devices more than ever before, but let’s take a look at some apps that already work seamlessly between platforms.
Degauss Labs’ new Pocket earbuds cost $35, which puts them on the cusp of “quality possibility” (a term I just made up) – they might sound good, or they may just use the same crappy old internals of every other cheap earbud under $50.
But what this Swedish-designed gadget does have is style, and that’s probably the most important spec in this price range.
More than two million videos from the web are being saved to Pocket each week now. To make the viewing experience more seamless, Pocket has integrated AirPlay into its iOS app for sharing with the Apple TV. The update went live today in the App Store.
Thanks to the slickness of AirPlay, users can exit the Pocket app when a video is streaming. There’s a new AirPlay button embedded in the app’s video player.
“This is just the beginning of how Pocket plans on truly becoming the DVR for the Web, and we think it’s going to be a great addition to our users’ experience in general,” said Pocket.
If you’re shopping for a new iPhone wallet case, you’ll be hard pushed to find one as suave and as strongly-built as the Fulki Pocket for iPhone 5 and 5s. Handmade from thick, belt-grade Italian leather, it’s the kind of case that’ll still be looking good and going strong long after the iPhone you slip into it has died out.
Pocket by Fulki Category: Cases Works With: iPhone 5 & 5s Price: €85
The Fulki Pocket is designed to provide your iPhone with protection from scratches, scrapes, and bumps at almost every angle. It also has a small pocket that’ll carry your credit card or some cash, and the v-shaped cutout in its top edge will allow you to grip your iPhone with your thumb and forefinger when you’re pulling it out of the case.
The Fulki Pocket is available in tan, coffee, and cognac colors, and it’s priced at €85 ($116). It’s pretty pricey, but it’s worth it.
Pocket, the service formerly known as Read It Later, announced a new version of its mobile and desktop apps today. Version 5.0 introduces what Pocket is calling “Highlights,” a new method for discovering articles inside the app.
The user interface has also been simplified to make the experience of using the app smoother, and Pocket has added a new side navigation bar and the ability to bulk edit lists of items.
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.
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.
Pocket has received its big iOS 7 update. The app already looked pretty iOS 7-friendly to begin with, so the design tweaks in today’s update are more subtle. It’s likely that you won’t even notice them on an iOS 7 device. The biggest additions are what Pocket is calling Instant Sync and a more fine-tuned reading experience.
You may be familiar with Pocket. It’s the shiny, fast, easy-to-use counterpart to Instapaper’s current lameware offering. And you may be familiar with Kobo, maker of e-readers and tablets.
Now, Pocket and Kobo work together, putting all your read-later articles onto your e-ink reader or tablet without a middleman.
Digg Reader, the service hoping to secure as many Google Reader users as it can when the service closes on July 1, has just begun rolling out in beta to early testers. The news comes just as the official Digg Reader app for iOS is expected to hit the App Store.
Twitterrific, one of my favorite Twitter clients on iOS, got a new update this week that adds Readability integration for bookmarking tweets you want to catch up with later, as well as support for image hosting service Droplr. The update also comes with a ton of bug fixes and improvements.
It’s hard to oversell the usefulness of a good iPad stand stand for travelers. It starts on the plane so you can bypass the in-flight movies with something better, and continues from there.
You can prop the iPad up in the bathroom or on the nightstand, you can – in concert with the removed Smart Cover as a base – fashion a quick in-bed theater, and you can type, play music and everything else, all without having to put your pristine iDeice down onto filthy hotel furniture. Ugh.
If you haven’t played Ticket to Ride yet, all you need to know is that the iPad version is the most addictive board game I’ve played on the device. On the iPhone? Nothing even comes close (O.K., except maybe chess and Words with Friends).
This weekend the newest version of the game to hit the iPhone, Ticket to Ride Europe Pocket, goes from $2 to free. Don’t miss out on this one — and make sure you tell a buddy so you can play ’em.
Tumblr’s official iOS app has been updated today with a number of new sharing features, in addition to Instapaper and Pocket integration, that let you “do more than just reblog when you find something you love.” The update also makes some improvements to the photo viewer and the way the app displays GIF images.