Instapaper, the cure for having a hundred tabs open in your browser, just got a huge 4.0 update featuring better social integration, a new search service and a sleek new look.
The biggest addition to the app is the new server-side search service, which for $US1 a month allows you to search the entirety of every article you’ve ever saved. This is a big improvement over the old search which only worked with downloaded articles. In the previous update Instapaper added a Facebook and Twitter integration inside the app and the “Editors” discovery tool, and these features have been reworked for the new version. Instead of only viewing the articles your friends who use Instapaper have shared, you can now browse all of the links in your Facebook news feed, Twitter timeline, and Tumblr Dashboard. The Editors section has been completely overhauled and is now exclusively sourced from Give Me Something To Read.
While many of the updates are iPhone specific — the iPad app’s interface has been redesigned into an attractive, easy-to-navigate grid layout. Thanks to iOS 5, Instapaper now also supports hardware brightness control so you can adjust the LCD brightness inside the app. Nearly every section of the app has been cosmetically or functionally reworked for an overall cleaner, easier-to-use design. Read more about the update on the developer’s blog. [Instapaper]