CNN names Instapaper Pro "Most useful"
Since CNN republished the Best App Ever Awards from earlier today, I can now say that CNN named Instapaper one of its “Best iPhone apps”. (Yeah, I know it’s double-dipping.)
Instapaper Pro named "Most Useful App" by Best App Ever Awards
The Best App Ever Awards just announced their 2009 winners, and Instapaper Pro was named:
- Winner, Most Useful App
- Honorable mention, Best Productivity Enhancer App
- Honorable mention, Best News App
This is a great honor. Thanks, everyone.
Support for sites that require logins
Instapaper now supports these sites that require logins for premium, single-page, or all content:
- Ars Technica
- Autosport.com
- Baseball Prospectus
- Chronicle.com
- Economist
- ESPN Insider
- Financial Times
- Harper’s
- Liberation.fr
- LRB
- LWN
- New York Review of Books
- Newsday
- WSJ
It works by sending a copy of the page as you’re viewing it to Instapaper’s text engine when you click the Read Later bookmarklet. (This requires the newest bookmarklet, which came out last August.) This means:
- It’s nearly immune to character-encoding or HTML-parsing bugs on these sites.
- It can support almost any site that requires logins or subscription accounts, although I need to add it to the list first. But:
- It will not automatically choose the Print/single-page view. You need to view the single-page version, then click Read Later.
Support the publishers you love. I got a Harper’s subscription to use with this feature, and I’m eyeing The Economist as well. If you’re a geek like me, you should also consider getting an Ars Technica Premier subscription, which offers now-Instapaper-compatible single-page versions of all of their multi-page stories. (Definitely subscribe to Ars Premier before John Siracusa reviews the next version of OS X.)
Soon, I’ll let you add your own sites to this list for your account. But while this feature is still young, I’m going to add them manually.
Which subscription-requiring sites should I add? Answer here or email me. When requesting a site, please tell me if the subscriber content is served from a different domain, or a subdomain, from the main site. Thanks.
Ephemera for Mac
Ephemera will comfortably synchronize your ebook reader with Instapaper.com via USB. It works with the Amazon Kindle, Sony readers and pretty much any device capable of reading HTML, Mobipocket or EPUB files, which should cover quite a bit of ground.
It will fetch your news as single articles or in Instapaper’s premade bundles (Mobipocket & EPUB). Personally, I prefer the former. I can read an article, delete it on my reader, and during the next sync it’ll be archived on Instapaper.com.
Being the lazy guy, I’ve also implemented a feature I call “Plug, Sync & Go”: If you want it to, Ephemera will automatically start up, sync, and then unmount your reader when it detects the USB connection. My idea was that you’d configure the app once, and then just have it work — by simply connecting your reader.
Great idea: a Mac app to automatically synchronize Instapaper’s downloads to USB-mounted e-readers. I especially like the synchronization of deleted articles to your Instapaper Archive page.
Native Instapaper support in FeedDemon
Nick Bradbury of FeedDemon emailed me to show me the new send-to-Instapaper support in FeedDemon’s update from this week. Nick says:
To use it, first click the “gear” icon to enable the “Send To” menu:
Once that’s done, simply click the “Send To” icon beneath an article, then select Instapaper from the menu:
This replaces the method from my earlier post with a native, built-in feature.
Thanks, Nick!
Sending from FeedDemon to Instapaper
FeedDemon does have support for sending 3rd party blog posts to your own blog, though. It also allows you to specify your blog’s input however you want. So effectively, you can consider Instapaper your “blog” and just send articles to it. Fantastic!
Clever use of the Instapaper API for FeedDemon users. Update: This is no longer necessary.
Wired: 5 Apps We Can’t Wait to See on the iPad
Instapaper, not iBooks or anything else, is the thing that will turn your iPad into the ultimate, personal, newspaper.
Thanks! I’ll do my best to make it worth the wait.
I’m honored.
Indie+Relief tally
Yesterday, through participation in Indie+Relief (whether they realized it or not), Instapaper Pro’s new customers donated over $1500 to Doctors Without Borders (MSF).
Thanks, everyone!
