One of my great passions, which I recently mentioned is content curation. You are by now probably familiar with my latest effort to share with you all those nice and pretty things I find on the web. But it takes more than just mindless surfing and posting to deliver good content. Tools like Instapaper play a key role!

Should you get this app? All knowledge junkies must have this application, simply because it will allow you to have content at hand at all times*

Ok, let’s first understand what this app is: Instapaper is tool that allows you to download a text version of a website for you to read later. Unlike other bookmarking services out there, such as delicious.com, you are not just organizing links and sharing, you are also getting a stripped down version of your bookmark (less loading time!). Now how does it work? You can install a bookmarklet on your browser (Firefox, Safari, and Chrome are supported) and everytime you want to save a page, just click on it and it’ll be saved to your Instapaper account. If you are wondering “what the heck is a bookmarklet?”, this is it:

Imagine you have found this wonderful article you want to save to read later:

You click on your bookmarklet and it’ll be saved in your Instapaper account. You can open the original page OR you can view the stripped down text version:

There is a functionality that allows you to download your articles in several formats for offline reading (such as good’ol printing), but full disclosure here, I do not use them because I only use this tool on my iPad, which lets me download my articles and the are always available for offline viewing!
The nice thing about this iPad / iPhone app is that it will download the page in a nice magazine-like layout (and you know how much I love magazine-like layouts). Now, it is not the fanciest of layouts, but at least it’s not this horrible piece of HTML code with a bunch of dead links.

Instapaper a simple tool and it doesn’t have many “out there” features which in my opinion (and that of its developer, Marco Arment) is the beauty of it. Incredibly, Instapaper is a one man operation, which I found pretty awesome, I mean, these apps are usually developed by teams! Today Instapaper is free for computer and iPhone users. For the iPad, the app is available at 3.99€(3.86€). For me, it’s been money well spent, as this one of the apps I use most.
Many other sites, such as Twitter as well as news sites, have the API, so you always have the chance to read whatever you find on those later. For those of you that don’t speak geek, an API is simply a little code that interfaces with another software. It’s a way to communicate in code so to speak.
Love this app and believe you will get plenty of enjoyment out of it!

Paola’s mood after using this app:

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