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AI Voices, Text-to-Speech Redesign, and Android Update

Today, we’re excited to launch AI Voices, which are high-quality, streaming text-to-speech voices. We’ve completely redesigned the text-to-speech player to make it more modern and intuitive. Lastly, we’re launching a major Android update with an improved search experience and a number of other features.

AI Voices

Instapaper has supported text-to-speech for over 10 years, leveraging system voices available from iOS and Android. The state of the art has improved significantly since we first launch text-to-speech, and we’re excited to launch 17 high-quality text-to-speech voices across the following languages and accents:

English (US)

English (UK)

Chinese

French

Italian

Japanese

Hindi

Spanish

Portuguese

Below you can listen to the first paragraph of this post with a System Voice versus the new AI Voice:

System Voice (Samantha)

Visit Original Link

AI Voice (Grace)

Visit Original Link

AI Voices are available on Instapaper iOS 9.4 with a Premium subscription. Android support will be coming soon!

Text-to-Speech Redesign

In addition to the AI Voices, we’ve completely redesigned text-to-speech as a floating player throughout the application. You can easily expand the player to navigate to Playlist, select different voices, or manage articles while listening.

It’s a huge improvement to the previous experience, especially when combined with enhanced AI voices.

Android 6.4 Launch

We’re also excited to announce the launch of Instapaper Android 6.4:

Search Improvements: Local, title-only search is now free and available for all Instapaper users. Full-text search now always opens articles in the reader view, where previously, non-sync’d articles would only open the original website.

Article Editing: Edit article titles and descriptions by long-pressing an article > Tap “...” > Tap “Edit”.

Folder & Tag Editing: Edit the names of folders and tags by navigating to the folder or tag > Tap “...” > Tap “Edit”.

Public Folder Support: Android 6.4 includes support for public folders, showing which folders are public in the menu, and enabling the ability to set folders as public or private.

Other fixes & improvements: This release also comes with a number of stability and performance improvements.

Thanks for reading! As always, our roadmap is informed by your feature requests and bug reports, so please don’t hesitate to reach out with any feedback, questions, or concerns to [email protected].

– Instapaper Team

Rakuten Kobo Integration is Live!

We’re excited to share that Instapaper is now live on all Rakuten Kobo eReaders. Now you can log into Instapaper on your Kobo, download your list of articles, and read them on the go.

To celebrate, in partnership with Kobo, we are giving away 15 Kobo Clara Colour eReaders to Instapaper users. You can enter a chance to win a Kobo eReader at instapaper.com/kobo.

About Rakuten Kobo

Rakuten Kobo Inc. is the world’s digital bookseller created by and for booklovers, providing the best dedicated eReaders and apps for reading. Owned by Tokyo-based Rakuten Group, Inc. and headquartered in Toronto, Rakuten Kobo’s millions of worldwide users can read anytime, anywhere, and on any device. With a mission to make reading lives better for all, Rakuten Kobo connects readers to stories using thoughtful and personalized curation of eBooks and audiobooks. With the singular focus of making reading lives the best they can be, Kobo’s open platform allows people to fit reading into more moments in their busy lives. To learn more about Rakuten Kobo, visit www.kobo.com.

Features

The Kobo integration supports the following features:

Sync your articles with your Instapaper account.

Access articles offline.

Like, archive, and delete articles.

Save articles to your Instapaper account.

You can sign in to Instapaper on your Kobo by navigating to More > My Articles.

We know many of you have been asking for an Instapaper integration on Kobo for many years, and we’re excited to launch this integration. As always, if you have any questions, concerns, or requests, you can reach us at [email protected]. We look forward to hearing from you!

– Instapaper Team

PDF Support, Localization, and International Pricing

We’re excited to (finally) launch PDF support for Instapaper! Our focus for PDFs is to make them more readable, especially on mobile devices, and bring the suite of Instapaper tools to PDFs including highlighting, notes, text-to-speech, etc.

For years, we’ve been at work building a PDF Parser that is up to our standards for great reading experiences. We’ve really enjoyed reading PDFs on Instapaper, and have received really positive feedback from beta testers.

Given PDFs require additional processing, PDF support will only be available for Instapaper Premium customers.

Saving PDFs to Instapaper

We have expanded most of our existing “save” methods to support PDFs. You can save PDFs to Instapaper using any of the following methods:

Use one of our browser extensions to save a PDF from a link on the web.

Drag & drop a PDF (or several PDFs) to instapaper.com in order to save.

Upload PDFs from iOS, macOS, or Android using new share extensions.

Attach a PDF to an email and send to your Save to Instapaper email address.

