Instapaper for Retina iPad
marco.org
marco.org
It's frustrating that IPS LCD, OLED, and E-Ink all have such distinct advantages, so the idea of having a single device with the best screen in all contexts isn't really possible. I assume OLED will eventually be that.
Some early e-ink manufactures used to claim that e-ink is better than backlit for the eyes, but they retracted those claims because there was no scientific evidence behind them.
You just need to set the brightness of the iPad appropriately, to match what the relative brightness of an e-ink reader would be. You can also adjust the colors, i.e have a sepia background etc.
Battery life and reading in the sun is indeed much better with e-ink devices, though.
If it's articles with diagrams and colors or magazine layouts, with gloss and shine, nothing beats iPhone 4(s) and iPad 3's retina display.
The Fire seems like a great video watching device, but I don't do much of that (and when I do, it's on a projector with surround sound and other people)
Quite on point. Few people would willingly admit to this, but a lot of research suggests that simply having options available imposes a real cognitive load. Simple additions to text like footnotes and hyperlinks produce real drops in recall/comprehension - it's not a stretch to apply this to the iPad with its notifications and rich entertainment options.
on e-ink there isn't really an advantage to my eyes. I've never gotten eyestrain reading on my (first generation) iPad. The image quality of the e-ink display is worse than even the first generation iPad (to my eyes), in large part because the e-ink display is not responsive.
weight- I deal with it on the iPad. The kindle is better in this regard, but not enough to make it compelling.
Amazon had a great product in the original kindle, but it was a single purpose product. It hasn't kept up (or e-ink hasn't advanced fast enough) and its losing the race.
Apparently the @2x modifier takes precedence over the -Landscape and -Portrait modifiers, resulting in retina iPads preferentially using the high-res iPhone launch screen over the low-res iPad launch screen (which are optimized for each launch orientation).
So you end up with a mildly- (portrait) or greatly-distorted (landscape) launch image on high-res iPads if you simply recompile. I imagine this is what Apple was trying to avoid, with reneging on what their API docs say about modifier precedence.
Where I think kindle probably still has the edge is in ergonomics, specifically weight. The iPad is too heavy for me to hold like I would a physical book. (but I make do with this fact and use it anyway as one... and I've got the heavier first generation iPad.)
All the other things the iPad does have a big impact, but as a pure reading device (iBooks is my killer app) the iPad is working out great for me, so I look forward to getting a third generation.
My reading of a lot of the commercial Android developer pieces is not that it's impossible to make money on Android, just that where you have limited resources it tends to be the case that they can more profitably be utilised on iOS work. The issue for someone like Marco where it's just him is is less can you make money in Android (with or without ads, that's kind of secondary), more is working on an Android version going to bring him more money than putting that same effort into keeping Instapaper close to the top of the iOS pile.
Obviously if you're a company with several programmers and you're happy with that model then so long as the cost of building an Android version is less than money it brings in, it makes sense because you can just bring in someone else to do it without detracting from your other work. If you're a one man band (or similarly small outfit) with no interest in taking on and managing more people it might not.
Essentially he was talking about what an iOS developer "might" earn. If memory serves he pitched that the equivalent of a six figure salary was possible / reasonable if you were successful and I think agreed that that was the sort of thing he was getting.
Obviously that puts it at between $100,000 and $999,999 a year, so fairly wide error bars on that.
Android users are often aware that they're missing out, but there is always something to fill that void. As a result, their users have a siege mentality towards their platform and the businesses that ignore them. As Instagram is likely to figure out when they (finally) move to Android arriving late to the Android game could be fatal to the perception of their brand.
The one thing Instapaper 3.0 did really better than InstaFetch is that it's option for changing from the light to dark theme is accessible right from the article view, while in InstaFetch you have to go to settings.
[1]: http://www.marco.org/2010/06/10/iphone-multitasking-and-back...
I don’t know whether that’s default, but I set my iPad up in a way that pressing the home button three times activates VoiceOver. You then select what you want VoiceOver to read to you. If you want it to just continue reading forever (instead of just reading what you selected, like a headline or a paragraph) you scroll down with two fingers.
It’s an accessibility feature, so its primary use case is not reading texts to you, but it works perfectly fine for that purpose – and in the vast majority of apps it just works, even without the developer doing anything.
But let's assume that his analysis (as biased as it is) is correct. It still might be a net positive to make an Android version if you consider this. All Android sales are potentially a double sale. Android has a majority market share on phones and iPad has a (overwhelming) majority market share in tablets.
There is a strong chance that the person buying his Android version would also have an iPad. This is pretty obvious when you think about it. Android covers a wide spectrum, with a lot of people on the low end. The people who would be buying his app must represent those on the high end (simply because they'll pay for it), and those people are far more likely to also have an iPad.
If the app-making was free. You forgot the "opportunity cost".
Android has a majority market share on phones and iPad has a (overwhelming) majority market share in tablets.
