Hasta La Gadget!

Instapaper Pro, one of Gadget Lab’s favorite iPhone apps, has been updated to version 2.2. Despite that incremental number, there is a slew of new features which make the application more like v3.0. For those who never heard of it, Instapaper lets you save long articles from your browser by clicking a bookmarklet. It then cleans up the text and images (stripping out all the crap and ads) and serves it up to you on your iPhone to read at your leisure.

Developer Marco Arment was planning on waiting for the iPad before releasing this version, but couldn’t hold on any longer. It shows. Small interface touches make Instapaper much nicer to use (if that were possible) and the application now seems more complete.

So what’s new? The biggest addition is pagination. Previously you had to either scroll continuously with your thumb or switch on “tilt-scroll”, which would scroll the page slowly as you tilted the iPhone. Pagination works much more like an e-reader: touch the bottom or top of the screen and the next “page” flips into view. You can toggle this from the reading screen on the fly.

Next is dictionary lookup. Tap a word to highlight it, as if you were going to copy-and-paste. You can then choose to look the word up. The dictionary comes from Wiktionary, and is completely off-line, so you can use it on a disconnected iPod touch. This is useful for learning English, we guess.

There is also an in-app browser, which replaces the old option to save the full version of a page. You need to be online, of course, but a browser is far more useful as you can follow links and of course mark them to read later in Instapaper. Better, the browser has a text mode, which Instapaper-izes a web-page in place for better small-screen reading.

You’ll also notice indicators on your article list. Like the blue dots by podcasts and TV shows in iTunes, these show partially-read articles (and you can now delete archived articles, something you couldn’t do before).

There are also much nicer text and font controls (the pop-over panel may hint at the future iPad version) and general tweaks to the graphics (including a nice new icon). If you don’t have Instapaper Pro already, go spend you $5 now. If you do, you won’t need any pushing to grab this update.

Instapaper Pro 2.2 now available [Instapaper Blog]

Instapaper Pro [iTunes]

See Also:

• Instapaper: A $5 App That Justifies Your iPhone Purchase
• New, Improved Instapaper for Kindle
• How To Make Your Kindle Into an Automatic Instapaper
• 5 Apps We Can't Wait to See on the iPad