Localizations

Historically, Instapaper has supported 13 localizations other than English: Dutch, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Chinese Simplified, and Chinese Traditional.

Our iOS app had only 65% of strings translated, and Android had only 70% of strings translated.

We’ve onboarded a new localization vendor, and we’ve brought those translations up to 99% across iOS and Android. Additionally, we’re working to localize and translate the core app flows on instapaper.com.

International Pricing

We’re significantly reducing international pricing in certain markets for Instapaper Premium.

When we first launched Instapaper Premium in 2014, we set international pricing automatically on the App Store and Google Play based on the USD price and 2014 conversion rates.

In 2024, when we increased the price of Instapaper Premium, we updated the USD price point and used the 2024 conversion rate, which significantly increased the price of Instapaper Premium in some international markets.

That was a mistake. We didn’t appropriately predict how the price change would impact each locale and we apologize.

In order to make things right, we are significantly reducing the price of Instapaper Premium on the App Store and Google Play in the following countries:

The new prices will go into effect Thursday August 7th on both iOS App Store and Google Play. On iOS App Store, existing Premium subscriptions will renew at the new price points. On Google Play, new price points are only in effect for new subscriptions, and you can cancel/resubscribe to get the lower rates.

Our goal with Instapaper is to build a long-term, sustainable business that brings the best reading tools to everyone at an affordable price point. The prices above more accurately reflect that intent, and we’re happy to rectify this mistake.

As always, our work is informed by your feature requests and bug reports. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at [email protected] if you have any feedback!

– Instapaper Team

Instapaper Rakuten Kobo Integration

We’re excited to announce a new integration that will bring Instapaper to all Rakuten Kobo eReaders. The integration will provide Kobo readers with a seamless way to save and read web articles directly on their Kobo eReaders.

In close partnership with Kobo, we’re working diligently on the integration, and we’re aiming to launch at the end of this summer. The new Kobo Instapaper integration will replace Kobo’s previous integration with Pocket which shut down earlier this month.

Since the Pocket shutdown, our top priority has been to help Pocket users migrate to Instapaper. Pocket users who have made the switch praise Instapaper on its clean, distraction-free reading experience, and robust organization tools.

We’re excited to be partnered closely with Rakuten Kobo to power the read-it-later functionality on their Kobo eReader devices!

Importing from Pocket

If you’re a former Pocket user, you can import your articles into Instapaper in 2-clicks at instapaper.com/pocket.

Alternatively, you can download your Pocket export file and import to Instapaper Settings.

As always, if you have any questions, concerns, or requests, you can reach us at [email protected]. We look forward to hearing from you!

– Instapaper Team

PDF Beta, TTS Fixes on iOS, and Logged-In Sites on Android

Today, we’re launching a few updates to Instapaper including a public beta for PDFs, text-to-speech fixes on iOS, and support for Logged-In Sites on Android.

PDF Beta

For years, we’ve been at work building a PDF Parser that is up to our standards for great reading experiences. Now that we’re closing in on a PDF Parser that focuses on delivering the best reading experience for PDFs, especially on mobile devices, we’re ready to onboard beta testers so we can continue refining the experience.

If you’re interested in joining the PDF Beta, please send an email to [email protected] from your Instapaper login email (or include it in the email). We’re going to add the first 100 people that reach out to the beta, and we’ll send you the instructions to get started in a reply.

We’re really excited about our new PDF Parser. It’s one of the biggest leaps we’ve made with Instapaper recently, and we look forward to hearing your feedback!

iOS 9.2: Text-to-Speech Fixes

We rewrote Instapaper’s text-to-speech integration to fix some longstanding issues where the voice skipped or restarted, especially on larger articles. In our testing, this resolved issues across many of the provided voices on iOS, and we’ve received a lot of positive feedback from testers.

We’re working on more improvements to Text-to-Speech on Instapaper, including fixing issues with wireless CarPlay, adding more text-to-speech voices, and re-writing the interface for text-to-speech. If you’re interested in helping to beta test any of those, please reach out to [email protected] and we’ll let you know when it’s ready!

Android 6.2: Logged-In Sites Support

On Instapaper Android, you can now sign in to websites directly within the app. When you’re logged into sites, Instapaper can more reliably retrieve and display complete articles, especially for websites with paywalls. You can learn more on the Logged-In Sites Launch Post.

To get started, navigate to Settings > Logged-In Sites > Navigate to website > Login with your credentials > Tap “Save Login”.

As always, our work is informed by your feature requests and bug reports. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at [email protected] if you have any feedback!

