

Introducing Instapaper 4.1 for iPhone, iPad - evanwalsh
http://www.marco.org/2012/03/16/instapaper-4-1-released

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tptacek
These typefaces are so great. He's actually one-upped Readability, which uses
H&FJ faces exclusively, and makes hay of that. H&FJ is one of the great
typography design houses in the world, but the net result of Readability's
implementation is... quirky; nobody in the world wants to read large amounts
of body text set in Vitesse!

(And I love Vitesse; it's my slide deck font now.)

Marco wrote a blog post recently saying he had trouble getting responses from
type designers, but what he managed to pull off here is a survey of some of
the best reading faces in the world, ranging from venerable (FF Meta) to brand
new (Elena).

~~~
eneveu
Vitesse looks great. I might be interested in using it for my slide decks,
too.

I'm wondering about the licensing model, though... When I go to buy it,
pricing depends on the number of CPUS. If I were to buy this font and use it
in a slide deck, could I publish it after the conference?

In their FAQ, they say:

 _Our end-user font licenses allow only the production of Workflow PDFs, not
Public PDFs. For organizations that need to circulate PDFs more widely, we
offer an Embedding License as a supplemental product. For more information,
please contact our sales office at info@typography.com._

<http://www.typography.com/ask/faq.php?faqID=16#Faq_16>

Font licensing seems complicated. I just want a font that I can use to produce
beautiful slides, display them on a screen in front of a large audience, and
print them / share them after the talk.

~~~
tptacek
You can't share the font software with your audience, and since the only good
way to share a slide deck with an audience is PDF (otherwise you'd literally
have to share the font itself alongside the deck), and PDF embeds the font,
you can't share a basic PDF either.

So, couple things:

(a) You can just not share the deck at all. That's my strategy. Slide decks
suck. Sharing them also dilutes the value of your talk; a single talk can be
given more than once, as long as you don't publish it.

(b) You can ignore the license. Many other people do that. You are unlikely to
get burned by the H&FJ police for doing that. One imagines H&FJ is much more
concerns about agencies and big companies accidentally publishing their whole
font library in their professional PDFs.

(c) You can, instead of designing your talk in Keynote, design it in
Illustrator (bonus: Illustrator is _way better_ ), slice the slides up on
artboards, convert the type into outlines (a 1-click operation in AI), export
them to individual PDFs, pull them into Keynote, and share that.

~~~
samg
What about exporting the Keynote to JPGs, and then putting the JPGs into a new
Keynote and exporting as PDF?

~~~
tptacek
Similar difficulty as AI, but lower quality result.

If I'm going to spend a couple hundred bucks on a typeface, I'm not going to
share it in JPG format.

I really think the best option is just not sharing slides. Your talk is your
_talk_ , not your visual aids.

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ronin510
It looks like Readability doesn't quite like this new feature in Instapaper.
From Timothy Meaney, part of Arc90, parent company of Readability:

@marcoarment congrats Marco, great idea out of nowhere to up your game re:
typography. Out of nowhere!!

Interesting, considering Readabilty's app is a complete ripoff of the one-man-
company Instapaper.

~~~
pronoiac
Marco mentioned their lovely fonts as the impetus for the change:
<http://www.marco.org/2012/03/08/learning-from-competition>

Edit: Even without that context, it seems petulant & rude.

~~~
sambeau
Marco said everything that needed to be said. Meaney should have kept smugly
quiet.

    
    
      "I wish someone had kicked my complacent ass about fonts sooner."

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teejae
Marco, Hope you're reading this.

Yes, the fonts are great. Not sure if anyone has noticed, but on IPad3 with
Elena font only while in landscape only, capitals are distorted/thin. It's
fine in every other font with both portrait and landscape orientations.

Good Characters: BCDNST

Bad Characters: EFHIJKLUVY

Otherwise, no doubt, these fonts are beautiful, and the twilight sepia is a
welcome addition, since I use F.lux generally on all my systems. Great release
Marco!

~~~
spicyj
That is curious. (I see the same on my iPad.)

~~~
mattkaar
Seeing the same on my iPhone 4S while in landscape.

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dvdhsu
That's impressive. He stated less than 24 hours ago that it would take 7-10
days [1]. I guess both Marco and Apple are working around the clock.

1\. <http://www.marco.org/2012/03/16/instapaper-for-retina-ipad>

~~~
xuki
This seems to be a expedited review by Apple. He submitted it and it was
approved within hours. Even with expedited request to Apple it usually does
not get this fast. Being popular helped, I guess.

~~~
oacgnol
It's in Apple's best interest to get this out so they can show off the new
Retina Display with native apps. Makes perfect sense from a business
standpoint.

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Steko
The new default iOS font Elena is really gorgeous. There's a few example
retina images in TFA that show you how many more pixels the new ipad has then
my (and possibly your) display.

~~~
ugh
I think Marco Arment licensed those fonts. They don’t come with iOS. Would be
nice, though, if Apple were to finally step it up again in the typography
department, especially now that they have devices that can show beautiful and
detailed fonts off.

~~~
Steko
I think you misunderstood me and/or I could have been less ambiguous. It's
Instapaper's new default font on iOS as stated in the article.

I'm not a big font guy but I've been very impressed twice recently by new web
fonts -- first Kottke's redesign using Whitney Screen Smart and now Elena for
Instapaper.

------
crazygringo
I'm actually quite disappointed that, while Marco added three new fonts
(that's great), he completely removed the ability to use the standard system
fonts, at least on my iPhone version!

