Instapaper Gets Even Better With The Latest 4.0 Update
Instapaper, the useful web service that allows you to save webpages for later offline reading, just received it’s major update to version 4.0 today. And this is the best version of Instapaper yet, for both iPhone and iPad users.
In addition to getting a completely revamped icon, there are several major changes to how Instapaper works on your iDevice – especially on the iPad.
Interface
Previously, the iPad version looked like a blown up version of the iPhone interface. Now, the iPad interface has something completely different – a grid view, with a minimal, non-intrusive sidebar. The grid view gives you a headline, where the link comes from (and sometimes a byline), and an excerpt of the beginning of the article.
The sidebar is reminiscent of the original Tweetie for Mac (which has carried over into other apps, such as Reeder and Sparrow on OS X), and allows you to quickly access Read Later, Liked, Archive, Friends, Editors, Web, and Settings. This replaces the old sidebar and menu overlay, which wasn’t the best interface choice to begin with. This new iPad interface is simply great, and worth the download alone.
The iPhone version also got a more elegant interface as well, though it doesn’t have that awesome sidebar like on the iPad. Reading articles now gets a full screen mode, so distractions are erased and you can just focus on reading.
Reading Experience
To add to the reading experience, Instapaper now features a draggable scrollbar so you can easily navigate through those longer articles. This was previously a huge pain if you wanted to reference something in an article and then wanted to get back to your spot.
Multiple articles can now be selected to be archived, deleted, or moved for both the iPad and iPhone, which is a huge relief. I’ve often struggled with archiving multiple things in the past, so I’m very glad this feature is now available. And that’s another bonus – archiving and deleting now coexist!
Social
The Friends section is a bit different now as well. Rather than just showing you the people you subscribe to and their “liked” articles, you can see all recent links from Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr dashboard. The option to view your friends’ Instapaper “likes” is still there though (a great way to find more amazing reads).
Footnotes and Defining
My favorite part of the new Instapaper, though, are the footnotes and new “Define” popups. Sometimes, authors use footnotes to reference something in an article. Before, you would have to go to the bottom of the article to see the reference. But now in 4.0, Instapaper will show you a “…” glyph where a footnote is. Tapping this glyph will display the footnote in a popover window. This feature alone is worth buying Instapaper, if you haven’t already. The Define feature now integrates Wikipedia, so you can always look something up if you want to know more about it.
Search Subscription
The last major change is Search Subscription. This is a $2.99 in-app subscription (every three months) feature that brings server-side searching of the full content of every single article you have ever saved on your account. Yes, this replaces the old downloaded-articles-only search. Those that are subscribers to Instapaper already will have this feature enabled – this in-app purchase is essentially the same thing, just now available within the app. This feature alone is incredibly handy, and definitely worth the asking price.
Conclusion
All-in-all, Instapaper 4.0 is definitely the best version of Instapaper. I just gave a brief overview of the major new changes in the update, but the full change log is below:
- Completely redesigned iPad list interface as a grid with sidebar
- Redesigned iPhone interface with a black-and-white theme
- Multi-select articles in list to archive, delete, or move in bulk
- Search Subscription: the $1/month Subscription from the Instapaper website is now available in the app via In-App Purchase. It’s called Search Subscription, and it adds server-side searching of the full contents of every article you’ve ever saved. This replaces the old downloaded-articles-only search in the app.
- Archive and Delete now peacefully coexist everywhere
- App Directory (in Settings) lists apps that integrate with Instapaper
- Hardware brightness control in iOS 5 (brightness now also available on iPhone)
- Draggable scrollbar for quickly jumping through documents
- Article authors, published dates, and site titles are now displayed when available (availability will increase over time)
- “Friends” section can now browse all recent links posted in your Facebook news feed, Twitter timeline, and Tumblr Dashboard
- “Editors” is now fully intergrated and sourced exclusively from Give Me Something To Read
- New settings to customize number of Liked/Archive articles stored on device
- Wikipedia lookups added to newly redesigned “Define” popups
- Footnotes are converted to inline “…” buttons that display in popovers
- [iPhone] Option to hide the status bar while reading (hidden by default)
- [iPhone] Redesigned font (ᴀA) panel to be like iPad’s
- [iPhone] Redesigned Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Pinboard, Evernote share forms
- YouTube URLs now open in the system’s YouTube app
- New option to use Apple’s dictionary under iOS 5
- Minor improvements to the in-article styling
- Smoother tilt scrolling that works well in all orientations
- New icon
- Added Tweetbot and The Hit List to Share panel
- When updating, the entire table no longer reloads after each article downloads. It now just reloads once after the main update request, showing all (even un-downloaded) articles, and they enable themselves as they get downloaded.
Personally, while Apple may have a nice little Reading List feature in iOS 5, they have nothing when compared to Marco Arment and the best version of Instapaper yet.
Download the update now on your iDevice, or go out and purchase this amazing app if you haven’t already. It’s definitely worth the cash, and will change how you read articles.
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