– Instapaper Team

Instapaper 9.1: Logged-In Sites, Paywall Detection, and Settings Redesign

Today, we’re launching Instapaper 9.1 for iOS and macOS, which includes support for Logged-In Sites, Paywall Detection, Settings Redesign, and more.

Logged-In Sites

On Instapaper iOS and macOS, you can now sign in to websites directly within the app. When you're logged into sites, Instapaper can more reliably retrieve and display complete articles.

Increasingly, we’re seeing more “hard paywalls” across the Internet, where publishers are preventing third parties from accessing content. Sometimes, this results in Instapaper only receiving part of an article and, other times, Instapaper is completely blocked from accessing any information including basic metadata (i.e. title, author, image thumbnail, etc.).

We support publishers in serving their content however they’d like. That said, paid subscribers of those publishers should be able to access that content in whichever browsers, apps, or user-agents they’d like.

To get started, navigate to Settings > Logged-In Sites > Navigate to website > Login with your credentials > Tap "Save Login".

As a reminder, you can long press an article in the list to redownload it, or save new articles to get the full content.

Paywall Detection

Our article parsers now detect paywalls and provide instructions for accessing the complete content when you have a subscription.

On iOS and macOS, you can use Logged-In Sites in order to access the paywalled content, and we prompt you to login to the website directly from the paywall notice.

On Instapaper.com, the best way to access the full content for a paywalled site is to open the article, ensure you’re logged in to the website, and use one of our browser extensions to save the article.

Settings Redesign

We re-wrote Settings on iOS and macOS to conform to the app theme, improve the organization of Settings pages, and make it easier for our team to add and manage Settings.

We also added three new settings in Settings > Behavior to customize Instapaper further:

Save Delay: Adjusts the amount of time that the Save screen shows. You can set this to "None" to have it disappear as quickly as possible.

Auto-Lock: Prevents your screen from locking in reader when disabled.

Line Breaks in Code: Prevents line breaks in code blocks when disabled.

Other Improvements

We’re also launching a number of other fixes and improvements, including…

Fixed issue where article information was not showing on lock screen when using text-to-speech Playlists.

Improved Full Screen Image Viewer on all platforms, but big improvements to iPad and macOS.

Improvements to device rotation on iPad, and reduced crashing.

Other minor fixes and improvements.

We’re in the process of building Logged-In Sites support on Android, if you’d like to help beta test please drop us an email at [email protected]

As always, our roadmap is informed by your feature requests and bug reports. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to [email protected] with any requests, questions, or concerns.

– Instapaper Team

Instapaper Android 6.1: View Notes, Multiselect Tagging, and More!

Happy new year! Today we’re excited to launch Instapaper Android 6.1, which includes View Notes to make it easy to view an article’s notes in one place, multiselect tagging for better bulk organizing of your articles with tags, and a few more features and improvements.

View Notes

Easily view your highlights and notes on an article by tapping the Notes button in the article list, or by opening an article, tapping the more button, and tap “View Notes”.

From there, you can easily export your notes on an article in plain text, markdown, or HTML. Additionally, you can easily navigate to each note within the article.

Multiselect Tagging

We added multiselect tagging in Instapaper Android 6.1 to make it much easier to organize your articles with tags in bulk. You can start multiselect by long pressing an article, select the articles you want to add tags to, and then tap the tag icon.

Other Features & Improvements

In addition to the above, Instapaper Android 6.1 has a handful of additional features and improvements:

Added OpenDyslexic font for readers with dyslexia.

Improved experience for e-ink readers by disabling more animations.

Fixed bug where screen would not lock with reader open.

Fixed issue where video thumbnails would show up duplicated.

Other minor crash fixes and improvements.

We’re excited to continue improving the Android app, and getting it up to parity with iOS and web. Please let us know if you have any feature requests, bug reports, or improvements you’d like to see on Android!

– Instapaper Team

Introducing Tags for Better Organization

We're excited to announce that Tags are now live on all platforms—iOS, macOS, Android, Web, and Browser Extensions!

Tags offer more flexibility than folders when it comes to organizing your articles. With tags, you can assign multiple labels to a single article, making it easier to find exactly what you’re looking for later. Additionally, archived articles retain their tags, keeping everything organized long-term.

Both Folders and Tags will continue to be supported in Instapaper. We’ve already seen beta testers reorganize folders into top-level topics and use tags to organize within folders.

To make the migration to tags easy, we’ve added a feature to convert your folders into tags. Just go to instapaper.com, navigate to the folder, select Edit, and click Convert to Tag.

Tags are completely free to use! If you'd like to support Instapaper and unlock additional features, consider subscribing to Instapaper Premium.

