The consolidation of all content by authors you follow plus newsletters is one big reason for using Matter.
Plus, the curated writing in the app has appealed to me a lot more than other similar recommendation apps/services. I enjoy the reading experience as well.
But I’m also eagerly awaiting the reading app coming soon from Readwise 
For me Instapaper has one big advantage: integration in Reeder.
A simple swipe in Reeder is all it takes to add an article to Instapaper.
(RSS is my main source of read-it-later entries)
Experiment over. I like the idea of having one app that helps me gather everything I need to read in one place; collects my notes and highlights; and ports them to my notes repository. Matter is almost that, but without a mac app with a robust feature set, it’s just not suited to my workflow.
I also don’t need Matter’s other big selling points: its social aspects; its Nuzzel-like feed; its valiant attempt to surface all the work by writers I follow; and curation. I know there are people who genuinely appreciate those features, but I find that they distract me from my work rather than helping me focus on it. (I’d like the option to make that “Discover” tab go away; its mental clutter I don’t need.) If I don’t need that box checked, Matter doesn’t offer enough for me to accept its two big (for me) downsides:
Matter wants to collect my data and link it to my identity. (See Dig Wells’ Privacy Policy for the details.) I’d rather pay for their service with money than with my data. And I would pony up a handsome chunk of change for a native macOS and iOS app that gave me a decent subset of what Matter offers without harvesting my data plus a reader for my epub library. My Holy Grail is an app that lets me read, highlight, and take notes on PDFs, epubs, plain text, newsletters, and web content and ports those notes and highlights into a well-organized repository.
My stuff is in their cloud, although it looks like they’ve made it easy to get it out of their cloud (good for them!). I think this is fine for things like columns, blog posts, newletters, and the like—content I read casually for interest and may want to return to from time to time—but anything I need for serious work eventually ends up in DEVONthink. I’d have to figure out how to port stuff from Matter to DEVONthink simply and straightforwardly.
Lots of promise there, but it’s not (yet) quite right for my workflow and privacy requirements.
PS: my read-it-later app of choice is Goodlinks. It’s reliable, private, and plays well with DEVONthink.
I share the sentiment. The dealbreaker for me was that there was no way to read my Matter articles on MacOS or web? Only iphone/ipad for reading? That’s a no go.
How do you use Goodlink with DEVONthink?
GoodLinks is my inbox for online content I intend to process for further use. (I know myself well enough to know that I need to be very intentional about what I put there.) When I process my GoodLinks inbox, I make a series of choices about each thing I’ve saved there:
The very first step is to create a properly-formatted, plain text bibliographic citation for the article in a markdown or plain-text editor. (You know what’s great for this: my Obsidian daily note! It’s a handy place to both type the citation and keep a record of what I’ve read.) Yes, I do this for everything in my Goodlinks queue before I read it.
If the article is ephemera, once I’ve read it I decide whether I need to share it, and then I toss it. (Note: “ephemera” doesn’t mean unimportant! It could be information that’s important to know right now, but won’t be a week from now.)
If it’s worth saving in its entirety for future reference or careful note-taking, I use the share sheet to save it to DEVONthink as a markdown file. I use “Add to DEVONthink” dialogue box to 1) preview what the markdown document will look like to make sure the “Clutter-Free” option gives me everything I need; 2) add the relevant tags; 3) paste the citation I’ve already created into the comment box; and 4) add some brief comments for context if needed—for example, I might note that the article is an attempt to refute another author on some point. I almost always turn something I’ve decided to save in its entirety to a continuous PDF using Marked 2 or an epub document using Pages or Calibre. But first, I get it into DEVONthink and make sure I’ve captured all the important bibliographic information.
If I don’t need to keep the whole article, but want to capture some highlights, I do the following. I’ll highlight the text I want to capture and use the share sheet to save the highlight to DEVONthink. I’ll use the dialogue box to give the saved highlight a title, add any relevant tags, and add the citation.
Hope that answers your question!
