Read It Later: Useful Firefox Add-on & iPhone App

Are you also that kinda web surfer who tends to open up a bunch of tabs with interesting stuff you want to read or study later on and eventually wind up having those tabs in your Firefox browser for weeks, without reading them? Believe me, it’s possible – some of my 15-20 always-open tabs in Firefox is more than 6 months old, simply because I wanted to read them but never got around to it.

Until now.

Thanks to Read It Later I now have 2 amazing features in just one product, one being the free Firefox add-on and one being a paid iPhone app (there’s a free version also, with less features).

Let’s cut to the chase.

Feature #1: Firefox add-on

Here’s how it works. You surf around on the interwebs like you always do when suddenly it hits you… *BAM*… the web-bacon got you again!! You know what spam is, do you know what bacon is? Bacon is the kind of e-mails that you do want to read, just not right now, as opposed to spam which you never want to read. Web-bacon should be pretty self explanatory by now.

What you do with this web-bacon is, you add it to Read It Later. This can be done either by hitting ALT+W (default) or by clicking the check mark in the right side of Firefox’s address bar. The page is now added to Read It Later and you can access it whenever you want, simply by clicking the Read It Later icon in the upper right corner of Firefox. The Read It Later add-on features so many different settings that, as a Mac user, I’d almost say there’s too many options!!! However, it works pretty much out of the box and if you spend a few minutes digging into it, you will thank yourself later.

Remember to configure the syncing.

Now comes the good part…

Feature #2: Read It Later Pro for iPhone

Read It Later Pro is a paid version of Read It Later, it costs DKK 18 in the Danish App Store, so probably around $3 in the US App Store.

While you’ve happily surfed around the net, tagging stuff you want to come back to later, Read It Later has already synchronized those articles for you. Seconds after you’ve installed Read It Later on your iPhone and configured the synchronization, you will have all your articles ready for you on the iPhone. But that’s not all. You even have an offline version, so you can catch-up while on the plane or if you don’t have network coverage (*knock on wood*). To make it even easier for you to just get what you really want, the text, Read It Later also sports an “offline text”-version of your pages. Check out the screenshots below to see how it works.

Read It Later for iPhone also allows you to share your page to Facebook, Twitter, Digg, e-mail and lots more.

The only thing left for me to want, is the ability to save pages for Read It Later, directly from the iPhone…. or so I thought, it’s already there! It’s tricky to set up, but the developer does a pretty good job of explaining how to do it. Basically you have to copy/paste some javascript into the URL of a new bookmark  (thank you iPhone OS 3.0 Copy/Paste feature), after which you simply select that bookmark while being on the page you want to save for later. It’s then synchronized to your free Read It Later account and you can find it in Firefox when you get home.

All in all a very good combination, this will surely make it much easier for me to actually read, and not just skim through, all those articles that I often find interesting. And I love the offline text version, too. Go get it!