Why Arc90 Built Readability | Hacker News Reader

Why Arc90 Built Readability

blog.arc90.com

78 pointsnirmal26 comments

I did not realize that Safari 5's Reader feature was actually implemented using Readability. That's good to know.

They themselves didn’t know, actually. Until someone told them to look at the Acknowledgements. (If you have Safari 5 installed you can check it out yourself, the Acknowledgments can be found in the Help menu.)

So can we assume this means Safari isn't actually calling arc90's servers when it uses Readability?

I really hope it isn't. That'd be INCREDIBLY under-handed. I can't imagine a big company like Apple shipping software that relies on an unrelated company's service, without said other company even realizing.

I don't know if they are, but I can tell you that the day Safari 5 came out, for few hours Readability was unresponsive. It wasn't working for me on any site.

They aren't calling our servers. And that was a European backbone (Tiscali) having trouble - if you're in the EU or small fractions of the east coast you may have seen that hiccup. Unrelated to our servers.

Thanks for the response. By the way, I integrated readability in to my site as an alternative to "print page" option. I have to have ads, I hate the fact that I do, at least I give readers the option to read in a less cluttered way.

No, they based their work on readability but it's not like they're just lifting it straight.

I know there's no requirement to do so, but am somewhat surprised that they didn't get a heads up or thanks from Apple for such a visible implementation.

Neither did I. So I find it strange that in news articles like this one: http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/travel/13Harry.html?hp Readability still does a better job then the Reader extension that is based on it.

Readability is able to include the images and presents something that doesn't look like a poorly printed page like, sorry guys, the Reader thing does.

I imagine that "thank a developer for using a bookmarklet" is pretty low on the priority list of people trying to implement this feature. Wayyy below "guess where Steve's mood is going, so we can get him at a time he'll think this deserves the precious screen space".

Of course, you have to wonder, why doesn't arc90's blog use one of its readability themes?

If there were a readability+ which accumulated micropayments for participating sites you used it on, so that a site on which you liked the content, but not the view, could be compensated (perhaps exactly equal to the ad-money you were "depriving" them of (assuming that is true)), would you use it? Would enough people use it to make it worthwhile for sites to participate?

Ironically, this piece which criticizes pages with no regard for the reading experience cropped off the right 20% of every single line, thus making itself unreadable. Worse yet, when I tried scrolling right, I still didn't get the missing text. Instead, it was a solid wall of dark pixels.

I really wish I had Safari 5's reader for sites like this!

Good for Arc90. They built an awesome tool and deserve more recognition (and for more people to use it, in various forms).

I think that the typography solution that Safari Reader uses is very similar to my ClipR reading bookmarklet http://code.google.com/p/clipr/

I wonder if they're wishing they had copyrighted Readability with a non-commercial license instead of the Apache License. They should be getting paid for it.

Then this probably wouldn’t have happened. I don’t think Reader is so important to Apple that they would have implemented it no matter what.

Reimplementing it is not that difficult.

They might have reimplemented it (or not). I very much doubt that they would have called up Arc90 and asked them how much money they want.

(My own little theory is that one or a few Safari developers were avid Readability users. They saw the kind of license Readability used and noticed that all they had to do to make it a Safari feature is to give it a nice UI. And that’s when they noticed that they could easily convince others [superiors, that is] that it would be a worthy addition. A quite boring theory since it doesn’t include any grand conspiracy to bully Google, I know.)

Funny, I didn't see "To get paid" anywhere in the "Why we created readability" article.

I'm not saying Apple did anything improper, I'm just saying that it would be nice for Arc90 to get some money out of this. It is the number one feature on the Safari 5 "What's New" page, it's worth something to Apple.

And all I was saying that Arc90 was well aware of the terms of their license when they chose it. Should Apple be paid for others who make use of WebKit? After all, it is the core of Chrome OS and Google gets to use it for free.

As an aside, Apple didn't originally write WebKit, they took it from KHTML. I'm sure Apple has released some other original code as open source.

> As an aside, Apple didn't originally write WebKit, they took it from KHTML. I'm sure Apple has released some other original code as open source.

The Darwin kernel's source used to be released (not sure it still is), I believe Clang is originally an Apple project (and so is the recently opened LLDB, a debugger for LLVM), Apple produced quite a few LLVM-related tools in general and they fund much of LLVM's work (including employing a bunch of LLVM contributors).

I believe big chunks of the Bonjour zeroconf protocol & impl are also open sourced.

Adding to the other comments ... such a service doesn't have a chance to not be free of charge. In this case the idea can be copied quickly, and not that hard to do.

Having Apple acknowledge and distribute their work is the best thing that could happen.

Is Readability just opencalais/alchemyapi, or did they build it themselves?

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