14 DAY TRIAL // Reading later just got way better with iOS 8. The best app for doing that is Instapaper and the developers managed to integrate some of the best features of iOS 8. Having an extension that takes text input from anywhere on the phone and adding it to the read-later app makes it less cumbersome.
Also, Instapaper is free and you can get some awesome added functionality via in-app purchase.
Instapaper reads to you later
The long-standing app that has been created by independent developer Marco Arment was sold last year to a company. The first shots fired by the new team were pretty weak, but now we know they were saving all the good stuff for iOS 8.
The version 6.0 came out minutes after the iOS 8 launch last night, and it is by far the most well-thought app for this kind of activity. The main reason is that reading later has been enriched with Text-to-Speech. The developers say this was one of the most requested features. They made it easy to access text-to-speech directly from the share sheet in Instapaper, and when the Siri voice starts to read the articles, you get music player-like controls on the bottom of the screen. You can stop it, rewind, play/pause and fast forward, and you can set the reading speed from 0.5x to 2.0x.
The player controls come up on the lock screen so you can just use this as a podcast player. Now if you are a premium subscriber you can get some more functionality out of it, and the most important one is text-to-speech playlist. You can choose a few articles and you don't need to play them one by one.
Premium package
Instapaper is now a free app, but there are some interesting perks to the premium membership subscribers. As we mentioned, one of the good ones is text-to-speech playlists.
Instapaper premium costs $2.99 (€2.31) per month and $29.99 (€23.14) if you pay it monthly. You will also get Full-Text Search. This helps you search through all of your articles, even the ones in the Archive folder. You also get Unlimited highlights and there are no ads showing on the Instapaper website, just in case you want to do your reading on the computer.
Another great feature for the Premium package is the API Integration for third-party apps. For example, you could be using your Instapaper queue to read in apps like ReadKit on your Mac.
Your Instapaper Profile
The new Instapaper has a new folder called Browse that combines the Feature and Friends sections. You can still choose to sort your articles and get only the featured ones or see the most recent ones. Also, you can just tap on your friends names and see their user profile.
And talking about that, Instapaper now has Profiles. You can choose to set it to Private or Public, and if your option is the second one, then everyone can follow you and see what you like.
You can view your Profile at www.instapaper.com/me
Extend it anywhere
One of the most important features of Instapaper 6.0 is the integration with iOS 8. Developers have created an extension that works system wide and can get the text on the screen and add it to Instapaper.
They have also added a Today extension for Notification Center. You can drag from the top of your screen and see all the stuff you have saved that day. Just tap on an article and you will open it in Instapaper.
