Tactile
Tactile, a read-it-later app at Agency Enterprise that extracts article content with Mozilla Readability, the Mercury parser and oEmbed and renders it as markdown, built on Expo.
- BPM
- 143
- GRADE
- C
- LEVEL
- 5
- RELEASES
- 0
- YEARS
- 2021–2021
Getting The Article Out
Tactile was a read-it-later app: save a link, read it later, no ads. Most of the work was taking an arbitrary web page, finding the article, and throwing away everything else.
I used three tools for that. Mozilla Readability, the engine behind Firefox reader view. The Mercury parser as a fallback for layouts Readability got wrong. And oEmbed for things that aren't text, so a tweet or video in the middle of a post came back as an embed. The output was rendered as markdown, so I could style it once and every article looked like it belonged in the app.
It was built on Expo 42 in October 2021, during a busy stretch at the studio alongside BeClear and an NFT marketplace.