About Toronto Wireless

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Read Articles later with Instapaper for BlackBerry

As part of my daily reading regimen, I often come across articles that I want to read later. They’re either long or otherwise don’t fit with what I’m reading at the moment. This used to involve keeping the tab open until I got around to reading it. Problem is, oftentimes browser tabs can eat up too much memory, eventually causing the browser to crash. If it’s on a site that automatically reloads every minute or so, forget about it. It’s just a huge pain. On the suggestion of a friend I tried outInstapaper. It installs a bookmarklet in your browser which you can use to set aside everything you want to read at a later time, allowing you to avoid your browser’s clunky bookmark system. This type of application is even more useful on a BlackBerry, so when I learned that Emerick hadreleased a BlackBerry version of Instapaper, I was all over it.

Once you install the application it adds a Send to Instapaper item to your browser menu. Whenever you run across an article that you want to read later, just hit the menu button and select that option. Then, when you’re back in front of your computer you can go back and read it.

This fits particularly well with BlackBerry. Some pages just don’t render properly in the BlackBerry browser, making them difficult to read. Other times, the article is just too long to read in a mobile format. The ability to send it to your computer later, with one easy step, makes reading articles a ton easier.

One neat aspect I’ve enjoyed about Instapaper is that your items create an RSS feed. When you send something to Instapaper to read later, in other words, you can have that sent directly to your favorite RSS reader. That, to me, is what makes Instapaper worth it. If it just bookmarked my items, well, it’d be marginally more useful than my browser bookmarks. But the RSS integration is what makes this an excellent service.

Posted by Joe at www.bbgeeks.com

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