A colleague asked “So Scott – tell me again what you do about emails you open with 1) PDFs and 2) links – that you want to read later, on the airplane?”
Here’s what I’ve been doing:
- If I’m on a web page that I want to read – just not now – I quickly archive it (using a bookmarklet) to Instapaper. Instapaper has both an iPhone and an iPad client as well as a browser interface I can use on my Mac – so I can go back and read the article anytime, anyplace. If I sync my iPhone/iPad Instapaper apps before getting on a plane, the articles are all stored in the Instapaper app on the device – so I can read even without network access. I use Instapaper ALOT for asynchronous reading of articles.
- If I’m on a web page that I want to remember – perhaps not an article to read but something else, then I bookmark the page using Pinboard (using another
bookmarklet) – see: http://pinboard.in/tour/. Pinboard provides me a chronological history of interesting pages that I might want to go back do. Has a lot of other features (tagging, etc) that I’m just beginning to learn how to use effectively. - For PDF’s, I just download them to my Downloads directory and periodically go back and review what’s there. If it’s a PDF that I might want to be able to read on my iPhone/iPad, I may save to a Dropbox directory instead – so that I
can access it wherever I have a network connection. This works great when you’re bored at lunch, etc. – except when on a plane. For the plane, you have to remember to download the PDF into your device using Dropbox and to also mark it as a favorite so that it’s saved locally in the device.
How about you? How are you managing your online life?