Expert's Rating
Pros
- Do more with bookmark links, including URL trimming, mobile syncing and offline export
Cons
- The free version offers little more than built-in bookmarks
Our Verdict
It’s a pity then that Quiet Read is available for OS X only at the moment – as an iOS version would be a perfect iPad tool.
We already have bookmarking features built into web browsers, but how many times have you favourited a page with the intention of coming back to it later, only to forget all about it? Quiet Read fixes that, with features that are designed to keep track of the online reading you intended to do.
Once installed, a tea cup icon sits on your menu bar. As you browse the web you can drag and drop page URLs from your browser to this icon. Alternatively, you can add a JavaScript bookmarklet to your browser’s menu bar. Quiet Read adds pages to a list, just like browser bookmarks. Cleverly, though, as you add URLs the number of pages in your list is displayed live in the menu bar icon. Click it and you’ll get instant access to the pages and are able to return to them, marking them as read when you’ve finished.
If that was all – and in the free version that pretty much is all – Quiet Read wouldn’t be very impressive. But in the Pro version you also get a list of features that enable you to manipulate that stack of stored URLs. You can send them to InstaPaper or its rival ReadItLater. You can add them to cloud-based bookmarking services Delicious or Pinboard. You can also shorten URLs or send them by email. When these features are added in, Quiet Read becomes much more than a bookmarking tool.
The cream on your apple pie is that Quiet Read enables you to sync lists between computers using MobileMe.