Marco Arment’s Instapaper is one of two* killer apps for the iPhone: It’s so useful that it just about justifies the phone’s purchase price all by itself.
Now Arment has cut the price of the Pro version in half, to $5, and you should buy it.
Instapaper started out as a simple web service. To use it, you drag a special “Read Later” bookmarklet to your browser. Whenever you find something that you’d like to read but don’t have time for at the moment, just click that “Read Later” button. The article gets added to your personal page on Instapaper. When you’ve got time later, just visit that page and read away. Conveniently, every article is automatically reformatted (all excess HTML and graphics are stripped out) leaving nothing but highly-readable text.
The Instapaper iPhone app lets you view all those saved articles in an iPhone-friendly format. The free version is so useful that I use it several times a day: On my commute, in the evening, during the odd moments of downtime.
In effect, it turns the iPhone into a super-convenient mini-reading tablet, great for catching up on the news, reading long-form articles, and more.
Instapaper Pro adds a couple new features. It now downloads articles in the background, so any time you have it open, it’s updating the list of stories for you to read. It handles the “graphical version” (with photo) of articles better than the free version. It lets you archive articles that you’ve read more easily. And it adds some minor interface enhancements, such as a reversed mode (light text on a dark background, good for reading at night) and tilt-scrolling.
And, it adds features that let you optionally share your articles with the wider Instapaper community, or read popular articles that have been shared by others.
But even if you don’t feel like you need those features, you should still get the Pro version. It’s only $5, and most of that goes to Arment. For developing such a great app, he certainly deserves it.
One side note: Instapaper pro is rated “17 and up” for “Frequent/Intense Mature/Suggestive Themes,” which is an indication of Apple’s bizarre and arbitrary approval and rating policies.
* The other killer iPhone app is Tweetie, a $3 Twitter client that, if you’re a Twitter user and have multiple accounts, is as indispensable as a needle to a heroin addict.
Bob Dylan, the musical voice of his generation, could the voice of your next car navigation system or portable navigation device (PND). He said so himself this week on his BBC satellite radio program, that he’s negotiating with two automakers to be the voice behind their navigation systems. Take that, James Earl Jones. Dylan certainly has enough lyrics to his credit that, with several decades hindsight, foreshadowed the GPS revolution: “how many roads,” “no direction home,” and “there must be someway out of here.” (Be sure to post any we forgot below in feedback.)
