The guys at samabox have made, among other things, a fabulous Chrome extension (and are finishing a Firefox version): iReader.
It will appeal to those who read lots of articles right on screen or, like me, love printing them out for comfortable, old-fashioned reading on paper.
The app plugs into the browser, and when you’re on a page with some long article (a blog post), an iReader icon appears at the right end of the address bar.
Click it and a lightbox-style window opens with the article’s text cleaned of “junk”: no sidebars, no ads and so on.
Here, for example, is how my previous post “On meritocracy” looks in iReader:
(Image lost: a screenshot of my post “On meritocracy” open in iReader.)
The panel at the bottom appears only when you hover the mouse over that part of the screen.
The panel lets you adjust the font size, switch off images within the text, print the cleaned article (more on that below) and send a link to Twitter or Facebook.
What follows sounds like an ad for a weight-loss product.
I suffered for a long time preparing interesting articles for printing, ones long enough to print rather than read on screen. I had to copy the text into Word, delete pictures by hand or fix tables that didn’t fit or simply weren’t interesting.
iReader solved my problem! :)
It sends to the printer a text that’s already prepared: a larger font, very small margins, the print date, page numbers (!) plus a link to the source at the end.
And it gives the link both as plain text (of course, it’s paper, Captain Obvious!) and as a shortened link that’s easier to type if you suddenly want to return to the article online.
What’s more, the wonderful iReader adds to all this a QR code of that very link. Isn’t it a clever little thing?
(Image lost: a photo of an iReader printout with its QR code.)
True, the “Mail this page” button doesn’t work for me for some reason, and it sends unshortened links to Twitter and Facebook. Then again, I haven’t needed those functions yet.