Introducing Short

The Story about Short

A few months ago in July 2014 I wrote this post in my personal blog about an app idea I had: Short App — Short reads from your favorite blogs. It’s about an app that offers only the shortest articles. This was the very first Prototype:

I’m a huge user of Pocket — the Read-It-Later App for iOS, that also has great Browser add-ons and ReadingPack — The Social Reading List.

As I mentioned in the blog post, I’m saving so many articles I find online but I can barely keep up with reading all of them.

Short was supposed to change this. With Short, I would only have shorter articles which I’m more likely to read — pulled from my always growing Reading lists. The app should filter the articles measured on reading time.

So I told some friends about this app idea and was pretty excited about it. My friend Enric Enrich, who I know from Twitter, offered me his help in developing the app. Wow! That’s so cool. He was ready to take his free time to develop the app with me as a side project, while also working for Doist as an iOS & Mac Developer for their awesome products, like Todoist, which is a To-Do-App that helps you get things done. Just the way Short will help you to get your reading done quickly. He’s working remotely from Menorca, Spain while I’m here in Nuremberg, Germany. I couldn’t be more happy to have him on the team.

We started researching, designing and developing the app. Also we created a Facebook Feedback Group with all our friends and people who want to help us create the app.

Since then we released 8 Betas before the launch with 83 external and 2 internal Testers, 545 Email Subscribers, 183 Social Media Followers/Likes and 33 people in our facebook feedback group.
The app has been featured on BetaList, Startupli.st, LaunchingNext, IdeaSquares, Erlibird, and NextStartup before the launch and we set up a landingpage with an email sign up form. Here we generated 545 subscribers until today who we will inform today that the app is ready.

We want to thank our beta testers who helped us in testing the app and improving it with all their feedback.

What’s Short?

Short is the reading list for busy people. It offers you only the shortest articles and enables you to select 5 minute or 10 minute long reads or blog posts measured on reading time. It will help you to keep up with your reading list with offering only short articles.

It imports articles from your favorite Read-It-Later apps like Pocket, Instapaper, Readability and ReadingPack. More channels to follow.

Short is my final project at the University of Applied Sciences Nuremberg Georg Simon Ohm and I graduated as Bachelor of Arts in Communication Design on February 6th, 2015.

App Features

Filter Reading Time
Filter between 0 to 5 minutes or 6 to 10 minutes articles which are shown in your feed.

Connect channels
Choose your favorite apps to get content from — Pocket, Instapaper, Readability and ReadingPack. Add them to Short.

Reading Progress
A progress bar shows how far you got and how much time is left to read the article in minutes.

Distraction free reading
Auto Fullscreen when reading an article. You won’t have any distractions from status bar or bottom bar.

Share your favorite reads
Share your articles to Twitter, on Facebook, open it in Safari, copy the link or buffer it.

Quick navigation
Just swipe right anywhere on the screen to quickly close an article, go back or open the menu.

Sync your account
Log in via Twitter and create an account. Connected channels stay saved if you want to log in on another device. You don’t have to connect them again.

Night Mode
Set the whole interface of the app to a dark color scheme to improve your reading experience under dark light conditions or at night.

Download Short

We will continue working on the app and have big plans for the future. In next updates we want to add more channels and collect feedback from our users to make our product even better. If you have any feedback, send us an email at hello at shortapp dot co.

You can download Short now for free on the App Store: Download here

Let us know what you think!
Happy reading,
Alex & Enric