Daniel Hruska There is finally an official client for the service in the App Store Readability. After many endless months, it seemed that the application might not see the light of day at all. About a year ago, the Readabilty application was rejected due to subscription accidents and did not enter the App Store, so the developers had to start from scratch.
For those of you who have never encountered Readability - it is a service that "sucks" only an article with accompanying images from a web page without surrounding ads and other distracting elements. They work on a very similar principle, for example Reader in Safari in OS X and iOS 5, Read It Later or Instapaper. Along with the last two mentioned, Readability can store articles in the iDevice's memory for offline reading.
On first launch, you will be prompted to sign in with an existing account or to create one. The entire service is free, but you can voluntarily subscribe for $5 or more per month to support your favorite servers. A full 70% of the amount you specify will go to them. A prerequisite for a given publisher to be able to receive money is registration at Readability LLC.
Since the application only serves as a browser for articles, it is necessary to get them into it somehow. There are basically three ways. As the first, probably the easiest, I would mark inserting a link to the article directly in the application. The second way is to submit an article using accessories for Safari, Chrome and Firefox. Thanks to the open API, there is one more way to properly clean the articles for reading - using third-party applications. For example, it belongs to one of them Reeder, which can not only send but also view articles.
The very "cracking" of the text in Readability can be called something other than a ballad, because it feels very similar to reading an electronic book in iBooks. The application is graphically absolutely amazingly processed, a feast for the eyes. Five studio-supplied fonts add to the excellent readability of the text Hoefler & Frere-Jones, which is among the world's best in typography. I have absolutely no reservations about the visual processing, and I'm in awe of the graphics. Making a simple yet interesting design is not easy at all, here it was done.
When you tap the display while reading, several controls appear at the bottom for saving the article to favorites, archiving, deleting, text settings (font, size, night mode) and sharing (Twitter, Facebook, email, link, opening the article on the source website). The mentioned night mode is really useful in a dark environment, especially if you work in front of a monitor all day.
Among the excellent features is the gesture for switching from the article you are currently reading to the list of articles. Users of Reeder for iPad know it very well. It's a very addictive one-finger swipe from left to right - absolutely simple, effective and brilliant. Thanks to this gesture, there is no need for a top bar with a button Back, giving more space for the text itself. This was very successful.
Now let's see what features the app offers in the list of articles. After clicking Reading sheet a menu for quick access to favorite and archived articles will appear. Right next to it is a button with three dots. Beneath it is hidden a palette of four more buttons for searching by text string, editing the list of articles, adding an article and entering the settings.
What I miss about Readability in general, not just the iOS app, is article sorting. And it doesn't matter at all whether this functionality will be implemented using folders or simple tags. With a small number, this deficiency cannot be seen, but as soon as we approach some larger two-digit number or in the order of hundreds, chaos can occur.
This is a brief presentation of the Readability application, which brings a slightly different perspective on reading. Even the text is a work of art, so why spoil the pleasure of reading it with flashing banners. I would also add that there has been a web version for a long time that can do the same as the app for our portable apple devices. Readability for iOS is a universal app, which means you can use it on your iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. I am attaching a few screenshots as well as a sample from the iPad version.
[button color=red link=http://itunes.apple.com/cz/app/readability/id460156587 target=""]Readability - free[/button]
Article just one day late ;) great, I installed RA on my iPhone last night and it's a really cool app…
The app is great. Only two bugs that they will hopefully fix: locking the rotation on the iPhone (I read most of the time lying down before going to bed) and the fact that the images for the article are pulled from the web – they are completely offline at ReadItlater.
elka_cz: And what prevents you from going to multitasking, dragging to the right and locking the rotation of the display by tapping on the designated icon? I see no reason why a program/application should take care of this in addition. And the pictures are not necessarily needed for reading and the fact that the articles are Offline is a plus for me just like an extra bonus because basically I still have the net ;) but it definitely has its advantages.
Such a small question. It looks great as a reader, but I can't download rss like mobilerss or others? Or can I add pages from where to download them? Because manually going to each website and opening each article is laborious and I prefer to stay with mobilerss
Reeder should be able to submit articles directly to Readibility. In addition, we can expect support for other rss readers in the near future.
Send? So it's stupid to forward all the articles, because it's like scratching your ear with the other hand. Please, who will want you? In other words, unusable as an rss reader, which is a shame. And for the few articles outside of rss, Safari and its reader are enough for me...
And iOS doesn't have a reader in it or what?
Personally, I would like it if it was possible to send articles from Flipboard to the RA in a way that I am interested in the title of the article, so I can easily send it to the RA and then just go to the RA and read all the articles, but I am not sure if this is going to happen, I will ask the RA on Twitter, I'll let you know.