On my desktop computers (both my PC at work and my Mac at home), I've long been a fan of a free service called Readability. It allows you to take a website that contains an article and a bunch of other extraneous information on the side (ads, other stories, etc.) and reformat the page so that all you see is the text of the article itself and the pictures, plus you can format the text into beautiful fonts at different sizes on a nice background. It is sort of like taking the text of an article and placing it into an elegant book reader on your computer screen. By increasing the text size, the text becomes easier to read, and by stripping away the ads, you remove the distractions and can just focus on the articles. Here is a link to a great post by David Pogue of the New York Times which describes Readability better than I can.
It never occurred to me that this service could work with an iPhone until I saw this article by Darren Becket on iPhone Alley, which prompted me to do some more digging and locate this post from Herm Greider last year. The steps to set it up are a little complicated, but essentially you use your computer to create a bookmarklet for the Readability site, and then you transfer that bookmarklet to your iPhone. There are two ways to do this. If you already use MobileMe to sync your Safari bookmarks on your computer and iPhone, then just create the Readability bookmark on your computer and it will automatically sync. Greider describes that easier method, and also gives step by step instructions on a more complicated way that I used which involves sending yourself an e-mail containing the javascript for the bookmarklet.
Once you have it set up, here is what you can do with it. Let's say you are reading the New York Times using Safari on your iPhone and you see an article like this:
There is a lot of extraneous information on that page, such as all of the ads on the right and the related stories on the left. You can of course double-tap on the text of the article to zoom in, but you still have some of this distracting information. But with the Readability bookmarklet, you can just tap your Bookmarks icon, then select Readability bookmark that you created, and then the article that you were looking at will instantly be reformatted.
Here are two examples which both use the settings of Newspaper style, Extra Large size but the one on the left uses a Wide margin and the one on the right uses the Extra Wide margin (to get an even more narrow column, which you can double-tap to get even larger text):
The text in the Newspaper / Extra Large / Extra Wide Margin version is obviously quite huge, but I like that I can hold my iPhone far from my face and still easily read the text. Of course, with fewer words per page I have to do more scrolling, which is a reason to instead use Newspaper / Extra Large / Wide Margin. I actually set up two bookmarklets on my iPhone, one with each size of margin, so I can just choose the one that fits my mood.
I prefer the white background and typeface of the Newspaper style, but if you want something different you can choose other styles such as Inverse (on the left) and Novel (on the right):
For those of you planning to get an iPad, keep this tip in mind as I'm sure that Readability would look fantastic on the iPad's large screen. But even on the iPhone, it is wonderful to have a fast option for stripping away the extras and focusing on just the text in an article.
