Instapaper for iPhone and iPad 2.2.6 released

Instapaper and Instapaper Free have just been updated to version 2.2.6 in the App Store with lots of new features and improvements.

Both apps gained two major features:

• A prompt to add a URL from the pasteboard to Instapaper. (Copy a URL from another app, then launch Instapaper.)
• Address Book integration to conveniently install the email-in feature as a contact. (Yes, Instapaper has an email-in feature!) Once it’s installed, in any email-link or email-text feature in other apps, you can just start typing “instapaper” or “readlater”, and autocomplete will suggest the Instapaper email-in contact. This helps add links to Instapaper from apps that don’t have built-in integration but do have an email-sharing feature.

The full Instapaper app has a bunch of new features and fixes:

• Delete-instead-of-archive option. This has been the most commonly requested feature for months: many customers just want clean, permanent deletes without an archive as an intermediary.
• Delete-without-confirming option (iPad only). On the iPad, tapping the trash-can icon in the article would prompt with a confirmation popover. If you’re confident in your deletes and would like to skip that extra tap, now you can.
• Reverse-sort option (show oldest articles first).
• Swipe-only-pagination option. Previously, both taps and swipes would trigger page-turning in pagination mode. But it’s easy to accidentally tap when you’re just trying to brush dust off the screen or adjust your grip. Now, you can have pagination only activate on swipes and ignore simple taps. This is how I prefer to use it.
• Wi-Fi-only updating option. This comes with a caveat: it’s not guaranteed to be perfect and use absolutely zero cellular data (I don’t think that’s even possible to guarantee in data-using iOS apps), but it takes reasonable measures to avoid and minimize cellular data transfer.
• Article-limit option with a new raised maximum of 500 articles (up from 250). A lot of customers are… optimistic with how much they intend to read later.
• Larger fonts available on iPad. The iPad is popular among readers with low vision, because it can fit a reasonable amount of text on screen even at very large sizes. Now, Instapaper supports very large text.
• Improved performance , especially during updates, by changing a fundamental data-storage architecture that was used everywhere and would often cause brief unresponsiveness.
• Improved position-sync accuracy, especially on the iPod Touch and the Wi-Fi iPad.
• Fixed Twitter login and posting issues. I’m sorry about this – it was a big problem in 2.2.5.
• Fixed launch-in-Archive bug on iOS 4.
• Fixed Echofon sharing , and finally renamed the button to say Echofon instead of the old name, Twitterfon.
• Fixed auto-update behavior on iOS 4.
• Fixed a few other miscellaneous bugs.

Instapaper Free has also been updated to 2.2.6, its first update in a while. It now has some major features previously only found in the full app:

• Saves your position and synchronizes it with any other iPhones or iPads you have.
• Offers scroll-to-top protection.
• Has optimized graphics for Retina Display and background update completion for iOS 4.

Like the full edition, graphical-layout mode has now been removed from Instapaper Free in favor of the enhanced text mode with inline photos when available. I know a small portion of users don’t like this, and I apologize for needing to axe graphical mode, but it’s necessary for the growth of the service and the development of many current and future features. I believe I’ve added enough popular, high-demand features to both app editions to more than make up for the removal of this rarely-used feature.

Enjoy 2.2.6!