Thanks so much for the details! It inspires me to improve my workflow.
Deleted Matter after realising there was no web reader (like Instapaper) or MacOS app. Deal breaker for me.
Good workflow. I’ve been using Instapaper mainly for highlighting and annotating, but I prefer GoodLinks for reading. I’ll try some of your tips.
Great points on Matter’s privacy stance. I am also a fan of GoodLinks. I wish they’d add highlighting (with access to sync them to something like Obsidian). Highlighting is what keeps me with Instapaper and had me consider Matter in the first place.
I’m hoping that some of the development energy that’s getting poured into the note-taking space gets redirected to the reading-and-annotating space. MarginNote is close, but the last time I checked it was PDF-centric. I need something that accommodates other formats.
Out of curiosity, what specific formats are you looking for?
Epub, primarily.
(20 Characters)
I’m eagerly awaiting this too because their spaced repetition review is really good and they already have highlight sync down.
Does anyone have access to the beta? (I know @MacSparky mentioned he does)
Their announcement post back in September is very forward-looking so I’m pretty excited to see how it works and what kind of new toys it could provide for our workflows.
I could be wrong, but I thought MarginNote has always supported both PDF and ePub since its inception? The ePub features are much more limited compared to PDF, but that’s probably due to the nature of the ePub file format.
Yes, you can indeed port an epub document into MarginNote, but, as you point out, the epub features are limited. (You can’t bookmark an epub, for instance.)
There are so many things to like about MarginNote! (The functionality of the “Research” button that pops up as part of the right-click menu when you highlight text, for instance.) Here are the things that keep me from using it routinely:
It’s not a fully kitted out reader app. As a tool for reading, it’s just not as friendly and flexible as Clearview on the macOS or Marvin 3 on iOS. (I’m not sure either are under active development anymore.)
The share sheet functionality is crippled and it’s almost impossible to get anything out of MarginNote and into another app. That’s fine if you’re living in MarginNote, but not so fine if you want to make it part of a workflow with other PKM tools. (I can export notes and highlights from both Clearview and Marvin 3 to DEVONthink via the share sheet, for instance.)
It’s Tinderbox-level impenetrable on first use. I mean, the user manual is a mind map, for heaven’s sake, not a document with a table of contents and step-by-step instructions on how to do things. (The mind map contains embedded little screencasts, but no actual “how to” text that I can discover.) I’m willing to invest time into learning how to use an app, but I’m out of patience with apps that take the total immersion approach.
Please note that I’m not criticizing MarginNote for not being the app I want it to be. There are people for whom it is exactly the tool they want and need. (The only real criticism I’d level at the developer is the lack of a proper user manual.) It doesn’t work for me, but that doesn’t mean its a bad app.
Here’s a recommendation for Articles+, which is a very nice — but frustrating! — app for reading, highlighting, and annotating articles.
Now here’s the frustrating part: If Articles+ can’t parse the article, then it just gives you an error message and rejects the link. This is a problem for me because I use my RIL app for videos, Reddit threads, threads on Discourse forums, Twitter threads — anything I might want to read or view later.
I’m totally OK if my RIL app can’t parse those things. Just save the URL for me and throw me out to the web browser to actually consume content it can’t parse. I’m fine with that. It’s what Instapaper and Pocket do.
I have suggested this to the Articles+ developer and he has responded nope not interested. Articles+ is for reading, annotating, and highlighting articles. That is all that it does.
So I don’t use Articles+. But I did for several weeks, and it worked great, and others here might find it useful.
Thanks for the link! I gave it a test drive and I like the way it handles notes and highlights. I don’t like the way it handles images, which is basically not at all. Enough of what I read is image dependent to make this a real downside—enough to offset the virtues of the way it handles highlights and notes.
Like you, I tend to fling anything I want to review and process into my RIL app. Usually, it’s text but sometimes it’s a video, or a thread, or a media file. GoodLinks will parse it if it can, and if it can’t, it will capture the link. (It’s actually pretty good with video.)