Saving Improvements

On all platforms, Instapaper supports saving articles with tags, organizing into folders, or moving saved articles directly to archive.

Tag Search

With Instapaper Premium, you can now search your articles by tags using the # symbol (e.g. #science will filter articles with the science tag). You can also search articles using multiple tags (e.g. #science #physics), and use full-text search terms alongside your tag filters (e.g. gravity #science #physics).

Importing Tags from other Services

When you import tagged articles from another service, Instapaper will automatically import those tags and add them to your articles.

Through the end of November, we’re offering a 2-month free trial for Instapaper Premium when you import from another service at instapaper.com/user.

Additional Features

This round of updates also includes the following features:

From an article list, view your Notes on any article with one tap.

Multi-select tagging is supported on iOS and web, making bulk organization easier. Android support coming soon!

Export your tagged articles via RSS, PDF, or ePub on instapaper.com. Navigate to the tag > Tap your username on top right > Download.

IFTTT channel updates include a new trigger when a tag is added to an article, and an improved save action that can save an article with multiple tags.

Obsidian plugin syncs article tags on imported highlights and notes.

One More Thing: Multicolumn Support on iPad

Multi-column support is being piloted in Instapaper 9 for iOS. Multicolumn layout is a great way to take advantage of the entire screen for reading on your iPad. You can enable it by navigating to text settings > Swipe Left > Multi-column (ON).

The team has been using it and really enjoying it! Based on feedback, we will explore launching it on Android tablet and instapaper.com.

Next Up

Over the next weeks & months, we’ll be focused on more core improvements to Instapaper, including…

Parsing improvements, including for paywalled content.

Advanced text-to-speech voices.

Support for more types of content within Instapaper.

As always, our work is informed by your feature requests and feedback. Please drop us a message at [email protected] with any feedback, or if you’re interested in beta testing the features above.

– Instapaper Team

Bringing Highlights to the Open Web

Today we’re launching updates to our extensions for Chrome (including Arc/Edge), Firefox, and Safari. These updates bring support for highlights on the open web, archiving articles after saving, and Send to Kindle.

Highlights

With the updated Instapaper browser extensions, you can easily create highlights on any web page in a few different ways:

Select text and save the article.

After saving an article, any time you select text a small popover will appear with buttons to create a highlight or note.

After saving an article, you can create a Quick Highlight by holding Alt or Option and selecting text.

Your highlights will only be available on the page during that session, are not stored locally in the browser, and will not appear on a refresh. However, when you press the Instapaper button again it will bring all of your highlights back onto the page.

With these updates, pressing the Instapaper button is not only for saving the article, but bringing your highlights, notes, and Instapaper tools directly to the webpage itself.

We built these features to be discreet, however, you can also disable each feature in the extension settings:

Chrome: Right-click Instapaper extension > Options.

Firefox: Right-click Instapaper add-on > Manage Extension > Preferences.

Safari: Instapaper macOS App Settings > Safari Extension.

Archive after Save

We received many feature requests for archiving immediately after saving. We’ve added an archive button to the toolbar that makes it easy to quickly archive after saving.

Send to Kindle

With this update, we’re also bringing support for Send to Kindle directly in the browser extensions. It’s available for Instapaper Premium customers that have a Kindle email address configured in Instapaper Settings.

We recommend migrating Send to Kindle to the browser extensions, however, we will continue to maintain support for the Send to Kindle bookmarklet as well.

Send to Kindle can also be disabled in the extension options page.

Firefox Add-On

Earlier this year, Instapaper was removed from the Firefox Add-On store after attempting a small update to fix saving YouTube videos. After being removed and several subsequent rejections, we decided to self-distribute our Firefox Add-On.

We’re happy to share that we were able to work with Mozilla to resolve the issue, and Instapaper is now available on the Firefox Add-On store again. That said, given the situation we will be continuing to support the Firefox Add-On store and self-distribution of our Add-On.

In either case, your Add-On should automatically update as long as you’re using Firefox version 109 (January 2023) or later.

Safari Extension

For historical reasons, we previously distributed our Safari Extension with the Instapaper Save app. We’re happy to share that the new Safari Extension is now available with the main Instapaper macOS app.

We recommend migrating to the new Safari Settings by doing the following:

Update Instapaper macOS to version 8.6.2.

Open Safari Settings > Extensions

Enable new Instapaper extension (icon with rounded corners).

Disable old Instapaper Extension (icon with square corners).

Instapaper macOS 8.6.2 also ships with an updated Mac Share Extension that is improved from the Instapaper Save app (e.g. saving from Apple News now works properly).

