View Webpages Offline With Pocket

Pocket, formerly called Read Me Later, is a great redesign and rebranding of an app that had potentias to make it big.

I have a WIFI only version of the iPad. So if do not have wireless network access, i’ll be just reading my digital mags or playing the latest version of Angry Birds. That’ll while off the time but a hard time indeed. No Facebook, CNN or PCMag.com. 

I installed Read Me Later sometime last year in the hopes of having offline access to webpages i liked. But the app was clunky. The user interface was unintuitive. After two pages, i relegated it to app purgatory waiting for the inevitable redesign or retirement. It was really a good concept.

Resurrected as Pocket, it quickly became an App of the Week in the App Store. I didn’t recognize it immediately but checked on it because it was featured (that is why app developers would die to get featured as an app of the week)

After installing it, lo and behold, it was Read Me Later with a brand new look. It looked a lot better! It functions like Pulse or Zite but instead of content being pushed to me, I pulled content, saved it actually to Pocket, either through the Safari browser on the iPad or as a Google Chrome plugin on my Macbook Pro. 

Its a lot easier now to save pages. In the Chrome extension, they put a Pocket button right beside the Address bar. It was a lot, lot easier to activate in Chrome. In the iPad they still had to do it the old way but they made the process easier. It took me less than 5 minutes to install.

So i downloaded a few pages that i know i want to browse later. I synced it with the ipad and i was done! My home page on the ad app looked like a cross between the Flipboard iPad app and Zite. While going home tonight, i read through the pages i pocketed and got me through.

A nice app indeed. Did i tell you it was free? This is gonna get added to the list of iPad apps i cant live without