Quiet Read : Instapaper & ReaditLater Made Easy

June 11, 2010 in General, Tricks & Tips by Angelina Roberts

Previously I discussed how difficult it was to select between the great Instapaper and the equally brilliant ReaditLater. Bamboo Apps offer a solution to this dilemma with a really nice little bookmarking application called “Quiet Read”.

Both Instapaper and Readitlater offer “bookmarklets” for managing your reading list. Bookmarlets work by adding bookmarks to your browser menu bar that when clicked add articles to your reading list.

The biggest problem I find with bookmarklets they move around as you favourite different pages and I would prefer just to have my own five favourite websites on the list. Welcome Quiet Read.

Quiet Read is a menu bar application that allows easy bookmarking of websites. At its very basic it is a great little app for adding your website bookmarks but the real power comes with the Instapaper and Readitlater support. Quiet Read is a great little application and I personally find it a quicker way of managing bookmarks than even Safari’s built in system.

To add an item to Quiet Read simple drag the short cut onto the menu icon. This initially adds it as a drop down item.

You can then use the application two ways. Firstly you can list your favourites and then manually add them to your offline reader application manually. This is useful if you keep regular favourites on the list as well as read it later type content. The second way is to have Quiet Read automatically add new items to Instapaper / ReaditLater.

Feeding Both

This means you can actually keep your Readitlater and Instapaper accounts up to date with the same content. To set up this feature open the application preferences (these appear as a little gear icon on the main Quiet Read wind0w).

By clicking “Send Links Automatically” Quiet Read automatically adds new bookmarks to both systems. Better still you don’t have to worry about logging into the web services as is the case with the bookmarklets.

Quiet Read also offers posting to Delicious, Email and auto URL shortening. If you want to share your entire list of bookmarks you can also export the content as a .csv file. It would be even better if deleting from Quiet Read also removed the item from Instapaper / Readitlater but I predict this would be particularly hard to implement.

3rd Party Apps

Quiet Reader also solves the problem of lack of Instapaper or Readitlater support in third party applications such as NetNewsWire. Just like in Safari you can drag any URL directly on to the menu bar icon and it will be added to your lists.

If you only use Delicious for your social bookmarking needs then perhaps Delibar (read our review) might be your tool of choice. If you use Instapaper, Readitlater (or both) then Quiet Read is definitely a worthy of a place on your menu bar !