With this update the Instapaper Save app is now deprecated. We plan to remove it from the App Store in the coming weeks. After you successfully migrate, you can delete the Instapaper Save app from your Mac.

Other Minor Fixes & Improvements

In this release, we’re also shipping a number of other minor fixes and improvements:

Fix inline Twitter saving on x.com domain.

Fix for saving Hacker News threads on Firefox.

Lobste.rs inline saving support.

As always, our roadmap is directly informed by your feature requests and bug reports. Please reach out to us at [email protected].

– Instapaper Team

Summaries, Custom Article Actions, Obsidian Integration, and More

Today we’re launching Instapaper 8.6 for iOS and macOS, which includes Summaries to quickly get a snapshot of an article, Custom Article Actions to customize the toolbar in the article view, and many more new features that you’ve been asking for.

We’re also launching our official Obsidian Plugin, which syncs all of your highlights and notes to Obsidian.

Summaries

Summaries provide both an overview of the current article, and a list of Summary Highlights which showcase the most important sentences in the article.

You can access Summaries by tapping the “...” menu then tapping Summarize. We wanted to make Summaries accessible from wherever you are in the article, so you can also swipe from the right edge of the article to open the summary.

Tapping any of the Summary Highlights will take you to that place in the article, and you can easily highlight or create a note by tapping the summary highlight. There is also a toggle that enables you to show all Summary Highlights in context while you’re reading the article.

Summaries are limited to 5 per month for free users. With Instapaper Premium you’ll get unlimited Summaries, and Instapaper will automatically sync Summary Highlights to your device. If you have the “Show in article” toggle enabled, Instapaper will automatically show the Summary Highlights in the article without needing to fetch the summary first.

Summaries are available in Instapaper 8.6 on iOS, macOS, and on the Instapaper website. Android support coming soon!

If you’re interested in the technical details, we also published a post about how Instapaper Summaries are generated.

Custom Article Actions

In the article view, you can now customize the toolbar actions by long pressing an icon, and replacing it with a customized action. We’ve received a lot of requests from people who frequently use text-to-speech or view their notes, and want an easy way to do that from the toolbar. So if you’re using Instapaper for heavy research, your toolbar might look something like this:

Custom Article Actions are available today on iOS and macOS.

Obsidian Plugin

We’re excited to share our official Obsidian Plugin, which is the only plugin that can sync all of your highlights and notes to Obsidian.

You can enable the plugin by searching for Instapaper in Obsidian Plugins. After installing, navigate to Settings > Instapaper (under Community Plugins), log in with your Instapaper credentials, and your Notes will start syncing.

Additional Features & Improvements

In addition to the above, we’re launching a number of additional features and improvements in Instapaper 8.6:

Oldest article sync is now available. If you'd like to sync your articles oldest first, you can navigate to Instapaper Settings > Advanced > Home (Under Syncing) > Oldest First.

Support for iOS default system browser when opening links. You can switch to the iOS default browser by navigating to Instapaper Settings > Browser > System.

If you prefer Dark Mode slightly less dark, True Black can now be disabled in Instapaper Settings > Advanced > True Black.

Toggle to enable or disable scrolling under the status bar available in Settings > Advanced > Full Screen.

Option to remove “via Instapaper” attribution when sharing articles is available with Instapaper Premium in Settings > Advanced > Sharing.

Improved display of code blocks in reader view.

Increased largest font sizes for better accessibility.

As always, if you have any feature requests, questions, or concerns please feel free to reach out at [email protected].

– Instapaper Team

Instapaper Android 5.0: Article list redesign, improved reader settings, and many bug fixes

Today we’re launching Instapaper Android 5.0, which completely redesigns the article list view, improves reader settings, reintroduces Send to Kindle, and fixes a number of longstanding issues and bugs with the Android app.

Article List Redesign

In order to bring Android to parity with iOS and web, we’ve redesigned the list to include thumbnail images, and replaced the old dot progress indicator with estimated read times.

On tablet we have included thumbnail images, and also added the option to toggle between grid and list view to more closely match our other tablet experiences.

Please note that previously saved articles will not automatically show thumbnail images. If you’d like all of your articles to show thumbnails, you can redownload all of your articles by navigating to Instapaper Settings > Advanced > Redownload All Articles. We recommend doing this on WiFi and leaving Instapaper open to re-sync.

Improved Reader Settings

We tweaked the default font settings on the reader view for a more pleasant reading experience by default. In particular, we increased the default font sizes and line heights, and customized these for both Android phone and tablet.

Many people have requested to disable pagination animations on Android e-ink readers like Onyx Boox. In this release you can disable pagination animations by navigating to Instapaper Settings > Pagination Options > Pagination Animations (OFF).

