Pro tip for using Instapaper and Tweetie 2 on the iPhone

February 24, 2010

Have you ever watched someone who doesn’t know the basic keyboard shortcuts for cut/copy/paste/bold/italic/etc? They have to reach for the mouse… then find the menu they want… then select the right menu item… It’s maddening if you know how much quicker it is to hit command+x.

Like most people, I don’t read instructions or instruction manuals all that often. If I can figure out how to do something in a program, I start to do it.

The problem is that sometimes I don’t learn about better ways of doing things (where by “better” I mean “easier, faster, less-thinking-required”).

Well here’s a little gem I just found on http://www.instapaper.com/extras:

Tweetie 2 for iPhone supports a custom Mobilizer setting for browsing links from tweets. To use Instapaper’s Mobilizer in Tweetie, go to Settings, Advanced, Mobilizer, Custom… and enter:

http://instapaper.com/m?u=%@

What’s a “Mobilizer”? It’s a mobile-friendly version of a web page. Imagine if every link that someone posted to Twitter was to the “printer friendly” version of a page. Well, you can do that by setting the preferences in Tweetie. (You can also browse from http://instapaper.com/m)

This is going to be much faster because you’re using Instapaper’s Text view, which will download faster, load faster, and already be optimized for your iPhone screen.

It’s going to take about 30 seconds to do this, but once you have it setup, you’re going to get this:

instead of this:

Go to the Settings in Tweetie 2 on the iPhone (keep clicking the “left” arrow at the top until you get back to the “Accounts” page, and then click “Settings” at the bottom).

Then tap “Advanced”:

then tap “Mobilizer”

then tap “Custom”

and finally put “http://instapaper.com/m?u=%@” in as shown here:

Then from now on when you click on a link that someone has posted, you’ll get the nicely formatted/easier to read version automatically (and there’s even a link to get back to the original version if you want).

Once you are there, you are reading an article and want to save it to Instapaper, just click on the “Send/Forward” icon at the bottom right of the screen

and choose “Read Later” from the options which appear

The first time you do this, it will ask for your Instapaper login information. After that, the article will be saved to your Instapaper.

Take a few minutes now to set this up once and you’ll benefit from it every time you click a link in Twitter. (I just wish I could do the same thing with the desktop version of Tweetie!)

1:13pm | URL: http://quotes.luo.ma/post/409397758/instpaper-and-tweetie2
(view comments)

(No. OF NOTES: 7)