I saw a tweet last night from FilmSchoolReject.com, a film site, that said how the “Pocket” app’s integration with Chrome had changed his workflow. As someone who’s always looking for online tools that would improve my productivity, I was curious.
Turns out the “Read It Later” app has rebranded itself as “Pocket.” The tagline is when you find someone you like on the net, put it in your pocket. Yeah, whatever.
“Read it Later” is more to the point, and let’s you know what the app does, which is to let you save articles for later reading without clogging up your bookmarks. “Pocket” is generic and abstract, which I guess allows the company to expand beyond just saving links to articles for later reading.
I’ve used “Read It Later” with Firefox and Chrome on my laptop and with Dolphin on my smartphone running Android.
On Firefox, there’s an official app from the company. For desktop browsers, it has the best implementation. You can save a link for later reading by right-clicking it, and then clicking on “Read This Link Later" on the dropdown menu. When you’re on a page, you can just click on the “Read It Later” icon next to the address bar (or wherever you put it). If you have multiple tabs open, you can also save all of the pages with one click. To access these saved pages, you can just click on the arrow next to the “Read It Later” icon.
On Chrome, it was a big mess. First, there wasn’t an official app. The best independently developed one I found was “Read This Page Later.” The only problem with that app is that saving a page is a two click process: first, click on the “Read This Page Later” app icon, then click on the Add button. On the Firefox app, it’s just one click. It also lacks the “Save All Tabs for Later” and “Save This Link Later” features. The article listing is on par with the Firefox app, though. That was about a year ago.
Fast forward to today, “Read It Later” is now called “Pocket,” and the company finally created an official app for Chrome in April - I think it’s April because the first review of the app was in that month. It’s not as feature rich as the Firefox app. It only does two things: save a page with one click and save a link by right-clicking. That’s it. You can’t access the reading list with the app.
The independently produced “Read This Page Later” app also updated itself recently with a “Save Link to Read Later” feature, which allows you to save link by right-clicking. Yeah, it’s kinda redundant with with the official “Pocket” app.
If you install both the independently produced “Read This Page Later” app and the official “Pocket” app and put them next to each other, then you would have pretty much all of the features from the Firefox app except for the “Save All Tabs for Later” feature.
If Chrome is your main browser, then that’s you’ll have to do. Firefox is still my main browser for web development. The “Read It Later” and “Firebug” apps are two reasons I’m still sticking with Mozilla.