We tested on our Onyx Boox, and it’s a big improvement!

Relaunching Send to Kindle

In late ‘23, there was an issue with sharing articles from Instapaper using the Android system share sheet. We fixed that issue, however, in the process it required us to remove Send to Kindle short-term.

With this release, we're bringing back Send to Kindle for individual articles on Android. Please note Send to Kindle on Android is only available with an Instapaper Premium subscription.

Many Fixes and Improvements

In addition to the above, we’ve also fixed a significant number of bugs:

Share All Notes now shares your highlights/notes in the order they appear in the article.

Saving to Instapaper from the share extension saves article description instead of article URL as the description.

Fixed transparent status bar issue on reader view.

Improved full screen transitions on reader view.

We’re excited to finally get this release out. It’s a strong foundation on which we’ll continue to improve the Instapaper Android app.

As always, if you have any feature requests, questions, or concerns please feel free to reach out at [email protected]

– Instapaper Team

Permanent Archive and Premium Price Change

Today, we’re launching Permanent Archive, an Instapaper Premium feature that ensures you will always have access to the content you save. That means articles you read, highlight, and create notes on will always be accessible to you, even if they disappear from the Internet.

Permanent Archive is available today for all Instapaper Premium customers. Your articles have already been permanently archived as part of the feature launch.

Premium Price Change

We are increasing the price of Instapaper Premium from $3/month ($30/year) to $6/month ($60/year). This will be our first price change to Instapaper Premium in 9 years. We’re making this change for the following reasons:

Increased Investment: We’ve heard from many of you that you want faster feature development in Instapaper. Our new pricing will allow us to hire more engineers so we can deliver more features faster.

Advanced Premium Features: Many customers are asking for additional Premium features like Permanent Archive, enhanced text-to-speech voices, automatic organization, and summarization tools. We’re excited to build these features, and they will require additional infrastructure to operate. The new pricing ensures we can deliver them while maintaining a self-sustaining business.

Minimizing Price Changes: We’re proud that Instapaper Premium pricing has remained consistent since 2014. When considering this price change, we wanted to ensure we won’t need to increase the price for the foreseeable future.

The new pricing goes into effect for Instapaper Premium renewals starting January 1st, 2024.

Premium for Students

We’re also launching Instapaper Premium for Students, which will be available at the previous price of $3/month or $30/year. To qualify please write in to [email protected] with your name, date of graduation, and a copy of your student ID.

As always, please feel free to reach out with any feature requests, questions, or concerns to [email protected].

– Instapaper Team

Note Search, Article Notes View, Notion Integration, and More!

Today, we’re launching our biggest updates to Notes since first introducing it on Instapaper. New features include Note Search, Article Notes View, an integration with Notion, and more!

Note Search

We finally added the ability to search the full-text of your highlights and notes on Instapaper. To search, navigate to the Notes section, tap the search bar, and enter your query.

On web we’re launching Advanced Note Search that allows you to filter by website domain, article title, or author.

Note Search is available with Instapaper Premium, and is currently launched on iOS, macOS, and Web.

We're offering a free month of Instapaper Premium through November if you'd like to trial Note Search and other Premium features.

Article Notes View

When reading an article in Instapaper, you can easily see the notes for that article in one place by tapping “View Notes” in the article options menu.

Tapping a note will take you directly to the note on the page. We also included the ability to share all notes directly from the Article Notes view, rather than requiring you to scroll to the bottom of the article.

Article Notes View is available on iOS and macOS.

Grouped Notes by Article

This has been a long-time feature request, and we’re glad to finally launch grouped notes by article. By default, we will now show your notes organized by article on iOS and macOS. If you prefer the most recent notes first, you can tap the menu on the top right “...” and select “Sort by Recent”.

Grouped Notes by Article is available on iOS and macOS.

Notion Integration

We’re happy to announce our integration with Notion for sharing your liked articles and notes from Instapaper to Notion.

When you link your Notion account, Instapaper will create an Instapaper page containing an “Instapaper Articles” database. As you like articles and create notes, Instapaper creates one page per article in your database.

Each article page will contain all of the notes you’ve created for that URL.

Other Features & Improvements

We’ve also launched a few more features & improvements in this release:

Redesigned Note options menu to be faster and better designed.

Brought back “Shuffle Sort” after receiving many requests since removing it in the previous release.

Fixed “Share All Notes” not showing for email saves on iOS.

Fixed issues with language detection for text-to-speech.

Added scroll to top shortcut on macOS (Cmd+Shift+↑).

Other minor fixes and improvements.

