Read It Later

For all of those who have asked, rest assured, the iPad version of Read It Later is coming.

While Apple gave developers the opportunity to submit their apps to be available on day one, I decided to wait until I could test it on the actual device.  As today loomed closer, I got increasingly nervous that I was making a mistake.  However, after spending the last two hours playing around on my shiny new iPad, I’m very happy I waited.

Make no mistake, the iPad is great, but how you hold it, how you touch it, even how you look at it is was all completely different than I expected.  Even though I have to-scale printouts of the iPad, it feels a lot heavier and a lot bigger than I would have guessed.  These factors make a big impact on how you want to interact with each app.

There is one thing that makes designing for the iPhone OS different than any other platform:  Feel.  When you design for the web or desktop you mainly concern yourself with the way the app looks.  When you design an iPhone and Ipad app, it has to feel right too.  This is why I waited.  I could design how I wanted it to look, but until I was holding it, I could not design how it feels.

Now I’ve got it in hand and it looks freaking awesome.  Give me a little bit more time and soon you’ll have it when it feels awesome too.

I would normally post some teaser screenshots here but I’m likely going to shuffle a few things around, so it’d all be a lie anyway

One more update: If you have an iPad, email me your device id if you’d like to beta test it.

In case you missed them, I’ve made a number of major updates to Digest this week.

Uncategorized List

A new tab is available alongside your topics that will pull from all of the items in your list.  This is useful in case your selected topics do not cover every single item you’ve saved.

Tag Support

Digest now works with your existing Read It Later tags.  For example, if you define a topic with the keyword ‘productivity’, any items you tag with that keyword will appear in your custom topic.

Domain Support

You can now include domains in your custom topic definitions.  For example, if you create a topic with the keyword ‘google.com’, any item from google.com will appear in your custom topic.

Miscategorized Items

You can now flag items as miscategorized.  Digest can learn from its mistakes and use the data to become smarter in the future.  After miscategorizing an item, you can opt to move it to another topic.

Beta Pricing

While Digest is in beta, I’m running an early introductory price of $5.  This is a one-time purchase and will give you access to Digest for as long as you use Read It Later.  This one-time purchase also applies to any RIL app that adds Digest support.  This means that when Digest comes to the iPhone and iPad, if you already have a Digest account, you won’t have to pay again to use it on each app.  Get It Now!

If you want to try it for free, you can also request a free trial invite.

Footnotes:
1. Users who paid more than $5 when Digest was first released have already had the difference refunded.
2. If you are already a Digest user, domain support may only work on items from today onward.  To get around this, add an additional keyword of the domain w/o any periods.  For example: google.com, googlecom

Last night during some planned server maintenance, I pushed through two updates that have been pending for a while:

20 Character Usernames

Previously, usernames were limited to 12 characters.  You can now make your username up to 20 characters long.  If you’d like to change yours go to http://readitlaterlist.com/pass.  While you are there, if you haven’t already, you should add a password reset email so if you ever forget your login you can retrieve it without contacting me

Tag Editing

Before the update, tags could only be added to items, not removed or edited.  This limit is no longer in affect.  You can edit and delete tags and the changes will sync as well.

Digest is Read It Later with a brain. It analyzes all of the articles in your list and automatically groups them into topics. Simply put, it is like having folders in your list, but RIL takes care of sorting them for you.

This is all about reinventing the reading list.  RIL makes it very easy to save a link with just one click, in any browser and on most mobile devices.  It’s almost too easy.  So naturally your reading list can fill up fast.

There is a fundamental problem with displaying your items in a list.  It’s hard to know where to start.  Do you start from the top?  From the bottom?  Randomly?  None of these make a whole lot of sense because the order in which you saved things is not necessarily the order you want to read them.

Looking at your list, you may have an article about technology you wanted to read, a video about kittens you wanted to watch, a link to shoes you wanted to buy or a website for a band your friend told you to check out.  And when you finally get around to reading, you may only be interested in one of those topics.  It’d be a LOT easier if it were better organized.

Normally organization is accomplished with folders and tagging.  But both of those take time to manually add to each item, time that you do not have, which is the whole reason why you are using Read It Later in the first place!

This is why Digest works.  It’s smart enough to know the difference between an article on iPhones and an article about sports.  It takes each article and filters it into the topics you care about automatically.

