10/07/12 22:07:12

Replacing Pocket with Safari's Reading List

I complained recently how much I would prefer to move away from Pocket as “later bucket”. As a proof of concept, I would like to see how I get by with Safari’s own Reading List.
The problem Reading List has is that it’s not as well integrated as, say, Pocket. Developers prefer to give sharing options to Pocket rather than offering a built-in solution. Apps like Downcast (on iOS) and Reeder (on OS X) show how to save articles to the reading list. Therefore it is possible.
Anyway, for now, there aren’t sharing options in most, so as a workaround I wrote a little AppleScript that searches for http:// and https:// links in email messages and adds them to Reading List.

You can find the script here: https://gist.github.com/3848561

Add it as Mail rule with the following conditions:

Now you can just add new links by adding +reading to your email address. This can be done with every email address. If your address is myaddress@gmail.com, then the reading address would be myaddress+reading@gmail.com.
Just add the address to Contacts and it’s going to be available on all devices in seconds.

Side Products

As I was figuring out how to solve this as easily as possible I found some neat things in Automator again.
Data detectors allow building rule to extract URLs off a text and process them with an AppleScript.

This can also be used in a Service (where the data detector part is a part of the input conditions):

There’s also a Mac OS X Hint solving the exact same problem, with a similar script solution, but rather scanty. The script is only recognizing entire paragraphs that http links only. My solution finds multiple URLs in one message. As long as they are separated by a whitespace they should be found.