A New Experiment with RSS and Read Later
MACSTORIES EXTRAS
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A New Experiment with RSS and Read Later
In my ongoing state of dissatisfaction with read-later apps and services (much like email clients, I’m now realizing that what I’d consider the “perfect” app for this task may never exist), last week I decided to try something different. For the past few days, I’ve been saving articles to read later in the default ‘Unsorted’ collection of Raindrop.io (which I was already using to save bookmarks from around the web); to facilitate the process of saving articles from my RSS subscriptions to Raindrop, I also temporarily switched from Reeder to Unread.
I’ve been using Raindrop for well over a year at this point, and although it isn’t the fastest service at adopting new iOS and iPadOS technologies (the app still doesn’t offer iOS 14 widgets or Shortcuts actions, for example), its backend is rock-solid, supports full-text search for webpage contents, and runs natively on all Apple platforms, including M1 Macs with an all-new Safari extension. What I’ve always loved about Raindrop is its clean design, reliable search, broken links detector, and freedom to organized saved links in nested collections. I never considered Raindrop as a read-later solution before, but I recently realized it could easily be used for that as well: its share extension can save links from Safari and Safari View Controller with one tap, and it can be configured to always remember the last collection you saved links into; furthermore, you can choose to always open links from the Raindrop app in Safari View Controller with Safari Reader enabled by default. And if you consider all these factors together, you can see how, in a way, Raindrop can be turned into a more powerful version of Safari Reading List with support for full-text search, permanent cached copies of webpages, and tagging (all of these features are missing from Apple’s built-in feature).