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Now, with Background Update Locations, Instapaper can automatically download new articles whenever you enter or leave locations such as your home or workplace. Visit the Settings panel to set it up. (Requires an iPhone or 3G/4G-equipped iPad.)

Special thanks to News.me for pioneering this clever technique.

iOS doesn’t yet permit apps like Instapaper to automatically download new content in the background on a regular schedule, but Background Update Locations can get most of the way there for a lot of people. Simply add up to 10 locations that you enter and leave often, and Instapaper will frequently update without manually launching it.

Instapaper stores these locations only within the app itself, only for this purpose, and does not share them or send them to any web service (not even its own servers). I respect your privacy.

Because this feature uses geofencing, you might be skeptical of battery life. (I was.) For whatever it’s worth, I’ve had it enabled for two weeks and haven’t noticed a meaningful battery-life difference on my iPhone or iPad.

The 4.2.2 update also includes improved typography and miscellaneous bugfixes. It’s now available in the App Store as a free update to all customers. Update now!

I’ll think we’ve all been there: you get into a subway car, and just as the doors are closing, you realize that you’ve forgotten to take your phone out, pull to refresh, and wait 10 seconds to download the latest news articles to read offline. You curse under your breath and switch back to Angry Birds.

Today we’re pleased to introduce a new feature called Paper Boy. Simply set your home location so that whenever you leave home, News.me downloads your latest news in the background. 

Download News.me for iPhone and visit Settings to enable Paper Boy.

We couldn’t be happier to launch this feature. We ride the subway every day and are more than familiar with the pain point it addresses.

Kudos to Rob Haining, subway rider extraordinaire, who came up with this idea on a Friday and had it built by the following Monday!

Love,

Team News.me

This is a significant update with many fixes and new features, including a new iBooks-Style Pagination option:

Other features:

• All-new Fast Pagination mode, a complete rewrite from the old pagination code that greatly improves accuracy and page-turn speed
• New draggable dot bar to replace the scroll bar in pagination mode
• New two-finger-swipe gesture to close an article
• Full-screen now has “Auto” mode to switch to full screen after a few seconds
• The subtle Twilight Sepia color tint can now be selected at any time
• Added sharing to Drafts and the upcoming Quotebook 2.0
• Many bugfixes and performance improvements

This update is free for all customers. Update today!