Goodbye Readability, Hello Pocket

I’m a big fan of Readability, but I’ve had to quit using the app.

Of all the “read later” apps, Readability is my favorite. Great design, reading experience and typography. So why did I switch to Pocket? A few reasons.

The one that finally made me switch is the saving of links within an article to your read later list. For some reason the developers decided it was a good idea to freeze the app interface when saving a link while it syncs the article. For the occasional link, this can be overlooked. But more than one link becomes extremely frustrating. Maybe it’s just me.

The exodus started earlier with some functionality in Pocket that I really like: the ability to send the text-only version of an article to Evernote. In fact, the sharing functionality in Pocket is quite robust, and relatively nonexistent in Readability. And of course, saving in-article links to the read later list happens in the background without affecting my reading of the current article.

I actually started using Pocket a bit more as of late for the Evernote functionality, as I’ve switched from bookmarking important articles to just Evernoting them — too often articles on the web disappear, so now I just save them all.

Since using Pocket a bit more, I’ve noticed some other nice touches. When saving a link to read later via Tweetbot, Pocket has a nice tweet attribution to the link. This makes it great to recall where you found it originally. And the Safari extension adds the ability to send links to Pocket via the right-click contextual menu. Another time-saver.

Pocket isn’t as polished visually and functionality-wise as Readability, but usability trumps lipstick.

While I’d like to see Readability fix that sync issue, the more I use Pocket the more I prefer it. The sharing features alone are worth the switch, along with the seamless background saving of article links.

On a side note, I used to use Instapaper but have moved on. I just never liked the iPad version, and the inability to save videos pretty much killed it for me. Maybe it’s better now, I just haven’t touched it in a long time since Pocket (and Readability) were more up my alley.