Landing on the front page is like coming to a news site where all of the articles were hand picked by you, where there is nothing to filter through, it is all content you already know you want to read.

Topics are automatically created for you based on what you’ve already saved but you can fully customize your digest by adding topics, removing them, rearranging them and even defining your own custom topics that articles will be sorted into.

Digest finds and highlights certain content from your list. If you save a lot of videos, Digest will present them together for you. If you save a lot of links from a certain site, Digest will group them for you.

You can even share your digest by making it public and sending the URL to all of your friends.

How to Get It

Today, Digest is available as a free invite only beta.  To request an invite, go to http://readitlaterlist.com/digest

The Future

Digest is starting on the web but will very soon be making a native appearance within the iPhone app, Firefox extension and the upcoming iPad app.

The current way you use Read It Later and all that it offers will not change and it will absolutely still be free.  Digest will be the premium upgrade to the Read It Later service and pricing will be announced in a few weeks.

I’m unbelievably excited about where Digest will go in the future.  I already have a million ideas for paths to explore, so grab an invite, give it a spin and enjoy a new way to use Read It Later!

For the past few months, I’ve been consumed, working on a new product.  It is a completely new approach to how you use Read It Later.  After overwhelmingly positive feedback from my initial test group, I’ve decided to release it into a wider beta.

This happens tomorrow.

Calibre, a free and open source e-book library management application now supports Read It Later.

Calibre allows you to download website content and sync it to your reader.  Read It Later has been added as a custom source in the last update.  Using Calibre, you can now sync the text content from your reading list to your Kindle or other eBook reader.

Learn More:
Calibre’s Website
Calibre in the Read It Later App Directory

How to Set it Up:

Any questions about Calibre are best directed towards the developers, however, here is a quick overview on how to add RIL as a source:

1. Click the dropdown arrow under ‘Fetch News’
2. Select ‘Add a custom source’
3. Click ‘Customize builtin recipe’
4. Select ‘Read It Later’ from the list
5. Close the window
6. Click ‘Fetch News’
7. Under Custom, Click ‘Read It Later’
8. Add your username/password and set a schedule if perferred
9. Click ‘Download Now’

I just submitted version 2.0.3 to Apple.  This update to the iPhone app fixes a sync issue affecting some URLs when marked as read.  If you had a page that you marked as read on the iPhone and the change was not synced to your other computers, this should resolve it.

Thanks to everyone for sending this in.  Keep up the good work

In case you missed them, here are the latest applications with Read It Later support.

For a full list of all supported apps see the Read It Later App Directory.

Browser Apps

Postponer – Chrome Extension
Simple Read It Later extension for Google Chrome.

Mobile Apps

AddToReadingList – Blackberry App
Addtoreadinglist is a Blackberry browser integrated client for the ReadItLater service.

Bulletin – Android App
Google Reader and news client for your Android phone.

iPhone Apps

ReadWriteWeb
Official app from ReadWriteWeb

Tweetings
Twitter app

Push News
Breaking news updates delivered via push

RSS-Flash-G
Fully featured Google Reader client

Thank you everyone for all of the feedback since the 2.0 release.

Firefox Extension Version 2.0.2

I just pushed out version 2.0.2 of the Firefox extension. This new version brings back a few old features from 0.9 in addition to important bug fixes:

• ‘X days ago’ is available as an option in the list view again.
• Right click to save a page for later is back.
• Users with master passwords can now opt to save their password differently so they can skip the prompt at startup.
• Fixed text-view encoding issues with non-english character sets.
• Fixed url not appearing in status bar on compact list view

iPhone Version 2.0.1

I submitted this version shortly after 2.0.0 was approved and it contains a number minor bug and crash fixes.  I expect it to be available soon.

Have an awesome holiday weekend!

I just pushed out an update to the text view that fixes a number of encoding issues.  Any content with Cyrillic, Hebrew, Farsi, Japanese, Chinese, or European characters that previously appeared garbled should be fixed.

For future content, you do not need to do anything, it will just work.  For already downloaded articles, you can redownload the content and it will replace it with the corrected encoding.

Note: A fix for the Firefox extension requires a new update, which I’m working on getting out soon.  In the meantime, you can access the fixed text view through the website at http://readitlaterlist.com/unread/.

Thank you to everyone who have sent in text view reports, they’ve been incredibly helpful.