Get Over Your Story With the Read Queue on IOS
I usually have about 90 articles in Instapaper and that’s fine with me. I move on to the articles a month after they stopped talking about them. I scan my line like it’s a ten-page menu, ignoring certain articles for weeks until I finally decide to read or delete. It could be worse; I once had 500 unread articles . But if your Reading List discourages you – if you want to be able to file for bankruptcy through Pocket or Instapaper – then you should try a new competitor, Reading Queue .
Reading Queue is a reading later application that forces you to actually read articles or archive them. Unlike most of the competition, it does not display a list of the pages you have saved. It only shows the first article in your queue. When you’re done with that, swipe your finger across the screen and you’ll see the following article. That’s all.
Here’s a little trick: you can put the article aside and place it at the end of the queue. But you can only do this three times with one article. At some point, you have to let it go.
The point is not to read less, but to read more. Instead of wasting time choosing an article to read, or being so overwhelmed that you switch to Instagram, you will hopefully find your way with Reading Queue. For Lifehacker, this is a familiar strategy: when you stop pretending to read everything , you are more likely to read what you really like .
Read Queue is still new and limited in functionality: it displays the “web” version of pages, but does not offer a text-only “readability” mode. (You can turn off Javascript, which blocks most of the ads.) Although there is a share button on mobile for iOS, there is currently no way to save articles from the desktop. Developer Greg de J told Lifehacker that he plans to add both of these features in the next few months.
Lifehacker also encouraged Greg to add bulk imports from Instapaper and Pocket. It would make sense given the origin story of Reading Queue: “After Pocket went bankrupt, then Safari Reading List went bankrupt, and then when 100+ Safari tabs were open for a few months, I decided to create my own minimal reading app later to discipline me and my reading habits. “
But for now, you will have to export articles from another application one by one. Of course, this is another chance to shorten the queue, for example, get rid of books when you move.
Greg is also exploring two optional features that he admits are “a bit radical”: an optional cap on total content stored (measured by reading time, not article count) and the expiration date for each article. And he currently plans to develop for iOS only. Some adventurous Android developer will have to build their own so that Google fans can escape digital hoarding too.