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'Iris' engine helps Readability find the content you care about

'Iris' engine helps Readability find the content you care about

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An update for Readability improves the way the service handles non-article content like videos and image galleries.

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Gallery Photo: Readability for iOS hands-on images
Gallery Photo: Readability for iOS hands-on images

While services like Readability and Instapaper were originally designed for long-form reading, it turns out that people are using them for more than just lengthy articles. Readability is looking to build on this trend with what it's calling the next generation of its "content normalization engine" — an under-the-hood tool that lets the service work with content other than text-based articles. Codenamed Iris, the tool first determines what exactly it is you're looking at — whether it's a photo gallery or a forum thread — and then decides what the most important aspects of that particular piece of content are, which it presents to you in Readability's typical minimalist style.

According to the company, the change means you should "expect better results on all sites," from YouTube to Wikipedia. And in addition to supporting more types of content, Iris also lets the developers make changes to the service incredibly fast — in hours or even minutes, if necessary. The feature is live, so you can check it out now via your browser, Android, and iOS.