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A $5 App That Justifies Your iPhone Purchase: Instapaper
- charliepark 17y agoInterestingly, 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 http://endlessyears.com/?p=1373), after reviewing (or, at least, considering) 65,000 apps, and selecting his top 200.
- brandnewlow 17y agoWhy 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?
- pistoriusp 17y agoMr. Murdoch, is that you?
- Zev 17y agoIf 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 17y agoIt 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 17y agoI 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.
- brandnewlow 17y agoDo you have data to prove these claims? My original comment was trying to point out that many "hot application" get hot because they enable theft or copyright circumvention in some way. Publishers continue to grumble about putting their stuff behind paywalls because offering it up for free offers very little protection.
- nkurz 17y agoBy 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.
- Zev 17y agoNonetheless, 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. Really? Would you mind pointing out where in the US Code or the DMCA (or whatever else you're referring to) that says this? I'm not as knowledgeable on copyright as I'd like to be; need to start learning more somewhere, and this seems like a good place.
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- pistoriusp 17y agoI 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.
- almost 17y agoExactly, if I don't have time to read it now then how come I'm browsing around finding links. And if I do have time to read it now but am choosing not then I will probably continue to choose not to.
- masklinn 17y agoThe 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 17y agoI 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 17y ago> 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)
- omnipath 17y agoThat is why I like Opera. You can actually save sessions, and return to them. So you can have more than one session going on at a time. I usually save a session once a month. It's quite interesting seeing what I was into 5-6 years ago.
- AndrewDucker 17y agoRead 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/ http://readitlaterlist.com/iphone/
- pclark 17y agowhats the advantage of this over instapaper? FYI: Instapaper came first
- AndrewDucker 17y agoI didn't know that, so thanks! But I find the way that ReadItLater works inside Firefox to work well - the fact that it's an icon on the toolbar, showing me how many unread things I have is kinda nice.
- terpaul 17y agoFYI: That's absolutely not true. Read It Later came out 5 months before Instapaper and had offline reading nearly a year before IP.
- crsmith 17y agohttp://www.givemesomethingtoread.com http://www.givemesomethingtoread.com Instapaper's popular items
- mildweed 17y agoAs 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 17y agoTry this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Serial_Visual_Presentation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Serial_Visual_Presentatio... http://www.zapreader.com/ http://www.zapreader.com/
- danw 17y agoI've found instapaper during my morning commute is an app that buys me time to catch up on reading. Works even better if you commute by tube and there is no phone signal to distract you (with email, twitter, etc).
- zandorg 17y agoI wrote a HTML stripper for my Amiga in 1998! Hardly innovative.
- jlees 17y agoI feel I must be alone in this after all the Instapaper hype, but I just can't read stuff enjoyably on my iPhone.
- raptorex 17y agoyeah, 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/ http://hatchetapp.com/
- Multiplayer 17y agoI've gone the other direction. I have the latest Kindle but I don't bother using it - I read all my Kindle purchases on the Iphone. It's always with me and I love the screen. I would sell it but I think I have to have one active to purchase items for my account.
- Zak 17y agoI've been using a similar (open source) program for my old Palm M500 for years. It's called Plucker.
- unalone 17y agoThe 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.
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- ubernostrum 17y agoYeah, using Twitter is such an incredibly weird rare fringe thing these days. Next you'll tell me that this "web" thing isn't just a fad...
- unalone 17y agoYou and your fucking snark. Hacker News is a place with lots of smart people saying smart things. Snark is for when people say something that is obviously stupid and not worth a debate. If you want to disagree with me, do it earnestly, because perhaps this is worth a discussion. Twitter is the #13 site globally according to Alexa. Does that mean that a Blogger app would be more of a killer app than a Twitter app? What about a MySpace app? MSN? Windows Live? Google? If I told you that the iPhone's killer app was a Google search, wouldn't that sound stupid? But Wired isn't just saying that. They're saying that Tweetie, one of a hundred Twitter applications, is a killer app and that the other applications aren't. Furthermore, Tweetie is a killer app if you use Twitter with multiple accounts. That is an incredible weird rare fringe thing. I'd bet most Twitter users have a single account. Now do you want to attempt sarcasm again? Because I'll warn you: Not only do I know more about what I'm arguing than you do, I'm a better snarker than you, and I will tear you to little fucking pieces. I remember when I joined HN and routinely felt dwarfed by the intellectual discourse here. Now I say something and the response is likely as not bullshit like yours. I feel so goddamn old.
- w1ntermute 17y ago
- castis 17y agoeverything i'd like to read is normally already stored here on HN.
- anigbrowl 17y agoOne 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 17y agoThere 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 17y agoI 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.
- xtimesninety 17y agothe 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.
- crxnamja 17y agoI just started using this service and completely love it.
- dabeeeenster 17y agoThis 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?