Is Matter or Readwise Reader the Read-Later App for You?

There’s been a battle brewing over the past year or so between Matter and Readwise Reader over which is the better brand-spanking-new read later service. Here at The Sweet Setup, we try to pick the best apps and services in every category we can, but the TSS crew is split on this one, so today Josh and Matt are going to make their case for why they prefer each of these apps.

Why Matter is the Best

There were a few apps that brought delight to your iPhone and iPad in the early days. The clicks and sounds of the original Tweetbot for iPhone come to mind. I also loved that old quick note-taking app Scratch — it had a great icon, super fast opening, and simple UI. And we probably all remember when Sparrow came to the iPhone to handle your email. That app was awesome!

Matter is one of the few apps that fall into this category these days. I get a tinge of excitement every time I tap the Matter icon. From the simple, reader-first UI to the excellent Apple Pencil support, I love capturing and reading in Matter.

Matter isn’t without its competitors though — Readwise is right on its heels with many advanced features for the heaviest power users. Where I think Readwise could well be the pick for the power read-later user, Matter is the best option for the rest of us readers who want a beautiful place to read and relax in the later evening with a glass of wine.

Here are the three reasons why I choose Matter as my read-later app.

Rock Solid Apps for iPhone and iPad

Matter feels like it was made for iPad first (specifically in portrait mode) and everything else after. There are very few hiccups, quirks, or janks in the app — tapping on a saved Youtube video takes you into a simple, viewer-first view, while text articles open immediately into a newspaper-like format, perfect for in-depth reading.

Both the iPhone and iPad app benefit from iOS-specific share sheet extensions, ensuring you can save anything from anywhere on iOS. The extension works well, too — tapping the Matter icon in the share sheet brings up the extension UI which can be dismissed with two quick swipes down when it’s all finished. Better yet, you can even jump straight into the article or highlight text from outside, make a note about the article in the share sheet extension, add tags, and more. A hallmark feature of a read-later app has to be a powerful share sheet extension, and Matter has this in spades.

I find myself saving more on iPhone and reading more on iPad, but this is me. Matter has this great read-out-loud feature so you can listen to your saved articles as well. This feature is probably more tuned for the iPhone and a pair of AirPods and is sure to please podcast listeners. You can also forward in your favorite RSS feeds and newsletters right into Matter and follow popular writers right in the app.

Finally, Matter has a neat feature to share your favorite articles with your Matter friends. By tapping the share button inside Matter, you can send the article or video straight to your friend’s Matter queue. It’s ridiculously simple to use and unearths a range of great reading from your online community.

In my experience, the Matter app on iPhone and iPad was rock solid. It surpassed any experience I’ve had with any other read-later app for iPhone and iPad, including Readwise.

Simple, Reader-First Interface

Where the backend of the Matter app feels rock solid and iOS-first, the actual user interface is one of the best app designs on the market right now. Matter was designed for reading — and I think designed for reading on the iPad specifically — and it shows from top to bottom.

The app opens to your Queue, which is a list of all your saved articles, videos, and threads from across the web. The list is wonderfully spaced, with a perfect amount of text, iconography, color, black and white text, etc. to suck you in. There’s nothing overwhelming about the Queue and nothing that leaves you wanting.

When you ultimately jump into an article, Matter’s design prowess jumps out at you. Matter has a total of 10 different fonts to choose from, including New York, Valkyrie, Lyon, and Literata. I’m a Valkyrie fan, for sure. In its early days, Matter used Bookerly from Amazon, which has to be the prettiest reading font out there today.

You have four different themes to choose from for both light and dark system themes. Paper gives Matter a newspaper feel, especially if you are into serif fonts for reading.

Matter nails highlights, both in visual design and utility design. Highlight colors aren’t magnified on the screen, instead opting for a slightly more neutral yellow to ensure you aren’t distracted as you read. The pop-up contextual menu when you tap on a highlight is really nice as well — you can take a note on a highlight and share the highlight with a nice “quote shot” image. When you’re done reading an article, you can tap the note button in the top right corner to view all your highlights and notes from the article. I use this button all the time to share my notes into Apple Notes for saving.

Matter has my favorite app design on the App Store today. It reminds me of Things 3, Mimestream on the Mac, and Unread — all apps with their own unique, airy feeling that instill delight every time you open the app.

Apple Pencil Support

The last killer feature for me is Matter’s Apple Pencil support. And the Pencil support is very, very simple — if you put your Pencil to text anywhere in an article, the Pencil is a highlighter. There’s no pause to see what you’re going to do with the Pencil. There’s no press-and-hold to invoke the highlighter. You can just immediately highlight the text you want to highlight.

You can, of course, navigate with the Apple Pencil so long as you don’t first tap on text. You can use the Pencil to tap on a highlight and take a note, which then uses iPadOS-wide Pencil support for handwriting text recognition.

