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:
Thanks for sharing Bram! I'm Enric, one of the two guys behind Short! :) If you have any question don't hesitate to leave a comment, and Alex and me will reply as soon as possible! :)
Hi everyone, Alex here from Short. First of all thanks, Bram for posting our app on Producthunt and the intro! Today we are launching our universal app for iPhone and iPad. I came to the idea because I'm a huge Pocket user, but I save so many articles everyday, that I couldn't keep up with it. Many articles just stayed there and were never read. I was demotivated because of the growing amount of articles. Then I thought, why not create an app that only filters the shortest articles from my list and motivates me to read again.
The awesome @enricenrich helped me to develop the app. He's the best!
If you have any questions, feel free to ask us.
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!
Love this. Been thinking I keep on bookmarking stuff, but never get to read them. Would love to see support for more bookmarking apps tho (i.e Raindrop)
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