Instapaper acquired →

For the longest time, Instapaper was one of my final choice apps. I didn't even consider alternatives.

But, as Marco admits, development slowed and Instapaper started to look a little dated.

In many ways, it's an app that finds itself in the same position as iOS itself. There's not a great deal wrong with it, most of what it does it does very well. But it could do with a fresh coat of paint and a renewed momentum to its development.

Grudgingly, I recently switched to Pocket, which is a nice app but it's lacking some of Instapaper's best features (geo-location updating, swipe to go back, send digest to Kindle).

I switched in the full expectation of a swift return once Marco got round to shipping Instapaper 5.

Now, that's not going to happen. Let's hope Betaworks eschew the Blackpixel approach of buying and burying and that instead Instapaper comes back with a bang.

∞

Which Way?

Looking at image above, in which direction would you guess you have to swipe to move to the next screen?

Left to right, as the arrow suggests?

Wrong. Right to left.

This is the first screen you see when you first open this app. Doesn't fill me with confidence that the developer knows what he's doing. 

Quick Take on Blends

Pentimento.

If you’re like me, you didn’t know what pentimento meant. And upon encountering it, you immediately stopped and looked it up.

If so you should consider Blends, a universal $1.99 dictionary app from Fizzy Potion. In some keys ways, it’s the perfect app for quickly defining and bookmarking a word.

By toggling a setting (in the iPhone’s main Settings app) Blends, upon launch, will be automatically ready for you to type the word you’re looking for. So it's super quick and friction-free.

And you can then bookmark words if you want to refer to them later. The app also keeps a history of all the words you’ve searched for.

It is these features, delivered with an understated, classy UI, that has made Blends one of my favourite apps in recent years.

Simple, clear layout of definitions.

However, there are a few issues and the developer seems to have given up on improving things. So if the following niggles seem like they'd be important to you, look elsewhere. Don’t expect them to be fixed.

The issues, to be fair, are all fairly minor but they combine to add frustration to the app's usage. 

For example: within the bookmarks list, once you tap on a word to see the definition, tapping the back button always takes you to the top of the bookmarks list, your scroll position is not remembered.

The bookmarks list also uses a standard iOS Table View, which looks out of place with the rest of the app’s aesthetic. It seems a little half-arsed. 

Standard list view belies design elsewhere

There is a further indication of a lack of care in the placement of the bookmark overlay. A bookmarked word is indicated with a red tab in the top right corner of its definition page, but this obscures the tap target in the search box, so there’s no way of tapping it while viewing a bookmarked word.

The overlay blocks the tap target

For an app with so few extraneous elements, to have one blocking another seems inexcusable. 

Additionally, it would be nice for the app to backup your bookmarks (and maybe history) to iCloud and even sync them across the iPad and iPhone versions. 

Given the woeful state of individual app-backup in iOS (when restoring a phone it’s all or nothing) I’m worried about losing my list of bookmarks created over many months of use.

It’s a shame the app isn't under more active development. Given its fairly simple aims, it’s one of those apps that, with some polish, could be genuinely considered without flaw.

As it stands, I use and love it but not without reservation.

South Korean schools

Nice piece from The New Yorker on the different approaches to homework around the world, including this on South Korea (currently ranked second best globally):

Ninety per cent of primary-school students in South Korea study with private tutors after school, and South Korean teen-agers are reported to be the unhappiest in the developed world. Competition is so fierce that the government has cracked down on what are called private “crammer” schools, making it illegal for them to stay open after 10 P.M. (though some attempt to get around this by disguising themselves as libraries).

Reminded me of the opening to a recent episode of This American Life, which spoke to an American teaching in South Korea:

Julia Lurie:

There's a full-length mirror and a scale on every single floor of the school in the main hallway.

Ira Glass:

And do girls use them?

Julia Lurie:

Yeah, they use them all the time. A lot of them don't really think twice about it. And then I asked some of the girls about it, and they said, yeah, our principal wants them there because it's an all-girls high school, and he wants us to be skinny. And he made a joke that if we lose a certain amount of weight, then we can get a cafe.

Sure does sound like a swell place to go to school.

Biden the Pol →

Good, overwhelmingly positive piece on Biden from Newsweek:

Four years into the Obama administration, Biden remains one of its more curious creatures. Critics deride him as Obama’s court jester, his big mouth a perpetual source of heartburn, headaches, even national embarrassment. And yet, as longtime Obama counselor David Axelrod put it in a recent interview with Newsweek, Biden continues to be “the go-to guy when a difficult assignment comes up.”

In David Plouffe's book on Obama's first run, he makes clear that one of the key criterion for the VP pick was how well-equipped they would be for the role rather than, say, how they might work during the campaign. 

It seems clear from this profile that, for all Biden's failings, he's a great complement to the President, excelling at some of the politicking for which Obama has never shown much appetite. 

Founders Talk - Sam Soffes

Core Intuition is a great podcast, ably filling the gap left by Build & Analyze, only with less coffee talk and with hosts that don't end most sentences laughing at their own witticisms.

In the two most recent episodes they've spent much time talking about the sale of Cheddar - a todo list app for iOS. Host Manton Reece referred to a series of interviews the creator of Cheddar, Sam Soffes, gave on the Founders Talk podcast charting the rise and fall of the app.

Listening to them in hindsight, after the app has basically failed, is a strange, sad, frustrating experience.