There’s something very analog-y about this experience. Inside Matter, Pencil is used as a pencil is used — to take notes and highlights — and your finger is best used for navigating the app. It’s a lot like a book, really, which is what it appears Matter wants to be in the best way.

If you want to read, Matter is the best app for reading I’ve come across in a long, long time.

Why Readwise Reader is also excellent

There’s no way I can argue on the feel of Matter, because it really is top notch, but I do think that Readwise Reader has some really excellent features that could push it over the top for some folks.

More Robust Highlighting

Readwise started as a service for saving highlights from a bunch of different sources, so it’s probably not surprising that it has a longer list of features when it comes to highlights. One big advantage Readwise has is that it can sync in highlights from things that aren’t web articles. You can save highlights from books (via Kindle, Goodreads, Libby, Apple Books, etc.) as well as Medium, Twitter, and even otherwise closed systems like Discord. Heck, if you get tired of Readwise Reader, you can link your Instapaper, Pocket, or Omnivore accounts to Readwise to keep syncing your highlights all to the same place.

The highlighting built into Readwise Reader is top notch, especially if you’re a power user who loves shortcuts. Without going on and on, here’s a few clever ways you can highlight in Readwise Reader that I really appreciate:

• On the iPhone and iPad, double-tap on a paragraph to instantly highlight the whole paragraph.
• On the web app, press h on your keyboard to highlight the currently-focused paragraph.
• When listening to the text-to-speech version of an article through AirPods, double-squeeze or double-tap your earbud to highlight the last paragraph without even touching your phone.

And if you’re an Obsidian user like I am and have your highlights syncing there, I’ve found Readwise’s plugin to be far quicker than Matter’s. After getting past a few hundred highlights in Matter, I really noticed it took a few minutes to sync each time I opened Obsidian, and it was just getting worse the more highlights I added. Readwise’s plugin is much faster for me, even though I presently have about 500 highlights in my Readwise account. I also really like that Readwise lets me customize the formatting of my Obsidian notes on the Readwise website, while Matter effectively doesn’t have an option to customize its format unless you are comfortable updating its plugin code directly (which will also get undone when the plugin updates).

Finally, Readwise has an email feature I really like that sends me an email every week with a few semi-random highlights I’ve saved before. This won’t be for everyone, but I find it really useful in helping retain some information that I read once and might have forgotten otherwise.

Saving YouTube Videos

This is one I didn’t really expect, but I absolutely love. You can save YouTube videos to Readwise Reader and not only will this let you watch the video in your Readwise queue, it also imports the video’s captions, so all the text in the video is there to be highlighted and saved/synced like anything else you save to Readwise Reader.

The cherry on top here is that the app will highlight and scroll the text as the video plays so that you can easily follow along.

Text-to-Speech

While I usually read articles on the screen, sometimes it’s nice to listen to them as if they’re a podcast. I have a dog who loves to walk, so I spend upwards of an hour each day walking that little guy, and it’s a great opportunity to listen to some articles along the way. Matter has text-to-speech as well, but I find Readwise’s voice to be more natural and easier to listen to for longer stretches of time.

I also really like the interface for listening to articles. If the app is on screen when you’re listening, you can follow along with real-time highlighting of each word as it reads to you. Matter is less precise here in my experience.

I also love that while the app scrolls the article as it reads to you, you can scroll backwards of forwards at will. Once you do, you can tap one button to zip back to where the voice is, or tap another button to have the voice skip to your scroll position.

Automatic Summaries

Whenever you save something to Readwise Reader, the app will automatically generate a short summary of the article. It’s just 2-3 sentences, and is generated by GPT 3.5.

While these summaries are not at all replacements for reading articles written by humans, I do find them very helpful when my reading list has gotten too long (we’ve all been there, don’t pretend you haven’t!) and I need to trim it down to what I actually want to read.

Wrap Up

Both Matter and Readwise have recurring subscription costs associated with them to use the full features. Readwise Reader currently costs $8/month (even if you pay for a year up front), while Matter is $8/month or $60/year, which means Matter can be a bit cheaper if you’re ready to commit for a year.

Ultimately, it probably comes down to what you value more: a smoother reading experience or easy and powerful highlighting features. Whichever works better for you, we’re all winners in a world where apps like these are competing to be the best they possibly can.

A First Look at Rewind.ai

Rewind is a pretty incredible new tool for Mac users that bills itself as the search engine for your life, and that’s really not a bad way to describe it. It’s the sort of app that is kind of rare to come across these days, as it feels completely new. Truly, I can’t think of a single alternative to Rewind that does anything like this; it feels like they are charting their own course and we’ll be seeing similar apps trying to match what they’re doing over the next few years.

In short, Rewind records (almost) everything you do on your Mac, and makes that information searchable in the future.

