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 support@help.instapaper.com.

– 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 support@help.instapaper.com

– 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 support@help.instapaper.com 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 support@help.instapaper.com. 

– 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 support@help.instapaper.com

– 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 support@help.instapaper.com

– 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 support@help.instapaper.com 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 support@help.instapaper.com 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

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 support@help.instapaper.com or via @InstapaperHelp on Twitter.

– Instapaper Team

Improving saves from Twitter and YouTube

Being able to save tweet threads has been a top feature request this year, and we’re excited to be introducing full support for tweets–and tweet threads–on Instapaper. We’ve also rebuilt our YouTube integration for better reliability and additional functionality.

When you save any tweet (even if you’re mid-thread), Instapaper will pull the tweet and thread into an article that you can easily read, highlight, and take notes on. Any images that are part of the thread will be included in the article, and we’ll be exploring how to support other embedded media, like videos, for future updates.

Additionally, Instapaper pulls tweet quotes from the threads into blockquotes in the article:

Instapaper will automatically parse individual tweets, but in order to support threads and tweet quotes you will need to connect your Twitter account in your Instapaper account settings.

Earlier this year, YouTube began rate limiting requests from Instapaper which led to content from YouTube not rendering or playing directly within Instapaper. We’ve built a completely new parser for YouTube saves, so video saves and playback will be far more reliable going forward. Any content already in your account that was not playing within Instapaper should now work as expected.

We’ve also added channel names and video duration information to the saves. This is present on the Instapaper website as of right now and will be added to the mobile apps in our next release so you can see how long a video is the same way you can see estimated article reading time. Thanks again for all the requests and feedback around YouTube saves.

In other news, we’ve spent the majority of 2021 working on an infrastructure project that brings improved stability and performance to Instapaper. We’re happy to share that infrastructure project is now complete, and we’re shifting back to building new features.

As part of that work, we want to hear your questions, feature requests, and/or issues. That feedback directly informs our roadmap, and we’d love to hear from you via email to support@help.instapaper.com or @InstapaperHelp on Twitter.

Thank you for using Instapaper!

– Instapaper Team

Instapaper Weekly Sponsorship

We are excited to announce that we are once again opening up sponsorship slots on the Instapaper Weekly email.

About Instapaper Weekly

Instapaper Weekly is an algorithmically-generated newsletter that goes out every Sunday. The email contains the most popular highlight created by all Instapaper users for the week and a list of the most popular articles saved to Instapaper for each day of the past week.

The Weekly is currently delivered to approximately 3 million Instapaper users. The open rate on the mailer is 7.7 percent, with an average click-to-open rate of 0.8% on advertisements.

Why Sponsorships?

By design, the Instapaper Weekly is a reflection of what our readers consider to be the most important and noteworthy topics for a given week. Sponsoring the Weekly places your content amongst the best content Instapaper has to offer and provides access to a large, engaged audience of tech-oriented and well-read professionals.

Sponsoring

As the Weekly compiles content our users found most compelling, we will be holding our sponsorship choices to the same standards of high quality. Your sponsored content should fit within our existing format for Instapaper Weekly and consist of a link, title, description, and thumbnail image. Ideally, the link would be something that our mobile-centric users can save to Instapaper for later reading.

We will run the sponsorship between the “Top Highlight” and “Most Popular” sections of the weekly email:

We are currently charging a flat rate of $2,500 for advertisements in the Instapaper Weekly, and offer one placement per week.

If you’re interested in sponsoring the Instapaper Weekly, please email us at sponsors@instapaper.com.

– Instapaper Team