
A $5 App That Justifies Your iPhone Purchase: Instapaper - xtimesninety
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/08/instapaper-a-5-app-that-justifies-your-iphone-purchase/
======
pistoriusp
I usually find that things I bookmark for later consumption, are rarely read.
Unless they apply to something technical that I implement and read up on
later.

~~~
masklinn
The only way for me to read backlogs is to just keep them open in tabs, at
some point I get frustrated by having 50+ tabs open and just triage, read &
discard.

~~~
jonshea
I do the same thing, but I use Safari which can only restore tabs from the
single most previous session. At some point my browser will crash, and then
will crash again before I’ve restored the previous session. And then my
reading black log will be cleared. I can’t decide if this is a bug or a
feature.

I use instapaper for articles I _really_ want to read. The tilt to scroll is
amazing. It might be my favorite way to read.

~~~
masklinn
> At some point my browser will crash, and then will crash again before I’ve
> restored the previous session.

I use Camino so it's happened to me once or twice. I used the history listing
to find them again (camino lists both the first and last visits to a given
URL, a bunch of URL grouped together with identical last access and first
access widely different both from one another and the corresponding last
access points to the URLs loaded the last time I launched the browser e.g.
after a restart)

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unalone
_The other killer iPhone app is Tweetie, a $3 Twitter client that, if you’re a
Twitter user and have multiple accounts, is as indispensable as a needle to a
heroin addict._

Oh, Wired. Continuing to destroy your credibility by insisting that a single
client among dozens is a killer application if you use a certain website in a
certain rare use case.

~~~
antidaily
Tweetie is by far the best twitter client I've used. And 100% worthy of such
high and arbitrary accolades.

~~~
ivankirigin
Tweetdeck syncs with our desktop experience. For people that need to filter
the stream to grok it better (read: eventually everyone), Tweetdeck is better.

~~~
danw
This reminds me of something Russell Davies spoke about at dConstruct. To
paraphrase, TweetDeck is humans solving problems humans have created for
themselves.

~~~
ivankirigin
Communication isn't a human invention.

~~~
danw
Twitter is a human invention. Written communication (arguably) is a human
invention.

Audio from the talk will be available on <http://2009.dconstruct.org/podcast/>
soon.

~~~
ivankirigin
Tweetdeck also filters Facebook, and others soon too, I'd bet. Given enough
time, it would work with your email / chats / voicemail / smoke signals etc.

Filtering information is not a new idea at all.

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crsmith
<http://www.givemesomethingtoread.com>

Instapaper's popular items

~~~
mildweed
As if I have a shortage of things to read. My RSS feeds are neglected, and all
are worthy of reading. Get me an app that buys me the time to catch up on my
reading-- now that'd be a killer app.

~~~
jdunck
Try this:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Serial_Visual_Presentatio...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Serial_Visual_Presentation)
<http://www.zapreader.com/>

~~~
yters
I've also used an OS tool called Dictator in the past, until it stopped
working on my computer. I read Brother's Karamozov at 2500 wpm! It was
something about Russia...

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anigbrowl
_One side note: Instapaper pro is rated “17 and up” for “Frequent/Intense
Mature/Suggestive Themes,” which is an indication of Apple’s bizarre and
arbitrary approval and rating policies._

Not a big deal I suppose, but this is perverse to the point of obnoxiousness.
This is slanderous, when you think about it.

~~~
lukifer
There are many apps stuck with a 17+ rating due to the app being able to
access content from the web which may or may not be kid-safe. It's a policy
which is paranoid and inconsistently applied, but it's not entirely arbitrary.

~~~
anigbrowl
I get that...what irritates me is they don't do the same with Safari. With
this logic, one could complain that the alphabet isn't kid safe because you
can make naughty words out of it, or that a clock app promotes pot use because
it reads 4:20 twice a day. A 17+ rating applied on such general grounds really
creates a false impression about the products it's applied to, suggesting they
are somehow more likely to expose the user to objectionable content and thus
hurting sales.

