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Why Arc90 Built Readability
- omaranto 16y agoI did not realize that Safari 5's Reader feature was actually implemented using Readability. That's good to know.
- ugh 16y agoThey 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.)
- sliverstorm 16y agoSo 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.
- pavs 16y agoI 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.
- umbrae 16y agoThey 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.
- pavs 16y agoThanks 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.
- masklinn 16y agoNo, they based their work on readability but it's not like they're just lifting it straight.
- jonah 16y agoI 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.
- miguelpais 16y agoNeither 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 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.
- andreyf 16y agoI 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".
- leif 16y agoOf course, you have to wonder, why doesn't arc90's blog use one of its readability themes?
- guelo 16y agoI 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.
- ugh 16y agoThen 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.
- JoachimSchipper 16y agoReimplementing it is not that difficult.
- ugh 16y agoThey 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.)
- naner 16y agoFunny, I didn't see "To get paid" anywhere in the "Why we created readability" article.
- guelo 16y agoI'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.
- hooande 16y agoIs Readability just opencalais/alchemyapi, or did they build it themselves?
- nooneelse 16y agoIf 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?
- brown9-2 16y agoGood for Arc90. They built an awesome tool and deserve more recognition (and for more people to use it, in various forms).
- xiaoma 16y agoIronically, 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!
- vladocar 16y agoI think that the typography solution that Safari Reader uses is very similar to my ClipR reading bookmarklet http://code.google.com/p/clipr/ http://code.google.com/p/clipr/