Building a Reading List Highlights Archive in Shortcuts, Part 1: Saving Highlights
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Building a Reading List Highlights Archive in Shortcuts, Part 1: Saving Highlights
I recently flew to the United States for Apple’s media event in New York City and, as usual ahead of every transatlantic flight, I spent a couple of days before the trip making sure I had enough music, podcast episodes, and articles saved offline on my iPhone. While I’ve been a happy Safari Reading List user for a couple of years, I decided a few weeks ago to start testing Pocket again to see how things have changed since the Mozilla acquisition and after their latest major update to the iOS app.
Pocket is a great cross-platform service that works everywhere and even lets you listen to text extracted from articles in an audiobook-like environment. The feature I like best about Pocket though is its ability to highlight passages of text and build a collection of interesting quotes you found while reading. That functionality (which I’m pretty sure Instapaper shipped first, but Pocket seems to be more actively developed these days) was the single reason I was interested in checking out Pocket again (well that and perhaps the service’s native integration with the Shortcuts app). As a non-native English speaker, I find it useful to archive new words I discover while reading alongside interesting quotes; Pocket is a solid option for the latter thanks to its simple select-to-highlight mechanism (I use LookUp to build my collection of words).