Storing articles to read later

Do you read a lot of articles of any kind? Do you struggle to find a good way to store them for later access? Are you tired of storing bookmarks, that at a later time has just disappeared or got changed content? My answer to the questions was yes. I am very happy that I finally found the app I was looking for:

ReaderView (https://apps.apple.com/app/id954343811)

Why not have a check to see if it meets your needs? I have tried Pocket, Instapaper, etc, but they all had some issues that I was not able to overcome.

What is good with ReaderView is also that it works with content behind paywalls.

Ill have to try it!

Does it work in landscape orientation?

I too have used all the read later services. I currently use read later in Safari and also am trying to like Keep It. The scope of Keep It is to be a place for not just bookmarks, but all kinds of files and notes. It is a subscription service though, so the hurdle is a bit higher to get started. For me to buy monthly subscriptions, apps have to be exceptional. I’m not sure if it is. The app icon and interface certainly aren’t. I like that it indexes and makes PDFs searchable. Only in the app though.

My ideal save-for-later scenario would be some kind of transparent system based on iCloud Drive for storage and text files for keeping it all together. I’ll have to invent it myself, but haven’t cracked the big issues yet.

» ‎Keep It Mobile on the App Store

ReaderView works in landscape mode. It uses iCloud drive to store the articles, making them available on all your Apple devices.
What I find important is that ReaderView stores content, and not links to content. Links tend to have a limited lifetime. ReaderView also supports annotating in the articles, I forgot to mention that before. Support is also brilliant, the author is very responsive and quickly implements new features.

Okay, then I’ll at least download it. 😀

Have you used the Safari capture-full-page-to-PDF feature? It is fantastic for pages you want to keep. The resulting PDFs are searchable like any other text PDF. You can annotate them with the iPadOS markup feature too.

My problem with the Safari capture-full-page-to-PDF feature is that it gives me a flat collection of PDF files where I cannot easily found all PDFs on a specific subject. There is no builtin functionality for tagging articles. ReaderView provides at least a basic functionality to store the articles in different folders.

I have made my own folder hierarchy in iCloud Drive and use the iOS-/iPadOS-/MacOS-wide tagging system. Proprietary folder and tagging systems can be a problem, but I trust Apple to be around and support theirs for a long time. Also, I take care when naming files so I can search and find the right ones with Spotlight (until there is support for searching file contents).

I’m surprised no one as made an indexing and search app for iCloud Drive. At the very least text, pdf, xml, html files, and such should be easy to index. Next is text search within images in Photos and iCloud Drive. 🙂

iCloud drive is still a mystery to me. It is clear that I have apps (like ReaderView) which are using iCloud drive for syncing documents etc, but I see no signs of them when I login to https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/. It is the same with my scanner app "Scanner Pro". It uses iCloud drive, but I cannot get hold of my scanned documents on https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/, they are not visible there. I guess that is why I choose to have apps like ReaderView to give me a more user friendly interface to iCloud Drive, without fiddling with the files directly. 

It took a long time until I understood iCloud, iCloud Drive and the Files app. Now I think it's pretty good. The Files app is what made it most understandable to me. I logged in to iCloud Drive online for the first time today. It seems to only be a way to view what's there. In Files, you can do things. It's like Finder in macOS, or Explorer in Windows.

I noticed in Settings, My account, iCloud, Manage storage* that ReaderView is using 1,4 MB of my iCloud space for storing my articles. But there is no corresponding folder for that in Files. So I take it that apps can use storage in iCloud without it being visible in Files. That is very confusing to me. I though that Files was a complete interface to iCloud, but it is not.

*) I am not sure about the menu item names in English, since I am currently on a Swedish language phone.

App developers can choose if they want to use iCloud (for storing and syncing data only) or iCloud Drive (for storing, syncing and sharing data). The Files app is a file manager for iCloud Drive.

I don't like when apps store data in iCloud that I can't browse. To me, that is a closed system, the opposite of what I strive for.

Thanks, you have made it a little less mysterious to me now! 😊