Tech Tuesday - Pocket (Read it Later) App - Galaxy Nexus Series - Part 5

Screenshot of Pocket icon
on my Galaxy Nexus
home screen

This is Part 5 in my Galaxy Nexus Series of Tech Tuesday blog posts. This Tech Tuesday I am going to look at the Pocket app.


Pocket (formerly Read it Later)
Google Play Store link: Pocket (formerly Read it Later) 

What can I do with this app? 

• Save articles, videos or images for later viewing or reading on your smartphone.
• Pocket is sort of like Evernote Clearly in that it strips away a lot of the unnecessary clutter on web pages and leaves plain text and the main images within articles, making them clearer and easier to read. 

How will I use this app for genealogy?

• I have already used this app to save articles, blog posts and YouTube videos which I was interested in viewing but wanted to view at a later time. 
• I had previously been using Evernote to save articles for later reading but I have found Pocket much easier and clearer for e-reading articles on my Galaxy Nexus. Besides, if I decide later that I want to keep the article in Evernote I can always go back and save it to Evernote. 

Links: "Introducing Pocket" on YouTube

Screen shots: 

You can use Pocket to save content (articles, videos, images) from the web via the 'share' option in a mobile web browser (in my case Chrome for Android Beta) or via a web browser on a desktop or laptop computer. Pocket has a Chrome extension which makes saving content to read or view later extremely easy and simple. 

A nifty feature of the Pocket Chrome extension is that, in addition to a button among the extensions buttons on the top panel in the Chrome browser, and a right click 'save to pocket' feature, you can also enable an option which adds a 'save to pocket' button next to each post in Google Reader. 

Within the Pocket app when you have finished reading/viewing a 'pocketed' item you can click the tick in bottom left hand corner which will archive that item. You can star that item to mark it as a favourite. To make reading easier in different situations, you can select different options for text (size, font, alignment) and background (white text on black, black text on white) and screen brightness. 

Within the Pocket app you can tag items, mark items as read and archive them (you can access archived items by choosing 'Archive' under the 'pocket' menu in the top left and corner), star items as favourites (you can access these by choosing 'Favorites' under the 'pocket' menu),  filter results by 'All items', 'Articles', 'Videos' and 'Images', search and filter items by Title and URL, or filter results by tag. 


Next Tech Tuesday I will look at News apps - Google Reader, Google Currents and Listen. 

 Australian Genealogy Journeys by Aillin O'Brien is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License.Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://ausgenjourneys.blogspot.com.