The most interesting section for me was Better filtering which breaks down his process for actually populating the app with links. As much as I’ve understood the concept of apps like instapaper, and even tried them, I still found myself victim to the infinite scroll and rarely returned to the app to take up saved links.
The idea presented there of delayed gratification via waiting periods, only ever reading things via a round trip to the app, would be a key workflow for me to be successful if I were to try one again.
I used Pocket for a long time, mostly because cellular network don’t work in subway in our city. Unfortunately, latest versions of it, at least on iOS, are unusable: one wrong swipe and it switches to page flipping and back (this can’t be turned off) and usually it downloads article lazily, when I first open it, making whole “offline” feature useless.
Now I usually send links to myself in Telegram and view in regular browsers, mostly in “reading mode” because lots of articles has css making them unreadable both on desktop and mobile. Btw, Telegram has Pocket-like “content striping” functionality (and offline too), but only for some websites.
Also, what frustrated in Pocket that it tended to remove code examples from websites, almost always. Seems that it even removed simple <pre> blocks. And Mathjax is very popular thing, and of course it didn’t work in Pocket (but formulas were visible in raw TeX format).
Yeah, the iOS version pf Pocket is a bit frustrating only because it’s so tantalizingly close to perfect that the gaps drive me nuts, especially, since the Android version doesn’t have the same issues. The most notable one for me, which you didn’t mention, is that sharing is a blocking operation on iOS but not on Android. Like you, I mostly use it on the subway.
The most interesting section for me was Better filtering which breaks down his process for actually populating the app with links. As much as I’ve understood the concept of apps like instapaper, and even tried them, I still found myself victim to the infinite scroll and rarely returned to the app to take up saved links.
The idea presented there of delayed gratification via waiting periods, only ever reading things via a round trip to the app, would be a key workflow for me to be successful if I were to try one again.
I used Pocket for a long time, mostly because cellular network don’t work in subway in our city. Unfortunately, latest versions of it, at least on iOS, are unusable: one wrong swipe and it switches to page flipping and back (this can’t be turned off) and usually it downloads article lazily, when I first open it, making whole “offline” feature useless.
Now I usually send links to myself in Telegram and view in regular browsers, mostly in “reading mode” because lots of articles has css making them unreadable both on desktop and mobile. Btw, Telegram has Pocket-like “content striping” functionality (and offline too), but only for some websites.
Also, what frustrated in Pocket that it tended to remove code examples from websites, almost always. Seems that it even removed simple
<pre>blocks. And Mathjax is very popular thing, and of course it didn’t work in Pocket (but formulas were visible in raw TeX format).Yeah, the iOS version pf Pocket is a bit frustrating only because it’s so tantalizingly close to perfect that the gaps drive me nuts, especially, since the Android version doesn’t have the same issues. The most notable one for me, which you didn’t mention, is that sharing is a blocking operation on iOS but not on Android. Like you, I mostly use it on the subway.
If you’re looking for a libre self-hostable ‘Read it Later’ app, check out Wallabag: [website] [github]