The fact is, Times New Roman and Helvetica are two of the greatest typefaces
of all time both for legibility, and for "receding into the background", so
that you notice the content, not the font. Just because they're tremendously
overused doesn't make them any less legible.

And while Elena, Lyon and Tisa are not terrible, all of them impose far more
typographical personality on the text than I'd rather have. And for an app
that people may spend an hour a day reading on, the choice of typeface is
actually tremendously important. For me, Elena is just too boxy and spindly,
with overlong serifs; Lyon's letterforms just need further work and refinement
(the lowercase 'f' has too large of a hook, and feels like it's going to
topple over to the right; the commas draw too much attention to themselves
because of their size, etc.), and Tisa is just too casual, without enough
variation between thick and thin strokes.

So please, Marco, bring back Times New Roman, Palatino, and Helvetica as
additional options!

~~~
emalminator
In both the iPhone and iPad versions, Helvetica and Palatino are still
available, as are Verdana, Georgia, Hoefler Text, and Baskerville. They're
just listed below the six new typefaces in the list. No TNR, but I'm
personally ok with that--reminds me too much of MS Word.

There are certainly some other typefaces I would have preferred (Adobe Minion
is one of my favorites), but I would imagine Marco was also constrained by the
deals he could cut with the foundries. Especially given how quickly he
incorporated the licensed typefaces, it seems like a remarkable upgrade to me,
and I'm looking forward to trying it out more extensively.

~~~
crazygringo
Son of a gun! I just tried, and you're right. Thanks!

It's just that there is ZERO indication that area is scrollable. It shows
three (on iPhone), has rounded corners, no scroll bar... definitely a failure
in user-interface. Strange.

Minion would be my #1 pick too.

~~~
emalminator
Yeah, I agree that discovering the scrolling nature of the iPhone's typeface
list is not immediate for every user. Of course, that's a problem with most
scrollable lists on iOS (and now Lion--cf. John Siracusa's comments on
Hypercritical #27 about pawing at everything on the screen).

On the iPad, the list displays 4.5 lines, with the top of 'Meta' peeking up
from the bottom, so that's a natural visual cue that the list continues.
Perhaps there's room to fit in 3.5 (3.4?) lines on the iPhone app, but I would
be concerned about making the list either too cramped or unbalanced next to
the triad of buttons on the right. In any case, once one discovers that the
list scrolls, it's hard to forget it, so perhaps it's fair to trade
discoverability for a cleaner interface in the long run.

One additional minor flaw I noted on that list (iPhone and iPad alike): the
'Lyon' text looks like it's aligned too high. I suspect the descender on the
'y' is to blame, although I don't see the same problem with the item for
Georgia, the only other font with a descender in its name. One-star review
until it's fixed in 4.1.1! ;)

P.S. Glad to hear the appreciation for Minion--I was so happy the day I got my
TeX installation configured to use it. I'll likely wait for the 4th generation
to update my iPad 2, so Marco's got a year to hash out an agreement with Adobe
to use it....

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pacomerh
Great to see that you invested big money in quality fonts. Congrats.

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ZanderEarth32
Looking forward to Build and Analyze next week to hear about how the update
process went.

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luigi
Sad that he feels the need to be so publicly thankful of the App Review team.

A sane policy would recognize that he's a popular iOS developer in good-
standing, and would not submit him to any review process.

~~~
donohoe
Sad that you have to be so publicly critical of someone you think is being so
publicly thankful.

Moving on... given that he thought it would take 7-10 days I think it was
completely appropriate of him. He worked hard and got an extra boost. I'd
rather be supportive than snarky.

~~~
luigi
I was remarking on the Stockholm Syndrome effect that Apple has inflicted on
its most popular third party developers. It's a sad situation.

~~~
rdl
Especially now (vs. when they first launched the App Store), Apple is seamless
and efficient compared to the way mobile apps worked before the open
smartphone platforms. You had to negotiate for 6-24mo to get on a carrier's
deck.

I wish Apple provided a way to install non-approved apps without jailbreaking,
either in some kind of custom security container or entirely at your own risk.
I specifically would like to see "adult" (porn) apps allowed (as a free speech
issue, and because I think they could be popular), but I'm aware of both
Apple's desire to be PG rated _and_ the likely influx of crappy spam which
would ensue from porn apps. HTML5 pretty much covers this niche now.

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gtcaz
The fonts look pretty great on my iPhone 4. (Though I miss my favorite face
from iBooks, Iowan.) Unfortunately, they look very strange on my iPad 1.
Uneven and partly washed out.

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swah
How do you owners of devices with retina display feel when you go back to
programming on your MBPs?

~~~
ChrisLTD
I'm seriously considering getting one of those high DPI MacBook Airs now.

~~~
pflats
They don't exist (yet). Lion supports HighDPI mode, but the Airs have about
the same DPIs as the iPad 1/2.

~~~
ChrisLTD
Still higher DPI than the pros. That's all I meant.

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tuacker
I haven't used Instapaper yet but why not use the pinch motion to get out of
an article as you'd do with pictures?

~~~
amartya916
While I think this a a worthy suggestion, I also believe that "hidden"
gestures that have low "discoverability" should be dealt with extreme caution.

For example, in a reading app, a pinch gesture can also be assigned to
changing font sizes, and perhaps that's what many users will expect to happen.

I think keeping gestures to a minimum (in this case, just a tap, which
coincidentally, is a feature of many e-book readers) serves Instapaper well.

By the way, well done Marco. Solid update, worth working hard for, and I am
sure your customers appreciate it.

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patman81
Great update. I love the new full screen mode. Tab on the screen to go full
screen. Tap again to go back.

