Readability, InstaPaper & NV - Preview

Some tips this week to make your web browsing more pleasurable and effective, along with a great application for creating and retrieving text notes.

The first part of the show includes a couple of great bookmarklets which allow you to remove all distracting ads and extraneous content from web pages, so you can just focus on the content.

The first is Readability - a very smart bookmarklet that allows you to reformat a web page to your liking with a single click of a button. Also includes options to print or email the contents of the selected web page in a clean, easy to read format.

The second is AutoScroll - once you have your cleanly formatted web page, why not let AutoScroll control the scrolling of the page automatically, allowing you to kick back and just read!

These first two bookmarklets are excellent if you have time to read long articles when you find them. More often than not, we don't have the time to read them there and then. That's when we need InstaPaper!

InstaPaper is a free web service that allows you to mark web pages to read later, either on or offline. Similar to Readability, it also strips out all the distractions and provides you with a clean copy of the information that matters - the content of the webpage itself. Add in the ability to download your unread web articles in printable, kindle or ePub format, along with the availability of both a free and pay for iPhone application for offline reading, InstaPaper is an indispensable tool.

The last part of the show is all about Notational Velocity, a deceptively simple application for creating and searching textual notes. Built for mouse-less interaction and with its modeless operation, this application is screamingly fast at searching for existing notes and makes creating notes a breeze.

All notes are stored in either a datafile (optional compression and encryption) or as standard text files for spotlight indexing. With full support for tagging and full text formatting, Notational Velocity is a great tool to keep on hand for all those little bits of information you need instant access to.