You can see Sam build a bigger and bigger house of sand on the back of his ever-diminishing savings around an app for which it is increasingly clear he has little appetite. By part three - after Sam has basically ditched the app and taken a full-time job - he admits he hates todo apps.

He seems to be doing really well now and clearly has a bright future, so there's no schadenfreude at work here. I just found it a really interesting insight and an antidote to the 'App Store millionaire' stories that abound.

Be warned, Sam has a phenomenally annoying habit of, like, saying 'like' at least once in every sentence. If you can get past that, this is a series well worth listening to.

Apple's Earnings

This is the last post you'll ever find on this site about Apple's earnings.

Is there anything more fantastically boring than article after article, punch and counter-punch on whether Apple is doing well or really well?

None of this matters. Unless they're close to going out of business (and I don't think even Rob Enderle's claiming that yet) I don't care about their finances and I fail to see why so many Apple bloggers have decided that they should.

When are Apple going to improve the horrible iOS App Store? What neat tricks are there for getting more from my Mac? What exciting and innovative new apps are available? What improvements are likely in the new iPad mini or iPhone? How does Apple innovate without jeopardising its appeal to non-technical users who have grown accustomed to the iOS interface?

How about Gruber et al give us their insight into some of those questions rather than rail against the obvious failings of financial speculation and reporting.

The most disappointing thing about Apple earnings call is the blanket coverage it's received from technology writers that used to spend their time writing about technology.

Blues Cruise →

Of all the post-election articles I’ve read, this is one of the best. The Republican bitterness and delusion is a joy to behold.

Via New York Magazine (who still haven’t got their arse into Newsstand).

∞

Quick Take on iPhone 5

My black 32GB iPhone arrived this morning. I'm sure you've read numerous incredibly verbose reviews by now so here are my brief initial thoughts.

Apple was right when it decided the 3.5" display was the most comfortable size. 4" is a stretch and I've found myself using two hands to operate it much more than I ever did previous models.

To reach the top left I end up sort of tilting the phone toward the thumb while lunging. It's imprecise and makes dropping it much more likely.

Little things like checking the time are also more precarious. You pull the phone out, spin it round, press the home button, see the time, then have to shift the whole hand position to get up to the standby button on top. This is made even worse with headphones plugged into the newly repositioned jack. The cable gets in the way of the manoeuvre.

I'm sure these digital gymnastics will become second nature in a week or so but for now I don't feel as comfortable using it.

Speed wise, it certainly feels quick but not wildly different to the 4S.

The mute rocker seems whittled down: thinner and a little easier to miss.

The movement of the pixels closer to the display isn't as apparent as I had expected. The jump from the 3GS to the 4 was a truly revolutionary upgrade for me. The first time I saw a Retina display I was blown away. I love the screen on the Retina MacBook Pro and the new iPad but they can never recapture the shock at how good the iPhone 4 was.

So when I heard talk that this screen upgrade was as impressive as the 3Gs to 4, I was excited. However, I can't notice a discernible difference. It's a fantastic display but so was its predecessor.

The one area of display that has stood out is the blacks. It really is difficult to discern where the screen ends on the black model.

The Lightning connector is fantastic. Seems stupid to be so effusive about a charger but the symmetrical design will be beneficial every single time you use it. The one thing that surprised me about it was how tightly it fits. It takes a good bit of force to pull it out. 

Finally, the Earpods. I'm not a good judge of earphones. I have funny shaped ears, with my right ear seemingly bigger than my left (the earpod stays in my left, falls out of my right) and I'm no audiophile. I think, however, it's safe to say that for almost everyone these will be better than the old pair but not great.

Before the Storm

We're a few hours away from the iPhone announcement and there's a couple of points to be made.

Disappointing

Yes, there will be moronic link-bait posts already in draft decrying the "disappointing" iPhone and foretelling the imminent implosion of the Apple universe. They should, of course, be ignored. But almost as stupid is the much more prevalent attitude which says: "criticism of the iPhone 4S as underwhelming was proven incontrovertibly wrong by the handset's stupendous sales figures".

That's like countering criticism of Windows Vista by pointing to the huge number of licenses Microsoft sold. People went to buy a PC, it came with Vista. People went to buy an iPhone, the current model was a 4S.

Now the 4S was a much better product that Vista but the point stands. Even if Apple had done nothing to the iPhone 4 at all, it still would have sold in similarly large quantities in the last year. 

Apple sold megatonnes of 4Ses despite a pretty underwhelming update. The two aren't mutually exclusive, contrary to the received wisdom.

This is testament to the quality and cachet of the iPhone. And it's relevant to make the point now as a plea to judge the new phone on its merits, not to reverse engineer an opinion based on sales figures.

The Screen

All the leaks point to a bigger screen on the iPhone 5 being the most prominent of the new features we see today. But I suspect there's more to come, in terms of narrative at least.

There's no way Schiller is going to stand on stage and say: "the new screen is better because it's bigger". That's not Apple.

Of course they're going to tell us this is the best ever phone screen but they're not going to rely on size alone to convince us. If the screen size is the tentpole change in the iPhone 5, Apple are sure to frame it as part of a bigger story on the new form factor, not just how it's a nice update but how it's an essential update that will empower users and enrich their experience. 

Those of us that follow Apple and technology know we're going to be barraged by the "what's better about the iPhone 5?" question over the coming days. I'm sure we can rely on Apple to provide us with a more satisfying answer than simply "a bigger screen".