How Rewind Works

Using Rewind requires quite a bit of trust in the developer, as this app literally records your screen at all times, so whatever you’re doing on your computer is being recorded by the app. A few caveats are worth noting here:

1. Recording pauses whenever you open a private window in your web browser.
2. You can tell the app not to record anything in specific apps (like your password manager or private messaging app).
3. All of the data is stored on your device and is never uploaded to the cloud. The data is not fully encrypted, so if someone steals you Mac and can log in to it, then they could retrieve this data (although they have access to your entire file system at that point, so this may be the least of your worries if that happens).

Assuming you are okay with this setup (and not everyone is), you can install Rewind and have it silently do its thing in the background. It will record your screen and it will save a hyper-compressed version of that video to your local drive. Despite the compression, it will still look great when you access it later, and the company predicts about 14GB of data that will be stored per month using the app. I’ve been using the app for 2 months exactly and I’ve used 24GB of local storage, for example. If you use your computer for an hour a day, your storage needs will be less, and if you’re on it all day and night, it will be higher. The app lets you decide how long you want to keep your recordings, ranging from 1 week all the way up to forever.

But Rewind isn’t just recording video, it’s also performing OCR on that video to keep a record of what’s on screen. It’s also able to record the audio from meetings (Zoom only at the time of writing) and save everything said in that meeting to your history as well. You can tell the app to automatically start recording when a Zoom call starts, or to prompt you each time to see if you want to record that one. They also ask you to get permission from others in the meeting.

Finally, you may be thinking that all this constant activity might be heavy on your computer and make things feel slow. The company is quick to try and ease concerns here, and I’m happy to report that on both an M1 MacBook Air, as well as a baseline M1 Pro MacBook Pro, the performance hit is completely unnoticeable to me. I actively monitored its activity in Activity Monitor for a while and saw CPU usage hover around 20% (which they point out is on a performance core, and is a sliver of your overall capacity) and RAM usage would hang out in the 400-500MB range. That’s not nothing, but I also noticed Keyboard Maestro and Pastebot were each using 100-200MB more RAM each, so it’s not out of line with other apps I didn’t even consider would be using considerable amounts of RAM.

How I’m Using Rewind

Rewind isn’t something I get value from everyday. Some apps — like a password manager or a photo editor — will constantly show why they’re valuable day-to-day, but Rewind is more like Time Machine: it’s constantly working, and invisible most of the time, but once you do need it, it’s pretty awesome.

For example, I do a regular Zoom call with my family and we talk about whatever’s going on with everyone, and last week my brother recommended I check out a band he liked. I said I would check them out, but I forgot to look them up right after the call, and a week went by without me looking them up. I could just message him and ask for a reminder, but that’s annoying and he may have even forgotten as well.

This is where Rewind shines.

I was able to bring up Rewind with the keyboard shortcut I configured (Ctrl + Opt + Cmd + Space is my go-to) and then I scrolled back to to that video call, and used the transcript to find the name of the band. It was an awesome moment that felt like it fulfilled the ultimate goal of computers, which is to help us do things that we could not do on our own. I forgot what was said, but my computer helped me recall it easily.

And since all text on screen is being OCR’d as it’s saved, you can find your way back to things you were looking at that you may have lost. As an example, I may have remembered an article I read about accessibility, but I wasn’t sure when or where, so I just brought up Rewind, searched for “accessibility,” and found the page in seconds.

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Often if it’s a website, you can actually click the moment in Rewind and open that URL again. If that’s not available for any reason, you can at least see what website it was on or how you found it by scrubbing through the video to see how you can get to it again.

One final use case is related to the “connected ideas” trend in note taking apps these days such as Obsidian and Roam Research. Those apps let you connect different notes together that talk about the same things, which can lead to eureka moments as they come together to reveal something else to you. In the same way, searching for a term in Rewind brings up all the things you’ve looked at with that term. So my “accessibility” search above returned the website I was thinking of, but it may have also turned up other articles I’d read or messages I’d shared with colleagues at work in Slack.

Pricing and Recommendation

This all sounds pretty good, and I wish that this was an easy recommendation to everyone with a Mac, but its cost is currently pretty significant at $20 per month. There’s no annual or lifetime plans, so the investment of $240 per year is pretty significant, and for many people would be the most expensive piece of software they run on their Mac.

This ongoing cost is also a bit hard to swallow when the entirety of Rewind runs on your Mac, not in the cloud. Maybe if Rewind came with an encrypted cloud backup of your data that you could recover if you lost your Mac or just got a new one, that would make the subscription feel better. As it stands, Rewind feels like an app that should either have a one-time cost or a relatively inexpensive subscription to support ongoing development for the app. The fact that it’s a very expensive recurring cost really limits who can become an ongoing customer.

If this overview of Rewind really resonated with you and if you can personally justify the cost, then I think Rewind is a pretty remarkable tool that completely shifted what I expect from a computer and its ability to recall information for me on demand. You can start a free trial today to see if it works for your workflows.