Features that can help you make the most out of Pocket
You are browsing the Internet and find an article or video that you would like to save for later when you have more time to read or watch. This is where Pocket, formerly called Read It Later, comes in. This handy app lets you save articles, images, and videos for viewing at another time. But, there is more to Pocket than it just being a catch-all for these types of items. Pocket has some great features that allow you to save, organize, and share items with ease.
Pocket offers a simple interface so that you can find what you need quickly. The left-hand navigation separates your items by articles, images, and videos. You can also view your tags, favorites, and archived items. Settings and a help section are also conveniently located.
There are many features of Pocket that can make organizing your items easy which is great if use the app as a regular reference for saved items.
Tags
Creating tags to label your items makes finding them later a simple task. If you are saving articles on pets, for example, creating a label means that you can just click that label later to find all articles with a tag for pets. This can be done from the main screen listing of your articles or from the tags section of the navigation.
Favorites
Marking an item as a favorite is perfect for those items that you reference often. To mark as a favorite, you just click the star icon once you open the item. To view all favorites you can select it from the navigation.
Archive
This is a nice feature for items you have already viewed, but do not necessarily want to delete. You might think you are done with an item and be tempted to delete it, however, once you do then there is no going back. So, even if you think you might want to revisit an item later it is just as easy to archive it instead. Archived items are also easily accessible from the navigation.
These are pretty basic features that you would expect to see in an app like Pocket. But, there are many other features that many people may not take advantage of.
Manage Site Logins
Websites such as ESPN Insider, Harpers, and The Washington Post are already listed within Pocket for you. You can store your username or email and password for these sites if you save items to Pocket from them often. You can also add a site of your own to the listing.
Display Settings
For making reading easier on the eyes, Pocket has a feature to change the appearance of the articles. You can set the screen for light, dark, or sepia. You can switch between serif and sans serif for the font style and make the font size larger or smaller as well. You can also change the screen brightness with a convenient slider.
Sharing
Items can be shared to Twitter, Facebook, Evernote, Buffer, sent to a friend, or viewed in Safari. You can also save or share via your configured apps in the sharing screen such as iMessage, Trello, WordPress, or others depending on your settings. Friends can share items with you too and those will display in the navigation section called Shared To Me.
Reading
You can choose to turn on or off reading settings such as opening an article in best view. This will show you the preferred view for an article automatically whether it is the article view or the Web view. Scrollbar and the option to justify the text are two additional settings. Finally, there is a setting to allow for page flipping by swiping left and right. Again, each of these can be turned on or off.
The app also offers sorting by newest or oldest first, a light or dark theme for the app itself, an instant sync, and push notifications for when a friend shares an item with you.
Pocket is a great app for reading and viewing items that you have found on the Internet at a later time. But, I have also found it to be a useful reference for items as well. Organizing everything with tags and favorites works great. If you forget to label something, Pocket also has a search feature.
Pocket is a free app that offers a Pocket Premium service for a monthly or yearly fee. The paid service provides a permanent library for items that may be removed from the Internet, a more powerful search, and tag suggestions.
