I just got back from a week-long “Code Jam” that was all business, all week, so I took a Saturday to work on some personal projects. Instapaper beyond 1.1 is out, and I’d love to hear some feedback on the new features. One of the major additions is a bit of mouse support. You can now click an article in your list to skip the highlighting to that point, and then perform the standard commands on it (open, move, archive, etc.). To that end, most of the links in the interface have also been hijacked and will use the Instapaper Beyond methods, mostly Ajax, to perform their jobs. Read on for a more complete list of new features…

  • Shift-O will open the original articles in a new window, immediately from the article list
  • Send-To menu (t), includes Evernote , E-mail, Delicious, Delibar and Pinboard
  • Sending to a service will find any selection, highlight or existing summary and use it as a description
  • Period and comma navigation has been improved, and mouse clicks to highlight elements have been added
  • Title links and “Open original article” links automatically open in a new window if clicked
  • Better positioning for the Star indicator in text view
  • Ajaxed folder creation (Shift-N) from the Unread and Folder views
  • “Concentrate mode” can be toggled with the backslash (\) key, hiding headers and sidebars and focusing the article list

I don’t know if anyone noticed it in the first version, but navigating with period and comma while reading in text view will sequentially highlight headlines, code blocks, paragraphs and other blocks of text for easy reading and clipping to other services. Like the article lists, these elements also accept mouse clicks to skip the highlight to your position more quickly. If you highlight a block and press “t”, you’ll be able to send it as a description or quote to a service or as an email (along with the link and title). Any manual selection on the page will override the highlight. From the list view, if there’s a summary available in the Instapaper article, it will be used as the description.

I have a few more ideas to implement, mostly based around grabbing code snippets and sending them to Snippet, Snippets, Code Collector, TextMate or Gist, but we’ll see when I get my next big block of free time. In the meantime, let me know what you think!

If this is your first look at Instapaper Beyond, check out my previous post for instructions on creating a dedicated Instapaper app using Fluid. If you’re already using it and just need to update your script, you can press “U” in your current Instapaper Fluid instance, or point it here.