Everyone’s been there. You’re reading an article on a train or while waiting for a friend, and just as you go to click the second page of the story, your connection dies. Suddenly you can’t finish the story right away. Now you’ll never know where Waldo is because you’re going to close that window, and completely forget about it in five minutes.
Read It Later (free) offers a solution to this irritating problem by letting users archive stories they want to read later within the app. After a mildly cumbersome set-up process in order to install the “story catcher” as a bookmark within the Safari app, everything else is as easy as setting up a bookmark.
Once the catcher is installed in Safari (a process that is explained within the Read It Later app), you simply have to click the Read It Later bookmark when you’re viewing a web page in Safari that you want to read later. When you do this, it adds the web page to the Read It Later app.
Once the bookmarks are in your app, you can tag them to make them easier to identify. From there, they can be filtered by title, URL or tag. The filtering is easy to do, but there are also a set of buttons attached to each story that aren’t explained anywhere in the app. Although a little experimentation soon makes it clear what their purpose is, icons that are easier to understand would be nice.
The odd icons are one of Read It Later’s few missteps, as the rest of the app functions very intelligently. After a story is marked as read, it appears in an archive of stories you’ve already read, and another portion of the app keeps track of what page you’re reading in a given article.
These features make Read It Later a real asset of an app, and a pleasure to use. Read It Later (free) is a must-have if you do a lot of reading on your iPhone. It’ll make getting caught without Internet service much less frustrating, as there’s nothing quite like being engrossed in a story only to have the lights turned out on you.
