Mark Articles Read, Undo in One Tap

Summary (TL;DR)

Your queue now shows a plain Read or Unread label on every article. Mark an item read or unread with one tap, and a short confirmation slides in with an Undo button, so a mis-tap takes one click to fix. The filter tab reads "Read" instead of "Done", and the status buttons stay disabled until an article finishes saving.

You open your queue to pick the next thing to read, and you want a fast answer to one question: what have you read, and what is left?

The old queue marked unread items with a small dot next to the title. The dot was easy to miss, and a read article sat next to an unread one looking nearly the same at a glance, so the list struggled to answer that question.

Now every article carries a plain label. "Unread" or "Read" sits right under the title, beside the source and the read time. You scan the list and you know where you stand. No squinting at dots.

One tap to mark read, one tap to undo

Each card has a clear button. An unread article shows "Mark as read", a read one shows "Mark as unread", and a tap switches the state so the article moves to where it belongs.

People mis-tap. You go to open an article on a phone, your thumb lands a few pixels off, and you mark it read instead. The old fix was to find the article again, open it, and set the state back by hand, which is slow and fiddly on a small screen.

So we added a confirmation. Mark an article and a short message appears, "Marked as read", with an Undo button next to it, and one tap on Undo puts the article back where it was. The message clears itself after a few seconds, so it does not sit in your way once you have moved on.

A wrong tap should cost one click to fix, not a hunt through the list.

A clearer filter and fewer surprises

The queue keeps two filters at the top, one for unread articles and one for the ones you have finished.

That second tab used to read "Done". It reads "Read" now, to match the label on the cards, so the same word means the same thing whether you are looking at a filter or a card.

We also closed a small trap. An article you just saved spends a few seconds being fetched and summarised, and during that short window the read and unread buttons sit disabled with a "Processing…" note on the card. You cannot mark an article read before Readplace has finished saving it, because the state would not stick. The buttons wake up the moment the article is ready.

Why this matters for your reading

A read-it-later queue earns its keep by being honest about what you have read. Unread means you have not opened it, and read means you have. The label says so, the filter says the same, and a wrong tap costs you one click to fix.

Small friction adds up. A queue that hides where you stand makes you re-read pieces you already finished, or lose track of the one piece you actually meant to get to, and after a while you stop trusting the list and start keeping the real one in your head.

Clear labels and a working Undo keep that from happening, so the time you spend with the queue goes to reading rather than checking.

Open your queue and try it. Mark something read, watch the label change, then hit Undo and watch it come back. Start at readplace.com.