Reading app

This was a simple iPad and iPhone app by Douglas Hill for reading web articles, text snippets and ebooks. The app was available on Apple’s app store from December 2019 until May 2025, when I decided Apple’s control over software distribution was not the future I wanted.

When you found an article on the web you’d like to read without being sidetracked from whatever you were doing, you could save it in the app and come back to it at a better time. There was no need to make an account because everything happened right on your device.

The reading experience was paramount. Saved articles were shown beautifully with a comfortable, distraction-free layout. Side-by-side pages meant you could focus on reading instead of scrolling. Multiple columns on iPad made effective use of the large screen and avoided long lines, which would be hard to read.

Features

• Saved webpages for offline reading.
• Cleaned up webpages by stripping out distracting parts so you could focus on the writing.
• Saved text snippets. Useful for long emails or to proof read your own writing.
• Kept your data privately on your device. No online accounts.
• Showed text in multiple columns to make excellent use of larger screens and give a feel like a magazine or newspaper.
• Used your preferred Text Size from the Settings app, including large accessibility sizes.
• Could optionally use the system font for best clarity.
• Supported Dark Mode specifically designed for reading in a dark room.
• Correctly laid out articles using right-to-left scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew.
• Was usable almost entirely from a hardware keyboard without touching the screen.
• Supported accessibility features including VoiceOver, Switch Control, Voice Control, and reduce motion.
• Exported really nice PDFs of articles by taking a screenshot and then selecting “Full Page”.
• Included Shortcuts actions to add, find, extract data from, and delete articles.