Monday, June 11, 2012

Pocket, a read-it-later app

There are many apps which allow you to identify articles for later viewing. A much-touted one is Instapaper, but Pocket is a good free alternative. Basically these apps allow you to download articles for later reading in offline mode.

Pocket is cloud based. The Pocket cloud stores all your articles for you, so you don't have to worry about losing anything. Once you have set up an account with them and have installed the Pocket app on your mobile devices (yes, more than one), or on your Mac or PC, you can view the same article/s on any device. For example, when you are browsing on the web you just have to click the pre-installed "Pocket" icon on your toolbar. The article will be saved to the Pocket server in the cloud. You can then read it on your mobile device. Likewise, as you read something on your mobile device in a wi-fi area, you can save it to Pocket and read it later.

What I like most about Pocket is the way it handles the stored article. In the images below, the first image is what you normally see when opening an article on a website. The second image is what you see when you open it in Pocket (less clutter). The third view is article view. It is clean and highly readable. You can change font, font size, spacings, brightness, and background color. This is pretty much what a basic e-reader would do.




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