Instapaper just got yet another update (developer Marco Arment seems to be on roll these last couple of months) and it brings a very neat new feature – when you arrive at any chosen location, Instapaper will automatically update your articles in the background. This should mean that never again will you be without your latest saved articles when you rush of to catch a bus.
Ever notice that Instapaper never seems to switch off your iPad or iPhone’s display while you’re reading, no matter how long you get distracted while reading, nor how slowly you read a page, whereas iBooks and Kindle regularly go dark if you don’t keep up a good pace? No? That’s because you’re not supposed to, even though Instapaper developer Marco Arment spend quite a lot of effort tweaking the app to do it.
In yesterday’s minor bugfix update, Instapaper developer Marco Arment posted this fantastic personal note, thanking users for allowing him to work from home and spend time with his wife and newborn baby. Could there be a better reason to subscribe to Instapaper, or for that matter, support your favorite app developers?
Instapaper 4.2 has just hit the App Store, and it’s a pretty big update. The headline feature is a new iBooks-style page-turn animation, but there is a lot more in there besides.
Papermill launched on Android several weeks ago. Developed by Ryan Bateman and designed with the help of Matt Legaspi, the app is a beautiful Instapaper client for Android devices. Papermill received high praise from the community and widespread media coverage when it launched, and the developer has since broken down its success based on sales. The conclusions he draws about Android users in general are particularly interesting.
Bateman says that, “Android users not being willing to pay for an apps whose focus is quality and whose price reflects this.” Is this true only for the average Android user, or should the average iPhone user be considered as well? How can one make the blanket argument that people don’t want to pay for quality apps? I think it comes down to the basic issue of supply and demand.
Instapaper has just been bumped from v4.1 to 4.1.1, But despite this tiny numerical increment, there are a few big changes worth writing about.
Marco Arment, the coffee-slurping, BMW-driving playboy developer of the iPad’s best read-later app, has fixed a few bugs introduced in the Retina-ready v4.1 released last week. These include some odd rendering problems for the new default font, Elena, and some speeding up to the page animations which were slowed down by some weird iPad 3 oddities.
But there are also a few new features, and one reversion that should please the luddites who hate the cool cell-table layout of the article list.
I’m a dead treeware holdout when it comes to cookbooks, and as such any recipes I save from the web are scattered across Pinboard, Instapaper and Simplenote. But Basil is the app that might just change all that. Yes, it’s another recipe organization app, but there’s a difference. Basil lets you throw in recipes from just about anywhere, formats them and categorizes them ready to use.
After unboxing your new iPad and getting it setup, the first thing you should do is open up the App Store and download some essential apps. We’ve compiled a list of 12 of the App Store’s greatest offerings, which we think should be installed on every iPad. These are apps you certainly won’t want to miss.
The new iPad’s Retina Display is perfect for reading, so some of the most highly-sought after app updates are going to be the ones that make the best iPad e-reading apps compatible with the doubled resolution. And, in fact, many such apps, like Kindle, Evernote and Readability have already updated.
Unfortunately, when you get your new iPad today, you’ll have to slog through Marco Arment’s best-selling e-reading app Instapaper in fuzzy old SD. But don’t despair, Retina Display support is coming soon.
Y’all know Instapaper, right? It’s the amazing read-later service from Marco Arment which lets you save anything your find on the web to read at your leisure on your iPhone, iPad or Kindle. Now a new, free, Mac App Store app called Read Later will let you read your articles on your Mac.
Evernote has announced “Clearly,” a new browser extension that mimics other enhanced reading services, like Instapaper and Readability. Clearly is available for Google Chrome now, with support coming for other browser in the near future.
While Evernote already lets you save webpages, take notes, archive memories and more, Clearly has one simple, clear (pardon the pun) focus: distraction-free reading.
On Tuesday, the FBI seized a number of servers from DigitalOne, a Swiss hosting company that leases blade servers from a Virginia datacenter. The FBI had a warrant for only one particular server, used by a fraudulent “scareware” distributor, but the FBI ended up taking a lot more servers than the one they were actually looking for, knocking several web sites offline in the process… and making off with nearly all of popular offline reading platform Instapaper‘s user data, some of its codebase and some password encryption keys in the process.
A new Safari feature hidden within the latest Mac OS X Lion build is expected to compete with services like Instapaper and ReadItLater as a method of saving pages for later reading. The ‘Reading List’ feature appears to be partly based on HTML and javascript, and is likely synchronize bookmarks between Mac and iOS devices.
Discovered by MacRumors, Apple’s description of the feature is the following:
Reading List lets you collect webpages and links for you to read later. To add the current page to your Reading List, click Add Page. You can also Shift-click a link to quickly add it to the list. To hide and show Reading List, click the Reading List icon (eyeglasses) in the bookmarks bar.
The feature is currently inactive within the latest build of Lion, so those running the release won’t be able to try it out just yet, but as a massive Instapaper addict I can’t wait for Reading List to go live.
Readability is an excellent bit of Javascript that strips online content down to its barest and most readable elements, and was borrowed wholesale last year by Apple for the new Safari Reader option in Safari 5.
Late last month, it became even more excellent by relaunching itself as a reading platform in its own right. Launching aside a native iOS app powered by Marco Arment’s excellent Instapaper, Readability is now more than a snip of Javascript code but instead a monthly subscription service that pays 70% of its collected fees directly to the writers and publishers being read.
We reached out to Arc90’s Richard Ziade for a quick chat about what Readability’s new change in scope would mean not just for existing users, but for publishers of web content looking to get paid.
If you’re an Instapaper user on iOS — and honest to god, you really should be — there’s a sexy new update available that not only contains an impressive algorithm to automatically switch you over to black-on-white dark mode the moment the sun sets outside of your window, but also includes new sharing options, article preview on the iPhone and the ability to use an “ihttps://” prefix to launch pages.
Check out the full change list below the jump.