Offline Article Support Is Back!
A staple of read-later apps has always been offline reader support. This has changed somewhat over the years as connectivity is nearly everywhere but it’s still a heavily requested feature.
Admittedly, I’ve struggled building this feature. From a technical perspective it’s always been a challenge for me to implement (I’m no Marco Arment) and NSAttributedStrings are a nightmare! It was just hard and frustrating programming. So I relied on a network connection using SFSafariViewController (browser) to open article links. The app does provide the ability to ‘open links in reader mode’ using SFSafariViewController’s reader mode.
Not having offline support ate away at me as the one thing I wasn’t able to implement. So I gave it another shot. It’s far from perfect and not super pretty. But it’s there, for now. I’ll continue to improve it over time but I wanted to get a v1 of the feature out the door asap. It has some (serious?) limitations for the time being…you cannot customize the font in the offline reader but you can change font sizes and line spacing.
Links from the My Links tab still open in the in-app browser (so nothing changed here). If you want to save an article for offline reading, you can do so from the contextual menu and the article will get saved to the Documents tab along with your PDF files.
Having downloaded articles on a separate tab may not be ideal in some cases, but I’m banking that most users will be happy to continue opening links with the in-app browser. Given that much of what’s saved to Keep isn’t just articles anymore, an offline reader didn’t seem so important on the My Links tab...I might change this in a future release.