As always, our roadmap is informed by your feature requests and bug reports. If you have any feature requests, questions, and/or issues, please let us via email at [email protected]

– Instapaper Team

Improved Organizing and Sorting Tools

We just launched updates to improve Instapaper’s organizing and sorting tools for iOS, macOS, and web. Features include drag & drop to reorder, sorting improvements, modern swipe actions, better integrations with Shortcuts on iOS, and more!

Drag & Drop to Reorder

This has been a common feature request, and we are excited to finally launch drag & drop reordering. It’s now easier than ever to manually organize your articles to their desired position.

Drag & drop is available on iOS, macOS, and web.

Sorting Improvements

On web, we launched a toggle to let you sort by oldest articles, instead of only by newest articles. To sort by oldest, navigate to your Instapaper email on the top right, and click “Oldest First” in the dropdown.

On iOS and macOS, we still offer all seven sorting options, but now they persist between sessions instead of needing to be set every time the app launches.

We also redesigned the article list menu to be more modern and inline with iOS and macOS system menus.

Modern Swipe Actions

Managing your articles on iOS is now more seamless with modern swipe actions. Simply swipe left or right to access a number of swipe actions including Archive, Move to Folder, Share, and more.

Swipe actions are fully customizable in Settings > Swipe Actions, and you can set different swipe actions for short or long swipes.

If you decide you prefer the classic swipe actions you can still enable those in Settings > Swipe Actions.

Lastly, long pressing an article will now show a full list of article options including like, move, archive, delete, redownload, edit, send to Kindle, and Share.

Save to Folder Email Addresses

We launched Save to Folder email addresses, which let you send articles to an Instapaper email address that will get directly saved into a folder. You can find a full list of your Save to Instapaper email addresses at instapaper.com/save/email

Improved Siri, Search, and Shortcuts Integrations

We’ve launched a number of “intents” that improve Instapaper’s integration with Siri, Search, and Shortcuts.

For instance, you can open your most recent article by saying “Hey Siri, Open Last Article in Instapaper”. You can open a folder by saying “Her Siri, Open Folder in Instapaper”, and then saying the folder name when prompted.

For a full list of actions available, open the Shortcuts app, go to the App Shortcuts section, and tap Instapaper.

Other Features & Improvements

We’ve launched a number of other smaller features, improvements, and bug fixes in this release including:

Haptic feedback on iOS. We added these sparingly, but if you find them distracting you can disable them in Settings > Advanced > Haptic Feedback.

Shake to undo archiving an article.

Link previews when long pressing links in reader view.

Share All Notes will now always share in the order appearing in the article.

Fixed pagination display issues on iPad after rotating.

Fixed crashes when highlighting on iOS 17.

Fixed some crashes on macOS.

Next Up: Notes, Android, and More!

This year we’ve been focused on improving several key features for Instapaper. In our last release we improved text-to-speech, including Voice selection and a CarPlay app. This release is focused on improved organization and article management tools.

Our next release will be focused on improvements to Notes. If you’re using Notes, please let us know any feature requests you’d like to see us add in the next release.

We’ve been a bit behind on our Android app, but recently brought on someone to help update the app to the latest Android frameworks. Afterward we’ll be working toward feature parity with iOS.

As always, our roadmap is informed by your feature requests and bug reports. If you have any feature requests, questions, and/or issues, please let us via email at [email protected]

– Instapaper Team

Instapaper iOS 8.3: CarPlay, Text-to-Speech Improvements, and more

Today, we launched Instapaper iOS 8.3 on the App Store. This release features a new CarPlay app for playing articles, a number of text-to-speech improvements including access to more voices, the ability to edit article metadata, and other improvements.

CarPlay

With the Instapaper CarPlay app, it’s now easier than ever to listen to your articles while driving. The CarPlay app offers easy access to your entire Instapaper account, including your saved articles in Home, Liked, Archived, and Folders.

To start listening to an article, just select one from the list.

When an article is playing, you can easily rewind, fast forward, adjust playback speed, and like or archive the article.

Anyone can use the CarPlay app to play one article at a time. With Instapaper Premium, selecting an article in CarPlay will automatically create a Playlist that allows you to listen to your articles one after the other.

Additionally, Premium customers can use the Instapaper app to create a custom playlist by going to the More button in an article list, selecting Playlist, and choosing articles to play. The CarPlay app will automatically detect custom Playlists, and you can access the Playlist from the top right of the Now Playing screen on CarPlay.

We’re offering a free month of Instapaper Premium through May if you’d like to trial playlist functionality and other Premium features.

