Meet one of the brightest spots in the Windows 8.1 upgrade list: Reading List.
If you’re familiar with the Reading List (in Apple’s Safari) or Instapaper (for phones and tablets), you get the idea: You find some article on the Web that you think you might like to read—later—so you capture it. Later, you can call it up to read at your leisure.
The Windows 8.1 Reading List app takes that concept one step ahead and one step back. The good news is that it can capture articles to read later from more than just Internet Explorer; you can find Save to Reading List commands in other apps, too, including TileWorld’s News, Sports, and Finance apps.
The bad news is that this Reading List does not save your material for reading later, when you’re offline (as Instapaper and Safari do). Instead, it just creates glorified bookmarks. You need an Internet connection to read any online articles you’ve flagged.
OK, then. Suppose you’re in Internet Explorer, News, Sports, Finance, or another app that knows about Reading List. You’ve got a juicy article before you. To save it for later, follow the steps in Figure 4-38.
Figure 4-38. To add an article to Reading List, open the Charms bar and select Share (top). On the Share panel (middle), choose Reading List. Over time, you might be pleasantly surprised to see how many apps add the Reading List option to this panel. Bottom: Before you commit this article to your list, you’re shown its headline one more time. Hit Add.
Once you’ve accumulated a story or two (or 50), open the
Reading List app. And there they are, handsomely
arrayed, as shown in Figure 4-39. You can
search all the articles (hit 
) or scroll through them (older ones are off
to the right).
Select an article to open it in whatever app first created it; the rest of the Reading List thoughtfully collapses into a list pane at left, where its other articles remain tappable.
At any time, you can delete articles, as described in Figure 4-39. (The “Recently deleted” view acts like the Recycle Bin, hanging on to the last 30 days’ worth of articles until you manually delete them or restore them.)
Tip
What’s extra cool is that the Reading List syncs across all your Windows 8.1 computers, as long as you’ve signed into them with the same Microsoft account. Start reading on one, keep reading on another!
Figure 4-39. Here you can see the Reading List’s App bars open for business. Select an article by right-clicking or swiping briefly down; at that point, you can use the Delete button in the App bar. (The article is not gone for good, though; hit “Recently deleted” to see everything you’ve ditched recently. In that view, you can delete things for good—or they’ll self-delete after 30 days.)
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