Downloader: Instapaper Beyond is keyboard shortcut heaven for Instapaper users

Saturday, May 1, 2010

Instapaper Beyond is keyboard shortcut heaven for Instapaper users

Filed under: Macintosh, Web services, Browser Tips

Instapaper Beyond I love Instapaper, and I love keyboard shortcuts. Instapaper, if you haven't come across it, is a tool that allows you to use a special bookmarklet to mark articles online that you'd like to read later. It has a website that is optimized for reading your saved articles, as well as a very good iPhone app so you can read those articles when you're not at your computer.

The website is quite good for reading articles, but one thing that is sorely lacking is keyboard shortcuts. If you're like me and have gotten used to navigating through Gmail and Google Reader using only the keyboard shortcuts, it feels like a step backwards to be forced to point and click to move from article to article on Instapaper.

Brett Terpstra, a developer that has put together a number of my favorite tools (including the specialized editor for Blogsmith that I'm using to write this post) felt the same lack-of-keyboard-shortcut pain, and set out to do something about it. What he's come up with is a user script for use with Fluid, so that you can create a stand-alone browser for Instapaper that is perfectly suited to the task.

The Instapaper Beyond script is very robust, and has a well-documented help screen. Just press 'h', and up pops a window very similar to the window that shows up in Gmail if you press '?' to help you remember the shortcuts, though you'll find them quite intuitive.

Unfortunately, Fluid is Mac-only, making Instapaper Beyond Mac-only as well. Maybe the more adventurous of you can take a stab at making Brett's userscript Firefox-compatible so that Windows users can join in the fun.