Selecting Voices

Previously, Instapaper used the default text-to-speech voice for the language of the article. In Instapaper 8.3, we now offer the ability to select from multiple text-to-speech voices. You can select voices in Instapaper Settings > Voices.

Instapaper will continue to automatically detect the language of the article and use the selected voice for that language. The selected voice will also be used for listening to articles with CarPlay.

You can download additional high quality voices by going to iOS Settings > Accessibility > Speech > Voices. We recommend the high quality Alex voice for English.

Editing Articles

In this release, we are adding the ability to edit article titles and descriptions directly in iOS. This can be helpful for adjusting the title/description or adding your own context to the article.

You can modify article titles and descriptions by swiping an article in the list, pressing the Share icon, and then tapping Edit.

Deprecating Connected Accounts on Mobile

We are deprecating the ability to link connected accounts (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, etc) on iOS in order to reduce maintenance overhead. You can still link your connected accounts in your Instapaper Settings on web. Additionally, Instapaper will still support automatically posting liked articles and notes to your connected accounts regardless of which platform you use.

Thanks for writing in with your feature requests and bug reports. We really appreciate hearing from you and your requests inform our roadmap. If you have any feature requests, questions, and/or issues, please let us know via email at [email protected] or via @InstapaperHelp on Twitter.

Instapaper iOS 8.2: Search in Article, Text Justification, and more

Instapaper iOS 8.2 is now available on the App Store. This release includes in-article search, text justification, and several design updates that make it faster and easier to access some of your favorite Instapaper features.

Search in Article

With Search in Article, you can easily find a term or quote in your article.

To trigger search, open an article, go to the new More (... icon) section on the toolbar, and choose “Search in Article.” In-article search will highlight matches in the text as you type. If there are multiple matches, you can cycle through them by tapping on the up or down arrow beside the search bar.

The new More menu on the article toolbar makes it easier to trigger features like Speak and Speed Read, as well as article management options. The traditional share option can also be found in this new menu.

We’ve also made it easier to trigger article management options right from the in-article toolbar. Just long-press the Archive icon to trigger deletion or move the article to a folder.

Text Justification

Being able to justify text so the edges of each line align with both margins is something users have regularly requested. With Instapaper 8.2, you can enable text justification from the second page of the text settings (Aa icon).

We’ve also redesigned the text settings display for cleaner, easier access to frequently adjusted options like theme, font, and brightness. Settings that we’ve found users to more often set-and-forget are still easily accessible by swiping to the second page of the text settings menu.

Manually Adding Links

To accommodate Apple’s changes to clipboard behavior in iOS 16, we’ve changed how to manually add links to Instapaper. Now, you can manually add a link from the side menu by tapping on the + icon. This way, you never need to worry about clipboard detection prompts while using Instapaper until you are ready to add a link.

You can always add items to Instapaper from your mobile browser or other apps through the standard Apple system share sheet, as well.

Sort by Recently Read

To make it easier to read your in progress articles, we added a Recently Read option to sort your articles. You can sort your articles by pressing the More (... icon) on the top right of your article list, and choosing Sort.

Thanks again for writing in with your feature requests and bug reports, we really appreciate hearing from you. If you have any feature requests, questions, and/or issues, please let us via email at [email protected] or via @InstapaperHelp on Twitter.

– Instapaper Team

Public Folders, Custom App Icons, and More

Today we’re launching public folders to make it really easy to share a list of articles.

On the iOS app or instapaper.com, you can create a public folder or edit an existing folder and change the privacy to public. To edit an existing folder on iOS, just swipe left on the folder, and tap Edit.

Public folders have unique icons, so you can easily tell which of your folders is public or not. To share a public folder on web, you can copy the link in your browser. On iOS, open the folder, tap the overflow menu (three circles), and press the “Share” button.

You can see a few examples of public folders here:

Engineering Management from Brian Donohue

Literature from Rodion Gusev

Custom App Icons

In Instapaper 8.1, we’re launching Custom App Icons for Sepia, Gray, and Dark themes. To change the App Icon go to Instapaper Settings, and tap the App Icon row.

Custom App Icons are only available with Instapaper Premium. You can sign up for Instapaper Premium at instapaper.com/premium or directly from iOS app settings.

Read Now

After saving an article, you can now click on the Instapaper logo to read it now. Read Now is available on Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. Due to technical limitations on iOS, we won’t be able to add support for Read Now.

Bug Fixes

We’ve also fixed a variety of bugs and issues in Instapaper iOS 8.1, including:

Improving reliability of saving from share sheet with poor Internet service

Articles displaying as blank after reopening the app following a period of inactivity

Not being able to exit speed reading

– Instapaper Team

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