Blog

Back to Work

Just a heads up for anyone who may be following this site or its RSS feed looking for updates on the Read It Later extension for Safari: I’m back from that thing to which I had a prior commitment, and I’m gearing up to do some new development work on the extension either this weekend or early next week.

The New Revision 1

It’s been a long time coming, and I’ve gone through more edits and do-overs than I care to discuss, but the new Revision 1 Studios website is up and running. There’s still a bit of clean-up work to do to ensure that the older portfolio entries match the new design, but for the most part, everything is where it needs to be.

Save For Later – A Read It Later Extension for Safari 5

About

Save for Later is a Safari 5 extension that allows you to add pages to your Read It Later reading list.

Download

Installation

Download Save for Later and double-click it. Safari will ask if you want to install the extension. Click “Install” and then bring up Safari’s Preferences again. Select the “Extensions” tab, click on Save for Later’s entry in the extension list, and fill in your Read It Later username and password.

Once the extension is installed, you should see this new toolbar button in Safari: Save for Later Toolbar Icon

If you don’t see this button, right-click the toolbar and select “Customize Toolbar”, then drag the button to where you want it and click “Done”.

Features

Current features include:

  • Save the current page to Read It Later.
  • Right-click a link to add it to Read It Later.

Planned Features

New features will propagate automatically once they’re implemented, since I’m utilizing Apple’s automated extension updating process.

  • Allow user to access their Read It Later list through the extension. – 1.2
  • Google Reader integration – 1.3
  • Allow user to tag the entry after saving it – 1.4

Release Notes

1.16 (July 11, 2011)

  • Fix for non-latin characters being caught up in the URL encoding of page titles. Now I’m only encoding ampersands.

1.15 (July 9, 2011)

  • Not quite an emergency update, but some more bug fixing I missed in the last release.
  • I have an icon! Check it out!
  • Corrected an issue where the “Saved to Read It Later” dialog would not disappear if the save feature was invoked more than one time on a single page.
  • Safari 5.1 feature: The extension will now generate a popover window prompting you for your Read It Later account information if you have not yet entered it. The context menu action still generates the modal dialog, and Safari 5.0.x users will still see the same modal prompt as always.

1.12 (July 9, 2011)

  • An update! Thank goodness!
  • Fixed the right-click menu item so that it will actually save links. I’ve tried to be as intelligent with this feature as possible, so that it will pick up on the content of the link’s text as the title to be used, but failing everything else, it will use the URL itself.

1.11 (June 14, 2010)

  • Replaced modal JavaScript dialog with floating auto-dismissing notice. This will get some additional love in future releases.
  • Added a contextual menu item for adding links to Read It Later. The item is “intelligent”, so it won’t appear unless you right-click a link.
    I’ve tried to accommodate for anchor tags with additional HTML embedded in them (like <i> etc.), but there may be some edge cases where the link detection breaks. If you run into such a situation, please let me know, and include the page and link you’re trying to save.

1.01 (June 10, 2010)

  • Updated confirmation message for saving link to Read It Later. No more “Data Saved: 200″.
  • Added more detailed error messages if saving a link fails for a server-related reason.

1.0 (June 9, 2010)

  • Initial Release, allows for saving the current page to Read It Later.

Legalese

Legalese: Read It Later is copyright Idea Shower. I’m not affiliated with them in any way, I’m just using their APIs.

Save For Later is copyright 2010 Revision 1 Studios.

If you like this extension, please consider donating to fund future development.


Lots Going On

I’m way behind on updates here, but there’s a lot going on at Revision 1 right now. I’ve got a number of web projects to post updates about, and I’m literally about 5 minutes from uploading a new Safari 5 extension for Read It Later for folks to download.

I really like Safari 5′s extension API. Since it’s built on HTML and JavaScript, I was able to roll up my Read It Later extension in about an hour. Right now it just supports adding the current tab to your list. There’s no tagging or list reviewing right now, but this fits what I need it to do about 99% of the time; I’ve actually got a Fluid instance that I use to display my list. I’m also working on a full-featured Delicious extension for Safari 5 since just adding bookmarks isn’t sufficient for me with that service, but that’ll probably be a few weeks out. I’m trying to work out the best way to group bookmarks by tag using HTML controls and a 30-pixel toolbar space. More consideration is needed.