For some tasks, you absolutely need network access, but for others, a rich and varied stock of offline-accessible information and research resources should provide plenty of fodder for getting things done. Your iPhone or iPod touch can be a great supplemental resource for exactly this kind of thing. Here’s how to turn your device into an offline road warrior.

Instapaper or Read It Later

These apps are great because when you do have connectivity (if you get a signal briefly, for example), you can quickly save articles for reading in extended blackout zones of little or no coverage. Both these apps allow you to capture and store web content as offline pages. What’s more, integration with both of these apps is often baked into other iPhone gems, like Tweetie, the popular Twitter client that recently got a brand new version with lots of extra bells and whistles.

Instapaper comes in two flavors: a Free version, and a Pro version for $4.99. The more expensive app allows for Folders, article recommendations, background updates, and more, and really is worth it if you’re an avid Instapaper user. Read It Later also comes in Free and Pro flavors, with the Pro costing only $2.99. It features full-screen reading, sharing, and the ability to send articles to other iPhone apps.

Dictionary.com or WordBook

Despite having impeccable spelling skills (quiet, Simon), even I can see the value in a dictionary app. For instance, I often have an overwhelming urge to look up the origins of words. Not necessarily of tremendous professional value, but still. And of course, I’m kidding about the spelling thing. I often need to double-check words, especially ones for which I seem to have a mental block like “aesthetics.”

Both Dictionary.com (Free) and WordBook ($1.99) offer offline access to more than 200,000 definitions. My personal preference of the two is WordBook because of the UI, but both provide a thesaurus, word of the day, audio pronunciation guides, and more.

Encyclopedia

Wikipedia is a great on-the-spot reference for background and contextual information on new and unfamiliar terms and concepts. Which is fine when you have an active network connection, but doesn’t help much when you’re on a train in a 3G dead zone and you’re looking to provide a quick overview of the USB 3.0 standard for a client report.

Enter Encyclopedia ($8.99, iTunes link), an iPhone/iPod touch app that stores a complete full-text offline version of Wikipedia on your device. All internal links function, and you can navigate your history and backtrack when you need to. Beware, references are excluded in the interest of usability, and it will take up a full 2GB of your device’s storage space, but it’s much simpler and more convenient than the alternative.

myPANTONE

Web designers, and people who just take an interest in the finished look of their documents and web work, will truly appreciate the usefulness of the recently released myPANTONE app. The app gives you access to Pantone’s color libraries, and allows you create color schemes on the go. You can even use colors from photos taken with your device to find matching Pantone hues. Even if you’re not a professional print designer, this app can still be very helpful in coming up with pleasing color combinations for documents, personal websites and more.

It’s a little on the pricey side at $9.99, but it does let you do really cool things like GPS tagging, and voice/text annotation of palettes you create. If color is important to the work that you do in any way, there might be no better way to spend otherwise unproductive time out of network range.

The Pocket Reference Re-imagined

Imagine how crazy the idea of having an encyclopedia in your pocket would’ve seemed 20 years ago? Plenty crazy, I’d say. Thanks to the versatile platform Apple developed for its mobile devices, you can now have multiple encyclopedias on hand in a package slimmer than most people’s wallets. And it doesn’t end where I’ve stopped here. There are plenty of very specialized reference apps available via the iTunes App Store, for little or no money.

What reference apps do you carry with you?

As much as I try to resist, I do end up spending a good amount of time browsing around. Most things I can quickly dismiss but sometimes I do find something of interest and wish to set it aside for later viewing. I’ve been using a tag in my del.icio.us account for this but am intrigued by some of the services that are designed for just this purpose. A recent entry into this field is LaterThis which launched last month.

The idea behind these services is to let you quickly mark something you find online, usually with a bookmarklet, and then present these unread items to you later at your own leisure.

We’ve covered a similar service Instapaper in the past and were generally impressed. Our own Aliza Sherman wrote in depth about using Instapaper as a Tickler for story ideas which is largely what I need as well. At the time, a concern of hers was that the lists might get overwhelming and being able to categorize the items would be a useful feature.

LaterThis seems to have listened. It is quite similar to Instapaper on the surface but with the added ability to tag items upon creation as well as greater display options to view your saved items. You can view by tag, star a favorite item and view saved items by timeframe.

