Hacker News Reader

Comment by akent | Hacker News Reader

For a while I wished for a decent Instapaper client for Android, either paid or free. But eventually I gave up and switched to Read It Later, which is perfectly adequate for my needs. I don't see what all the fuss is about over Instapaper in particular when there are competing services that work just fine and that care enough to develop an Android app themselves.

View on HN

Two features, that I love, that Instapaper has over Read It Later Pro are pagination and Readability support.

Scrolling works OK on PCs because of spacebar/PgDn it is pretty stupid on touch devices. However, pagination, at least as implemented in Instapaper, is not without it's downsides. I sometimes have issues with pagination not being consistent (moving back and forth are sometimes not exact opposites).

Since I am viewing content without ads and want people to be able to continue to write I support Readability. I don't know that they deserve the 30% cut they take but there isn't really much competition out there. Flattr doesn't count in my book though it is similar.

Don't forget the lock in. If you've been using Instapaper for 2 years, you might have a huge archive and a couple of good friends that share interesting stuff. You'd loose all of that by switching to Read It Later.

One thing that I sorely miss in Instapaper though is the ability to mark text fragments and save them as quotes (like in iBooks for example), and add notes to it. I'm reading all these texts, and I can't mark quotes or note my thoughts. I hate it. Does Read It Later offer such a feature?

You can export your stuff from Instapaper as CSV. Read it Later lets you export your stuff as HTML. If you wanted to switch you could probably script the migration in a few minutes.

Set up a Tumblr blog and simply use the in-app feature to post. It's what I do: http://www.ohtion.com

Reply on news.ycombinator.com