Touch Yourself: Read Smarter With Instapaper

Here's the first installment of Touch Yourself, the Techtonic Shifts iPhone app review column:

Some iPhone apps, like Urinal Test, you download as a gag. Others meet some temporary need, like the U.S. Open scoreboard app. And then there is the rare app that you come to  use every single day, to the point that it changes how you use the Internet itself.

For me, that's Instapaper (free; $4.99 pro version). It does one thing, and does it really well: when you come across a long article on your PC and don't have time to read it, Instapaper zaps it to your iPhone. Then, the next time you're stuck on an airplane, or anywhere else sans connectivity, you have something high-quality to read. "The times we find information aren’t always ideal for consuming it," developer Marco Arment writes about his creation. "Instapaper helps you bridge that gap."

Instapaper is dead simple and elegantly designed, from the option to not password-protect your account (password bloat is a big pet peeve for me) to an ingenious innovation called "tilt scrolling" that lets you read just by shifting the iPhone in your hand. "Tilt scrolling is the sexiest thing," one five-star reviewer wrote in the iTunes store. "I want to rub it all over my butt."

That's just the start of the acclaim. Wired.com's Gadget Lab called it "a $5 app that justifies iour iPhone purchase" and the author of a book on iPhone apps said Instapaper was his favorite, period. I've long been a fan, but my appreciation launched into overdrive after learning about a spinoff project called Give Me Something to Read.

GMSTR offers a daily selection of great writing (usually long magazine features and newspaper essays from sources like The , , and ) that are collectively discovered by the army of Instapaper users. If a piece is Instapapered often enough─each day, some 70 to 150 articles make the cut─a part-time editor who Arment hired takes a look and picks the best of the best. You can find the always-stimulating results directly at GiveMeSomethingToRead.com, or subscribe within the $4.99 pro version of the Instapaper app.

Ironically, it's aggregation like this that's helping to kill my dead-tree profession, but Arment's excellent execution is just too good not to admire.

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