Hi guys & gals,
I’d just like to share a new read-it-later app I discovered today. It’s opensource, cross platform, allows for annotation and highlighting and syncs with Obsidian!
As of yet no 2fa or encryption though.
Best regards,
Tom
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Funny that you should mention Omnivore - I’ve just started using it myself this week.
The full text syncing with Obsidian is the big attraction for me. It works really well. It does seem strange that other read-later apps only offer highlight syncing.
The import and reading experience are good and I like their web interface. The iOS/iPadOS app is OK, but the Mac app is pretty terrible, so I’ve just ended up using it on the web. Some of the features (such as RSS and email import) seem pretty buggy, and from what I’ve read on their Discord server, I’m not alone in finding that.
Overall, I’m pretty happy, but I’d probably switch to one of the more established read later services if they started offering full text syncing to Obsidian.
I, too, have just started using Omnivore this week, though it’s been around a while. I tried it earlier and bounced off it but it seems more polished now.
I like the full-text syncing.
It has the best parser and typography that I’ve seen—and I’ve tried many RIL apps.
I do like the way it exports article full text to Obsidian, though I haven’t set that up. That feature is probably my reason for switching from Readwise Reader.
The iOS/iPad app is, as @tomtom suggests, merely OK, but I’ve found the progressive web app to be better, at least at first glance. Save the web page to your home screen and you’re good to go.
That’s a really good idea. I’ll give that a go. I’m basically doing the same on the Mac with Safari’s “add to dock” feature.
I’ll put up with some annoyances if it means that I have a Markdown copy of everything I’ve read.
How strange that this seems to be the Omnivore week!
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Also just started using it this week. I’ve been using Readwise Reader for a year and my subscription is about to expire. Readwise Reader is undoubtedly a better product but I can’t justify my cost to use ratio.
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I’ve been using Omnivore for around 9 months… sorry, should have mentioned 
I’ve found it incredibly useful, especially now I’ve gone back to Obsidian as my daily driver. I use the Chrome/Vivaldi/Brave browser plugin making capturing very straightforward, and find it a good way of reading and highlighting content as I come across it. Having full-text copies of articles in my vault is game changing as they become searchable (using Omnisearch) alongside PDFs and my own notes. Omnivore captures accurately with just the occasional exception.
I now capture articles/sermons/blog posts to Omnivore in preference to capturing to Devonthink (in general) as it’s more useful there as something to work with and link to in Obsidian. I also use it to keep a few important newsletters.
In Obsidian I’ve adjusted the template so highlights are listed at the top, then the full text. I’m not using this setup optimally, but I’m getting there.
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Okay, guess I’ll download this thing after all!
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Why do you find Readwise Reader a better product? Is it the integration with book highlights? PDFs?
I don’t use those features of Readwise Reader and I’m finding Omnivore to actually be a superior product, with one exception: I like that Readwise Reader lets me highlight text on the live webpage rather than having to parse the text first.
I recently wrote an overview of the app listing all its features…might be a great place to start for new users:
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I’ll miss the YouTube video transcripts and I liked how Readwise Reader handled highlighting as you are reading, the AI stuff was occasionally useful for summarising long articles.
What I’m trying to decide on is if I should add RSS feeds into Omnivore or keep them separate. I was using Reader for both saving articles and RSS feeds, but I felt it got a little bit cluttered, I don’t have a huge amount of RSS feeds. My experience was that RSS feeds swamped the actual articles that I’d felt useful enough to save for later.
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Readwise Reader never did handle RSS feeds very well—it easily gets swamped. I’m told Matter is the same and I expect Omnivore would be the same.
Their RSS support is good if there’s only one or a few RSS feeds you want to monitor.
DEVONthink would be such an excellent RSS reader if (1) it could update feeds on mobile and (2) if smart rules were on mobile…
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I tried to use John Voorhees’ method of using Feedbin as my RSS backend, starring articles I like in NetNewsWire, then following the Feedbin starred articles RSS feed in my read later service (for me this was originally Matter and now Omnivore). This seemed like a really elegant solution for getting text from one service to the other. John reports that it works perfectly with Readwise Reeder. In my testing, the RSS feed was updated promptly. Unfortunately I found that Matter seemed to miss occasional articles, while Omnivore only loaded about one in three of those that I starred. So not good at all. The Omnivore Discord has lots of discussion about RSS issues. I would stay clear of their RSS service for now.
My overall impression of Omnivore is that the core service (saving articles, the reading experience, organisation on the web) is very good indeed. Some specialist features (e.g. Obsidian integration) work very well, while others (e.g. RSS and email import) are buggy and unreliable. The iPad and iOS app needs work, and as @MitchWagner says, a PWA works better unless you’re offline. The Mac app has very poor article organisation and crashes a lot.
I do really like Omnivore. It is under very rapid development, it has responsive developers, and the open source model is great. Personally I can live with the rough edges to get such good Obsidian integration and reading experience, but I don’t think it can be universally recommended quite yet.
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I use the read-later feature in my RSS reader (Inoreader) as a quick screener for RSS feeds. So I don’t want to send those articles directly to my actual RIL app.
This is awesome. Love the text-to-speech option that allows the text to remain visible as the audio is played. Pocket removed that years ago. For a dyslexic, that feature is very appreciated. Thank you for sharing this recommendation.