Something that hasn't been mentioned yet: Short seems perfect with those who have ADHD or have learning disabilities that impact their ability to read for longer periods of time.
I struggle with reading longform pieces (which sucks, because I love reading, but I lose focus often) but an app like Short would definitely encourage me to work through my Pocket stash. Downloaded! :)
Short is a reading app that filters only Short articles for you. So when you have time, don't waste it and read on Short to keep up with your ever growing reading list. Short imports articles from Read-It-Later Apps like Pocket, Instapaper and more, you can choose articles filtered by minutes to match the time you want to spend reading.
This app is so well designed, and great for reading. Have been trying the Beta for some time now and I can say it definitely helps me to read better dan more! Read more about the introduction of Short right here.
Great app by @alexmuench and @enricenrich
Another fan of Short here. Had a chance to beta test the app and it's definitely made it easier to go through the backlog of articles I have on Pocket. Congrats @alexmuench and @enricenrich on the great launch!
Really nicely execute - only thing I'm missing is the Feedly channel, which is marketed on the website but seemingly missing from the app. Am I missing something?
Check out @joshmuccio's #DailyHunt podcast where the maker of Short, @Alexmuench talks about creating this app :) http://dailyhunt.co/short/ - very cool this is a graduation project, congrats Alex!
@Alexmuench@bramk Yeah Alex, your story is awesome! I really enjoyed yesterday's interview. The fact that you met @enricenrich on Twitter and then worked remotely is quite epic.
Little easter egg: The Safari Share Extension is also already built in which enables you to save any article you find online to any channel you have connected:
Very helpful! Nice work.
Someone should take this to another level and allow me to submit articles that provide a tl;dr summary for me. Then I'd really get through this monster list of mine.
@xmcgraw An integration with tldr.io would be awesome. It's such a wonderful reading product, but I don't think it's well-known yet.
My summaries, for example - http://tldr.io/tedmiston
@kicksopenminds Hey, look at that! Had no idea. That is a step in the right direction--thanks for sharing! I'm hopeful that we can submit articles for folks to come in & tackle.
So my experience had a rocky start.
I enjoyed the onboarding.
-- Connecting Channels --
First, I tried to connect the read later service I use most, Pinboard, but it's not yet supported (totally understandable), so I connected Pocket*.
I saved a few new articles into Pocket to try Short's reading experience, but then I couldn't find them in Short.
(My Pocket is full of hundreds of old articles, most I'll probably never read. Many are videos or little things like table of contents for a book I want to check out where the preview is actually a PDF or something one level removed from the webpage. These seem to trick Short as "1 minute" reads, so they float to the top, and everything else gets buried under this list of many short things that aren't really readable. If I had a one-click "purge older than 6 months" button for Pocket, I'd use it right now. Until then, it would be great if there were a convenient filter or way to sort with new items first so that I could get around this.)
Second, I tried to connect Readability, but the auth failed every time. I changed my password on www.readability.com and re-logged in there to confirm it was correct, but the auth in Short still seems to fail. I consider this a minor quirk to be worked out, but it still felt quite strange.
Third, I tried my Instapaper account, which I hadn't used in years, but I knew it had articles. That got denied because only Instapaper Premium accounts have API access. Regular IP users probably know this, but I didn't expect it.
I hadn't seen ReadingPack before, but I signed up just so I had some way to get articles into Short. This one was successful.
It would be wonderful if perhaps Short came preloaded with some sample articles so I wouldn't have made it so far without ever seeing the best part of the app.
-- Reading Experience --
I read a couple shorter articles from ReadingPack.
The reading experience is wonderful.
I've been split across read-it-later apps because I haven't found one that nails everything: I love everything about Pocket except the reading view on desktop, where I think Readability is much cleaner. I love Feedly and use it to manage feeds, but it's reading view is not the greatest. Short really nails the reading view with a nice simple light/dark mode, proper font faces, sizes, and line heights.
That progress bar across the top is awesome to have as a hint and overall the experience is just beautiful.
-- Misc. --
I went back into list view from midway through an article to see if my progress was saved (nope).
I also tried going into Airplane Mode to see if the top articles were pre-downloaded, for example, when reading on the subway but they were not.
Those two would be very nice-to-haves.
-- Overall --
If the process for getting articles into Short becomes easier, this could become my preferred reading experience on iOS. The fact that it's agnostic to read-it-later services and has so much care putting into focusing on the reading experience is incredibly interesting to me.
@kicksopenminds Taylor, thanks for your detailed review! You mentioned great points to improve the app and we will definitely put those on the list. In the next versions we want to add more channels and prioritize the most request ones, sorting functionalities like new items first and try to improve filtering only articles in the feed. sorry about the Readabilty errors, that's something we have to investigate. The Instapaper limitation for only premium users will be displayed more prominently as we can't do anything about it. Again, thank you very much for your comment, everything is noted!
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