Yes, but does Android have a majority market share on apps sold? From what I have heard, I don't think so.
They just have a majority market share in phones because even people who don't care about a smart phone or apps get an Android phone for free with their contract. Whereas iPhone users are more picky in general about the phone they get, and more prone to fork out for apps. (Notice how I said "in general" --nerds are a small minority of smart phone buyers).
We're not talking about a multi-million dollar AAA development cycle. Probably 2 or 3 months of a single developer and maybe a part-time artist. Achieving some profitability for a major app like his wouldn't be difficult.
But no, let's flush some profitability down the toilet because it'll only buy a slightly used last year's Porsche, not next year's all new one.
http://www.marco.org/2011/12/07/standing-up-for-android
I don't know if he changed his opinion in the meantime but I think that would have hit the HN frontpage.
Sharing out I'm not so bothered about but a nicer way to consume links shared with you is cool.
Is it a mistake for the developer of TextMate to not spread to Windows?
A statement with absolutely zero backing.
Readability did the analysis and certainly seemed to believe that Android supported their product. Marco doesn't do analysis but instead just parrots the standard rhetoric, seemingly hoping that his words alone will make Android irrelevant and thus unnecessary of effort. His loss.
Readability has a completely different (if any) business model. They're following the standard approach of using venture funding to gather as much market share as possible and then exploring way to extract revenue once they have a large user-base.
Do you expect him to shell out a large sum of money to develop an Android app to _hope_ he'll regain the money through sales? There's a large amount of risk there, and it's definitely not your call to make how risk-averse he should be. How many apps are only available for Windows or OS X? As an independent developer, it makes more sense to focus on one high-quality product.
I would bet that he could have (well...not any more as the opportunity has long passed) gotten any of countless decent individual developers to write a very good port for free, asking for only a fraction of sales: It is not a complex app and isn't pushing the envelope.
I would never expect that from Marco, however, as he has been hilariously unprofessional about the Android/iOS divide, essentially choose to cheerlead a team over considering rational business choices.
He has invited people to do just that; if you make it with his public API, and he thinks it's good enough, he'll let you call it the official Android version and split revenue 50/50.
That was an update after the original piece (sadly not dated) but I think it's more sensible to assume that the update was written in response to Shift Jelly reading it and contacting him, rather than him being in discussion with them before writing it. Certainly I'd think it would be a very odd piece to write if he were already in talks with Shift Jelly.
The piece certainly implies that that there would be discussion around the project ("the details of which we’d work out privately" in relation to the functionality) rather than him thinking that people would just start coding and then come to him with a finished article so it reads more naturally as a clarification than something more radical.
He probably didn't expect many takers on the offer, but when they emerged it became OBVIOUS that this couldn't happen with more than one taker --only one could be the "official app for Android"), so clarified it with him picking only one to proceed with.
No decision is risk-free, but if it were me I'd be putting a toe into Andriod's bathwater.
1 - http://www.canalys.com/newsroom/android-apps-are-too-expensi...
1) You forgot that lots of other companies also did the same analysis as Readability and concluded that the Android is not for them, at least for the moment. You can find several such statements on web pages, and a lot more that speak through their actions.
2) You also forget that Readability and Instapaper don't have the exact same business model.
3) Lastly, you forget that Marco makes his own business decisions, and he bases them on his own insights. He doesn't have to do anything he doesn't want to. Would you go lend him a hand for free on the Android version? Even the overhead of dealing with an extra developer to do the port and the support etc, might be something he doesn't want to deal with, whatever the money. (Why should he? Just because some people are bitter that the don't have his app on their platform of choice, or more general, that they don't get a lot of the cool the apps the iOS market has?)
If Marco is content with his choice, then it's not "his loss", as he does not lose anything.
How so? I didn't forget that whatsoever. Many devs do make individual choices to support only one platform or another, for many reasons (business reasons, bias, etc). That's life.
The person I responded to claimed that Arment had empirical reasons for his claims. Hardly. Arment is a cheerleader of the worst kind, with little professionalism about the market as a whole.
It has nothing to do with market research etc. You can say he is not "market savvy" maybe, but not unprofessional.
Even then, once I built the free version of my app without a necessary ObjC linker flag and shipped it with a bug that caused it to crash on a couple of screens. Was always testing in debug mode...
It's only slightly embarrassing for Apple's culture of product secrecy, which prevents them from releasing tools in time for devs to have gear ready for release.
The simulator now scrolls, however, so you could in theory test retina iPad apps full size in portrait mode on an 11" MacBook Air.
My 27" iMac (2650x1440) isn't quite tall enough even in landscape mode, but it's not unusable thanks to the scrolling.
I haven't been following the iPad 3 closely. Are these new fonts included with iPad 3, or are they included with the Instapaper app? If it's the latter, are they available elsewhere? I'm still on the lookout for a nice serif font that looks good on screen.