Read It Whenever

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><root available-locales="en_US," default-locale="en_US"><static-content language-id="en_US"><![CDATA[<p>With our mobile devices in hand, we're always, always online. And that pretty much means reading material flies at us from all directions. If we were to stop and read everything we wanted to, we'd get nothing else done.&nbsp; And that's why we have reading apps.<br><br>Reading apps do three things: They let you save things to read whenever, including offline; they let you read in comfort by parsing content to get rid of other clutter on a web page and making other changes to the way text looks; and they let you email or share content with the world.<br><br>As with everything, there is more than one application that handles your reading. But three of them are really battling it out for your attention right now: Instapaper, Pocket (ex Read It Later) and Readability. There are others, like Spool and Longform, but they're still to become real alternatives to the big three.</p> <table style="width: 100px;" align="right" border="0" cellpadding="8" cellspacing="8"> <tbody> <tr> <td><img src="/businessworld/system/files/images/July/Readability-iPhone_100x100.jpg" height="100" width="100"></td> </tr> <tr> <td><span style="color: #333399;"><strong>READABILITY Zaps clutter and saves web articles for an easy read</strong></span></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p><br>For a while there, Instapaper for iOS and on the web through your PC, was the clear winner among the three apps. In some ways, it still is, because it's the one that is most supported by other apps. Look at the sharing options on any other content-related app and you'll find there's an inevitable option to send to Instapaper. Getting your reading material into Instapaper is in fact one of the easiest things about it. If you're on the PC or laptop, just log in to your Instapaper account and put the bookmarklet on the browser. Then, click to send anything to the app for reading later. In fact, if you copy a URL to the clipboard on your iPhone, iPod or iPad and then open the app, you will be given the option of adding that URL to your&nbsp; list.<br><br>Instapaper is a much-loved app with many loyal users who also support the equally-liked creator, Marco Arment, by paying $4.99. A recent update to the app has brought better formatting, more fonts and animated page flipping among others.&nbsp; There are some options for additional features such as text search. This month, Instapaper arrived in Android, licensed but not created by the same developer.<br><br></p> <table style="width: 100px;" align="left" border="0" cellpadding="8" cellspacing="8"> <tbody> <tr> <td><img src="/businessworld/system/files/images/July/pocket_app_100x100.jpg" height="100" width="100"></td> </tr> <tr> <td><span style="color: #000080;"><strong>POCKET Manage a reading list of articles from the Internet</strong></span></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p>Pocket does much of what Instapaper does. Both — or rather, all three —will let you set brightness from within the app, change fonts, modify text alignment, change from dark to light or use sepia for better reading comfort, and most importantly, change text size for easier reading. But Pocket is more charismatic, and has a more gesture-based and much prettier home screen. And yes, these things do matter. Pocket organises articles in tiles so that they feel magazine-like and you tap to get into full reading mode. People have always felt Pocket looks better. The app also lets you tag articles and search for them. What Instapaper has over Pocket is much wider support from other apps so that there's never any doubt you can save something to Instapaper. Pocket, on the other hand, also saves other content forms such as videos and so is quite a good bookmarking option. On top of that, Pocket is free and is available on multiple platforms.<br><br><br></p> <p>Readability, also free, is the other app that has been around for a long time and was seen on computers before mobile devices&nbsp;became so popular.</p> <table style="width: 100px;" align="right" border="0" cellpadding="8" cellspacing="8"> <tbody> <tr> <td><img src="/businessworld/system/files/images/July/instapaper_logo_100x100.jpg" height="100" width="100"></td> </tr> <tr> <td><span style="color: #000080;"><strong>INSTAPAPER Save long web pages for later offline reading</strong></span></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p>Many think of it as a network rather than a standalone app, syncing across devices. Readability had one of the first few mainstream uses of the Bookmarklet — a little button you can drag and drop on to your browser and use for instant access to a site or feature. Readability would, with a click, reformat your web page for a customised reading experience, including turning the background a soothing grey-black and the text white for reading without much glare from the screen. Sending to Readability isn't as commonly found in other apps as are the first two apps, but on the other hand, Readability has tie-ups with many apps and is automatically available with them. If you're a user of Tweetbot on the iPad or iPhone, you can set the Twitter app to go to Readability for all links that you click. This makes for quicker reading via Twitter, which can otherwise be a time-consuming activity because of the poor signal to noise ratio there. Also, try the amazing browser, Maven, on iOS, and see how a little Reader button converts the webpage to Readability format for easier reading.</p> <p><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="1"><span style="line-height: normal;"><br></span></font>Both Pocket and Readability are beginning to catch up with Instapaper in popularity and support from other apps. Ultimately, which one you prefer depends on what's most important in your reading experience. For some, it may be the way a page is parsed, for others, a particular font or how the app syncs with other devices or how quickly it works. Many people who consume vast quantities of reading material have more than one of these apps, choosing whichever they feel like on whichever device they happen to be using for reading whenever.<br><br><span>(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 09-07-2012)</span></p>