Readtime

Getting things read on your iPhone.

What is it?

Readtime is an iPhone app that helps you get through the items in your Readability list. It starts with setting the amount of time you have - up to 30 minutes - and fetches the right amount of articles for you based on average reading speeds.

Why Bother?

Reading lists are awesome for collecting all the articles you'd like to read - sometimes too awesome. However, having enthusiastically saved all those great reads for later, we found ourselves wincing when faced with the article pile-up.

What did we do?

Readtime started as a Cogent hackday project. Benjamin, Simon and Ben teamed up and aimed to get it mostly built in two days. After some brutal scoping sessions, we came out the other side with an equally brutal focus on just what the app would do: use available time to get things read. These sessions took place at the lunch table, which conveniently doubles as a sketch surface.

At the end of the two days we were looking at a functioning app - you could set a time, retrieve articles, and swipe them away when finished. We also had a few extra features we wanted to ship, a few areas we wanted to polish or redo, and an ongoing debate about the name.

Over the next little while we found the time to change the name a few times, add and subtract features, and debate whether having our own 'Read Later' feature was dangerously recursive (answer: yes). We also looped through a few visual designs following Simon and Benjamin's lukewarm response to the original "Ship's Captain" theme. Pffft. Developers.

We also settled on Readability as the sole service for launch, after probing the API requirements of the major reading lists. We're hoping to include other services in future releases, which would bring us closer to our original vision of getting through accumulated articles, regardless of whether they're in Readability, Instapaper, Pocket or any other service.

Where Can I Get It?

Readtime is live in the App Store now! Check it out at www.readtimeapp.com

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Readtime 2.0.0

Readtime planning.

2013-04-11T22:26:54Z, Rachel Morley from Cogent said

Love the new cuter, flatterer, etceterer. Is beauty and usefulness, personified.

Readtime 2.0 has been submitted to the App Store!!

2013-05-05T22:20:28Z, Simon Harris from Cogent said

Readtime featured in iTunes new and noteworthy this week!

The Readtime team really enjoys wearing white shirts.

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Rebuilding the Customer Platform, ground up.

We are bright and good at what we do

That means we’ll ask lots of questions.

We don’t think about our skills as buzzwords like strategy, user experience, agile methods or Ruby on Rails development — we think about working as a team with your objective in mind.

We relish the challenge of creating something new, and to solve tough problems that haven’t been solved before. We know that designing something that is efficient to run matters too, that’s why we’re also happy to be your ongoing support team.

We’ve been fortunate to work with some great customers, like:

Melbourne Business School
The Alfred Hospital
Real Estate Group
Tesselaar
Rezeko
Sensis Yellow Pages
Swann Insurance
Lonely Planet
Jetstar