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Instapaper
Have you ever came across something on the Internet you wanted to read but did not have the time? What about a long car ride with nothing to do? With Instapaper you can mark articles posted to the Internet to read later. Instapaper will download the articles to your iPhone or iPad and strip out all of the things that are not related to the article you want to read.This application was made by Marco Arment, who is one of the co-founders of Tumblr. He had the idea for it while riding the train to the office in New York. He would lose service on his phone and would not be able to load articles to read. So he made Instapaper and now works on it full time.
There are a few ways to get articles in to Instapaper. You can manually copy and paste a link in to the website or the iOS application. Most quality iPhone and iPad applications have an option to send a link to Instapaper. You can also use the bookmarklet from any browser to send the page you are currently looking at to Instapaper.
Reading an Instapaper article is one of the most impressive parts of the application. You can adjusts the font and the size of the text. The iOS application has a dark and light theme. Tapping on a word will give you the option to define that word. You can choose to read an article in a page-by-page mode by swiping left and right or by scrolling through the text with your thumb. One of the nice bonus features of Instapaper is to have it automatically send your unread articles to your Kindle every night.
If you ever run out of things to read you can always see what your friends on Twitter and Facebook are reading. If your friends have Instapaper you can see what articles they have liked from Instapaper. Instapaper will only share with your friends articles that you have liked.
I use Instapaper to mark articles that my friends post to Twitter or long posts of people I follow on Tumblr. I got started using Instapaper by storing the online novel Chokeville, by Joshua Allen, in it to read while flying across the country. Instapaper is just as good as the stuff you choose to read, and the Internet is full of great things to read.
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