What's next?

Instapaper.app 1.3 has been very well received, but I’m already hard at work on the next major version.

There will be some great new features coming in the next few versions, but to enable them, I’m first rewriting the entire storage/update engine. This is incredibly dull and time-consuming, but it will provide some nice benefits:

• Updates happen in a separate thread, so you won’t need to sit and stare at the list screen while waiting for them to complete. Everything will be downloaded in the background, similar to Mail.
• Articles and their two versions (text and graphical) can be downloaded separately from the app learning about the article for the first time. This will enable individual-article reloads from the app as well as a possible “download graphical version of just this article” feature.
• Article content is stored separately from the articles list, and the content is not included in iTunes backups. This will greatly speed up backups.
• Complex graphical layouts will download in less time and be less likely to crash or slow down.
• Operations can be enqueued while offline and sent to the server on the next sync, enabling a “Read Later” button for tapped links in saved articles.

…and a few more features that I’m not ready to announce publicly yet.

I don’t have a release-date estimate yet. Rest assured that 1.4 will be a significant update.