Marco Arment has released Instapaper 4.0, a major update to the popular offline reading app for iOS devices. The new version features a number of significant improvements including completely redesigned interfaces with a new grid view on the iPad version and a unified and restyled navigation view on the iPhone/iPod touch versions. Users can now also perform server-side searching of the full content of their entire Instapaper archive and can select multiple articles to archive, delete or move in a single operation.
The update also adds support for hardware brightness control in iOS 5, draggable scrollbars for quickly navigating through documents and the inclusion of article authors, published dates and site titles in articles whenever available.
Instapaper 4.0 also expands Friends support allowing users to browse recent links from their Facebook news feed, Twitter timeline and Tumblr dashboard and users can also customize the number of liked and archived items stored on the device, take advantage of integrated Wikipedia lookups from within articles and opt to use the built-in dictionary under iOS 5. A number of other smaller enhancements and bug fixes have also been included.
A detailed overview of the new features is available in a post at Macro Arment’s blog. Instapaper 4.0 is a universal app requiring iOS 4.2 or later and is available from the App Store for $5.
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