Overall I find LaterThis very easy to use, but these additional features add a level of complexity to the application that is missing from Instapaper. Adding to Instapaper is a one click process while adding an item to LaterThis adds an extra step for tagging and comments. This step is thought, and that thought is time and further distraction. Really, it turns a simple bookmark tool into more of a bookmark manager like del.icio.us or even your native browser system.

I think both apps have their audience and the likely factor that will determine which would be more useful to you is how long you leave your pages unprocessed. If you are really looking for a short term “Hey, look at this later” solution, Instapaper is probably your best bet. Those who might let things linger a bit longer will appreciate the organizational abilities that LaterThis brings to the table.

For me I like the simplicity of Instapaper, preferring to leave the tagging and organization steps to the review phase.

Both services are free, offer handy RSS feeds of your items, and offer ubiquitous iPhone support.

How do you manage your temporary links? Which service best fits your working style?

I have to say that my experience with two other apps – Evernote (still in limited beta) and Google Notebook – was quite different from the first two I tried. They didn’t work as well for me. Hey, I’ve got to be honest here but also should clarify my criteria for what “works well for me” means.

1. This is just my opinion.
2. I need things to be very intuitive.
3. Because I don’t read instructions.
4. Because my brain would explode if I did and starts to smoke when I try.

So in the name of saving my brain, I jump right into using an application and then see how often I use it. Does it become second nature to me? Or am I constantly having to think about using it and how to use it properly?

Here’s how the last week has gone using Evernote and Google Notebooks.

Evernote.com

I found that every time I opened my browser each morning and then tried to save a clip to Evernote, it asked me to log in. Yes, I checked “Remember Me.” Yes, I used the password storage feature in Firefox. This was a momentary blip as I saved clips.

What I do like about Evernote is that it uses a bookmarklet to facilitate clipping articles and blog posts to my account. Having a button at the top of my browser is just perfect – it is right there, where I can see it, access it and use it.

I can either highlight a portion of an article or post or clip and save the whole page. The options to do one or another is nice. Then I can either “Go to Notecards” or go back to the page I was viewing.

What I really like about Evernote is how they use a screen grab to show what I’ve clipped. I don’t know if it is a gender thing, but I’m really visual and I always use the Icon view in Mac and really prefer seeing a graphic or icon rather than text link.

Evernote’s marketing blurbs claim they can help you create notes, to-dos, brainstorms and reminders. You can also:

“…snap photos of anything from whiteboards to wine labels then email or sync them; clip web pages and have them stored and accessible in their entirety, even offline; write handwritten notes using digital ink or take snapshots of regular ink notes; record audio clips and memos to listen to later; Email or MMS notes from your cell phone to your personalized Evernote address.”

All I can say to all of those features is…say what?!? I am focused entirely on one capability – clipping web pages and storing them to access them later. That is my tickler file. I’m overwhelmed, even a little intimidated, by all the other features. But hey, that’s just me.

Google Notebook

While I can espouse my newfound love of Google Docs, I’m just not getting Google Notebook in the same way. The first thing that makes is harder for me to use is that the “button” you click to save a clip is on the bottom right hand corner of my browser. That position just isn’t intuitive for me.

Also, since I’m on a Mac with my menu of application icons across the bottom of my screen, anything I have to click at the bottom of my browser means I may accidentally click on Twhirl or Skype or another application in the menu. Kind of annoying.

At first, I was also confused about creating “notebooks” in Google Notebook – for some reason it seemed easier in Evernote. And while I love the plain vanilla text of Instapaper, for some reason seeing just text links in Google Notebook is a bit of a letdown after the elegant screen grabs of Evernote.

Big confession: While I was testing out Evernote and Google Notebook, I saved all the same clips to Instapaper every time.

Sometimes, the most basic apps work better for me than all the fancy, schmancy whiz bang apps out there. What about you?

I blogged about a “dream tool” I could use and called it Ticklr, and several WWD readers threw out some possible options of Web tools that actually exist, so I thought I’d try them out.

This is the first of two posts where I’ll test out these tools specifically for creating an online tickler file of potential story ideas.

Instapaper

I was attracted immediately by Instapaper’s uncanny simplicity. Register with your email address, create a password only if you want to, then drag the bookmarklet to your toolbar.

