My favorite little feature of ReadKit is search by field. Text is downloaded using each server’s stored copy and presented by default with a light theme (there are other three themes available in the Preferences) and the Optima font you can tweak article width, line height, and alignment, but I was pretty happy with the default presentation. You also can’t select multiple items at once. Articles are listed with their website favicon, bold headline, blue source link, and a brief excerpt you can’t right-click on an item in the Navigation view to bring up, for instance, a sharing menu. The app is laid out like Mail: there’s a list of services on the left pieces of content are listed vertically in the middle reading/watching videos/opening web views happens in the larger “content area” on the right. ReadKit immediately stood out to me for its clean interface and simple interactions. You can add accounts from the Preferences, and Pocket authentication uses the service’s new API with OAuth 2.0. Folders in the sidebar don’t have an unread count badge (the Unread section does), but you can hide accounts like mailboxes in Mail. There’s a decent selection of keyboard shortcuts to navigate between previous and next items, archive, mark as favorite, and “open in browser” (links can be opened in the background by setting an option in the Preferences) you can’t create new Instapaper folders from the app – nor can you configure custom keyboard shortcuts for quickly moving items into one – and there’s a strange “Save” item from the File menu (I would guess a result from Xcode leftovers). The app does have a command to add and remove links without using the browser, and the functionality is also available in the bottom toolbar as “+” and “-” buttons. You can drag & drop items from the Unread view to, say, a folder in Instapaper, but you can’t move an item from Instapaper to Pocket. For Pocket, it also contains content-specific filters for images and videos. ReadKit organizes configured accounts in a sidebar that contains top-level sections such as Unread, Favorites (liked items in Instapaper), and Archives, as well as folders created to manage articles. You can archive items and also move them across folders, with changes reflected almost instantly (if you have an Internet connection) on Instapaper’s website and other clients. I mainly used ReadKit with Instapaper, and I noticed how the app correctly fetched unread and liked items, allowing me to star entries and make them show up on Instapaper’s Liked section on the website. I’ve been testing ReadKit for the past week, and while not perfect yet, it is by far the best desktop experience for the services that I use – Instapaper (for text) and Pocket (for videos).įirst and foremost, ReadKit is stable and responsive: unlike other apps I’ve tried in the past months, ReadKit didn’t crash, and, aside from a minor hiccup that occurred on first launch when fetching my entire Instapaper archive, it performed reliably. The app costs $1.99, and if you want to use it with Instapaper, you’ll need the $1 monthly subscription. ReadKit, in fact, works with Instapaper, Pocket, and Readability, therefore covering the most popular third-party read later services. ReadKit, a new app by Webin released today, is – finally – a solid piece of software for those who have been looking for a desktop version of their favorite read later service. Words looks decent when it’s focused on text (generated by the Instapaper parser) in full-screen mode, but everything else is pretty buggy, unstable, and unfinished. Unfortunately, while promising, Words isn’t there yet. Looking around for alternatives that would work with the service I use on a daily basis for text articles, Marco Arment’s Instapaper, I was not impressed with Words: I guess a desktop app can be seen as an add-on, a companion to the main experience. I “catch up” on articles and videos with my iPhone and iPad. I’ve got used to thinking of “read later” as a inherently mobile state of mind. I’m still not completely sold on the overall concept of a desktop read-later app. After Michael Schneider, creator of Read Later, joined the Pocket team to release the official Pocket app for Mac, I wondered if there was a real need for a “read later” (lowercase) application for the desktop:
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