From Instapaper to Pocket: I never thought it would happen
Tuesday, July 31, 2012 at 2:59AM One of my staple mobile apps has been Instapaper for a long, long time. Every day I send articles to it and every day I read those saved articles.
And then I tried Pocket, an app from a developer that has never held as much kudos for me as Marco Arment and his flagship app. I listen to Marco’s podcast, Build and Analyze, every week and have always understood and appreciated where he is coming from with his software. Instapaper is a classic Mac / iOS app and looks fantastic. It is reliable and does exactly what it needs to do.
The problem is that a few minutes with Pocket showed me another way. I can't explain what it is about the presentation, apart from one of the fonts which is sublime, but everything about it feels different and more agnostic in terms of the platform it runs on. It does not feel like an iOS app or an Android app. It feels like an app all of its own and that is why I made the jump.
Part of me feels bad because I feel like I know Marco from his blog and the podcasts, but sometimes you just have to look at an app and judge it on merit alone.
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Reader Comments (4)
I have used Pocket now for a while. It's so slick.
Instapaper was something that I used way back when. Then, on Android, it wasn't available as an option for quite some time. Then it came along while I was using Read it Later Pro, which was good but not great. Then I found Pocket and it is awesome! What makes it even better is the fact of the desktop component which works perfectly. It is how I save my Lost in Mobile articles for later. It just works and the rendering is great. Ease of use and great functionality. The only problem is that how to delete an article is not clear; but it only took a few seconds to figure it out.
Finally, you have seen the light.
I wrote that article last week and forgot I even left it to be published. I went back to Instapaper after a few days. Quality journalism as ever...