Once you’re set up with the Instapaper bookmarklet, you just click the bookmarklet as you read a blog post or article on a site of interest that you don’t have time to read at that moment and move on to your next task. Then when you have more time and want to skim what you haven’t read, just visit the Instapaper site and voila, headlines to the articles you saved. As you read them, they automatically go to a Recently Read list. If you click the bookmarklet on an article already in your Instapaper, the site automatically updates the save date so it appears higher on the list.

What I really like about Instapaper is that I’ve always found bookmarking articles and blog posts in my browser to be a pain once I want to go through them. And bookmarking sites like del.iocio.us haven’t worked for me when I want to scan content for story ideas.

A little while ago, I remembered an article I didn’t have time to read this morning that someone tweeted about on Twitter. I wanted to read it to get some background for an article I’m writing. At first, I headed to Twitter to try to track down the article link, but then I checked Instapaper just in case I had remembered to file it. And there it was!

Even as I prepared this post, I found Instapaper to be instantly handy. I linked to the Web apps I wanted to review for this post instead of bookmarking them. The next day, I was able to find them on my list of links on the Instapaper site – far easier than if I had bookmarked them. In just a few days, I’m pressing the Read Later button as if I’ve been doing it all my life. Because it works.

Instapaper was created as a side project by a guy working on Tumblr.com, another site I really like but that doesn’t really work as a tickler file to me. A possible downside I can see with Instapaper is scalability, that is, if I don’t go through the articles frequently enough, the list will get really, really long. Being able to sort them by category would be a plus.

Read our previous coverage of Instapaper here.

Notefish

I heard about Notefish from a comment in my Dream Tools post so I figured I had better take a look. After registering, I was prompted to download a Firefox plug-in, restart Firefox, and it added a notefish tagging button right next to my del.icio.us button.

So Notefish takes the concept of saving articles and blog posts and search engine results to another level. All you have to do is highlight the text you want to save, click on the little yellow Notefish on your browser, then add the content to a “Page” you create which essentially is like a category.

I was blown away when I went to Notefish. The post was there, on the page I had created, but not only that, the interface let me move it around by clicking, dragging and dropping it. You can also change the color of each note. I’ve already started a page of notes and research for an upcoming article I’m writing for a women’s business web site.

Okay, so I’m easily impressed, you say. I guess it doesn’t take much to knock my socks off although my sock-removing criteria includes:

1. Must be simple.
2. Must be intuitive.
3. Must be helpful.

Call me a Web apps snob, call me a spoiled Mac user, call me what you want. I know what I like and know why I like it. And so far, I like both of these apps. Two down, three more to go.

Instapaper is personal bookmarking evolved. You sign up with your email (or anything else you want to use, no password necessary), get a bookmarklet you stick in your toolbar and you’re good to go. Then when you hit a page you need to read later, you click the Instapaper bookmarklet, a window briefly pops up saying “Saved!” then goes away and you’re done. No time wasted going off to some other page; no breaking your train of thought to fill in a form.

Back at Instapaper, here’s what you find:

While you can add a note to a URL, why bother? Instapaper has reduced bookmarking to its absolute minimum, and that means bookmarking can finally scale.

If you’re interested, here’s my very modest hack for Instapaper – don’t just create one account. I created 3 – one for each of the main areas of my life. Now when I’m in surfing mode, I can with one click add a page to my personal web newspaper:

Update: I asked Marco how he came to write Instapaper: “I wrote Instapaper, quite simply, because I needed it myself. Having recently started using a smartphone, I noticed that there were plenty of times that I wanted to read long-form content while idle – I spend about 90 minutes on trains every day. I also frequently find online articles that are too long to read at that moment, but that I’d truly like to read at some point. Instapaper is the simplest possible solution that solves both of those problems for me – and as it happens, a lot of other people have found it useful, too.”

What about scalability?: “I’m really not concerned about scalability. The site costs nearly nothing to run, and its server has plenty of excess capacity. It’s also just a very simple site, so I can serve many times its current traffic without any infrastructure expansion. Exceeding the capacity of affordable hosting is a problem I’d love to have.

Okay, how about new features?: “I’ll add an RSS feed in the coming days, since it’s a popular request and it’s trivial to implement. As for further expansion or advertising, I haven’t decided yet. It’s a very simple tool, and much of its appeal and usefulness is in its simplicity. I’d rather not add functionality unless it’s simple, it fits with the product, and I can implement it well.”