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AndrewDucker
Read It Later does much the same thing. I use it all the time to bookmark
things for later use. It's an addon for Firefox, but works with any browser
through bookmarklets.

<http://readitlaterlist.com/iphone/>

~~~
pclark
whats the advantage of this over instapaper? FYI: Instapaper came first

~~~
terpaul
FYI: That's absolutely not true. Read It Later came out 5 months before
Instapaper and had offline reading nearly a year before IP.

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Zak
I've been using a similar (open source) program for my old Palm M500 for
years. It's called Plucker.

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jlees
I feel I must be alone in this after all the Instapaper hype, but I just can't
read stuff enjoyably on my iPhone.

~~~
raptorex
yeah, it's convenient but I get eye strain pretty easily. if you happen to
have a kindle, hatchet does the same thing for it. it's a much better platform
for reading text. it costs $0.15 per use via Amazon's conversion charge
though.

<http://hatchetapp.com/>

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charliepark
Interestingly, the guy who wrote O'Reilly's book "Best iPhone Apps" also
picked Instapaper as the absolute best iPhone app
(<http://endlessyears.com/?p=1373>), after reviewing (or, at least,
considering) 65,000 apps, and selecting his top 200.

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dabeeeenster
This is the one app that would stop me from ditching the iPhone and going to
Android. Anyone know of a comparable app/service for Android?

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xtimesninety
the only problem i have reading on the ipod touch is my arm kinda gets tired
quickly because of the weight (and its awkward to hold it with 2 hands when
reading). if only the zune hd had a similar app to instapaper i'm sure it's
the next thing i would buy.

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crxnamja
I just started using this service and completely love it.

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castis
everything i'd like to read is normally already stored here on HN.

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zandorg
I wrote a HTML stripper for my Amiga in 1998! Hardly innovative.

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brandnewlow
Why am I not surprised that the iPhone's "killer app" is something that lets
you circumvent the copyrights and advertising on content sites?

Is there a way to block this app or have it generate just a link instead of a
full-text version of the article that lacks all the advertising?

~~~
Zev
If thats what you think Instapaper is, you've completely missed the point of
it. Instapaper saves articles so you can read them later, offline. You know,
without having to wait for a large site to load over 3G (or worse, EDGE. Or
the lack of wifi, if you have an iPod touch).

~~~
4chan4ever
It strips content down to plain text, removing any advertising, promotional
links, social networking buttons, etc., and it does so without the permission
of the originating site. Digg tried to pull something similar when they
introduced the Digg toolbar (embedding original content in a frame) and people
got hopping mad. But I guess on the iPhone anything goes, since Apple owns the
copyright for rounded rectangles.

~~~
jherdman
I think you're missing the point. The people that are likely to use this
application for articles are likely the kind of people that either (a)
regularly visit your site, (b) are new to your site but presently don't have
time to read the content, or (c) the kind of people that would say "tl;dr" and
have moved on.

By encouraging use of InstaPaper (or its ilk) with longer articles on your
site you may just find that it improves your readership.

~~~
nkurz
_By encouraging use of InstaPaper (or its ilk) with longer articles on your
site you may just find that it improves your readership._

Yes, and by allowing users to share MP3's of your songs you may find that over
the long run your listenership is improved.

Nonetheless, under current (US?) copyright code, reformatting documents by
stripping out 'extraneous' advertising and saving them in a different format
for later use is flat-out illegal. This may not make it 'wrong', and certainly
does not make the app any less useful, but I think the OP's point stands.

~~~
jrockway
This is wrong. Distributing that stripped-down version (or a non-stripped-down
version) would be illegal. But writing a program that lets you do it for
personal use is perfectly legal.

Consider ripping your CDs so you can play them on your MP3 player. Legal.
Selling those MP3s? Not legal.

~~~
natrius
Does the Instapaper iPhone app do the stripping, or does Instapaper serve the
stripped version? I'd say the former is illegal, and the latter is legal,
though it'd be nice if a publisher could opt out and/or provide their own
stripped down version that the app would use.

