Thursday, August 29, 2013

Redesigning Instapaper on the Web

Grant Custer:

When I got the opportunity to redesign the Instapaper website my goal was to do justice to the service Instapaper provides. In the FAQ quoted above, Marco referred to the “information-skimming, speed-overload mode” we often enter while surfing. I think of Instapaper as a place I can go to take a break from that mode, and I wanted the design of the website to signal and support that break.

There’s much to like in the new design, but one problem is that there seems to no longer be a way to quickly send a series of articles to the Archive. The button only appears when you move the cursor, so you can’t just keep clicking in the same place like with the old design. This is a problem because the “Archive All” link in the Kindle edition has been intermittently broken for me for a few months. Instapaper doesn’t keep track of what it’s already sent to the Kindle, so I have to manually clean it out after each mailing.

Update (2013-09-14): I continue to have problems with the “Archive All” link not working, saying that the link is invalid. However, it is now possible to double-click on the Web site to successively archive individual articles.

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[...] than the Kindle’s own software. I used to read Instapaper on my Kindle, but that feature stopped working for me, and of course the app makes it easier to read articles out of [...]

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