40 ms·

Introducing Instapaper 4.1 for iPhone, iPad

133 points by evanwalsh 15y ago

dvdhsu 15y ago
That's impressive. He stated less than 24 hours ago that it would take 7-10 days [1]. I guess both Marco and Apple are working around the clock. 1. http://www.marco.org/2012/03/16/instapaper-for-retina-ipad http://www.marco.org/2012/03/16/instapaper-for-retina-ipad
- artursapek 15y ago
  *7-10 days from the launch of the new iPad, which is now.
  - mthreat 15y ago
    It's nice when busting your ass pays off, good work marco
- xuki 15y ago
  This seems to be a expedited review by Apple. He submitted it and it was approved within hours. Even with expedited request to Apple it usually does not get this fast. Being popular helped, I guess.
  - oacgnol 15y ago
    It's in Apple's best interest to get this out so they can show off the new Retina Display with native apps. Makes perfect sense from a business standpoint.
Steko 15y ago
The new default iOS font Elena is really gorgeous. There's a few example retina images in TFA that show you how many more pixels the new ipad has then my (and possibly your) display.
- ugh 15y ago
  I think Marco Arment licensed those fonts. They don’t come with iOS. Would be nice, though, if Apple were to finally step it up again in the typography department, especially now that they have devices that can show beautiful and detailed fonts off.
  - Steko 15y ago
    I think you misunderstood me and/or I could have been less ambiguous. It's Instapaper's new default font on iOS as stated in the article. I'm not a big font guy but I've been very impressed twice recently by new web fonts -- first Kottke's redesign using Whitney Screen Smart and now Elena for Instapaper.
pacomerh 15y ago
Great to see that you invested big money in quality fonts. Congrats.
luigi 15y ago
Sad that he feels the need to be so publicly thankful of the App Review team. A sane policy would recognize that he's a popular iOS developer in good-standing, and would not submit him to any review process.
- donohoe 15y ago
  Sad that you have to be so publicly critical of someone you think is being so publicly thankful. Moving on... given that he thought it would take 7-10 days I think it was completely appropriate of him. He worked hard and got an extra boost. I'd rather be supportive than snarky.
  - luigi 15y ago
    I was remarking on the Stockholm Syndrome effect that Apple has inflicted on its most popular third party developers. It's a sad situation.
    - rdl 15y ago
      Especially now (vs. when they first launched the App Store), Apple is seamless and efficient compared to the way mobile apps worked before the open smartphone platforms. You had to negotiate for 6-24mo to get on a carrier's deck. I wish Apple provided a way to install non-approved apps without jailbreaking, either in some kind of custom security container or entirely at your own risk. I specifically would like to see "adult" (porn) apps allowed (as a free speech issue, and because I think they could be popular), but I'm aware of both Apple's desire to be PG rated and the likely influx of crappy spam which would ensue from porn apps. HTML5 pretty much covers this niche now.
- Steko 15y ago
  "A sane policy" From all the information we have it appears that, indeed, Marco's app was fast tracked for approval. So why are you questioning the sanity of Apple here? Apple's store is a blockbuster success and follows millenia of tradition in shopkeepers having veto power over what they sell in their shops.
tptacek 15y ago
These typefaces are so great. He's actually one-upped Readability, which uses H&FJ faces exclusively, and makes hay of that. H&FJ is one of the great typography design houses in the world, but the net result of Readability's implementation is... quirky; nobody in the world wants to read large amounts of body text set in Vitesse! (And I love Vitesse; it's my slide deck font now.) Marco wrote a blog post recently saying he had trouble getting responses from type designers, but what he managed to pull off here is a survey of some of the best reading faces in the world, ranging from venerable (FF Meta) to brand new (Elena).
- eneveu 15y ago
  Vitesse looks great. I might be interested in using it for my slide decks, too. I'm wondering about the licensing model, though... When I go to buy it, pricing depends on the number of CPUS. If I were to buy this font and use it in a slide deck, could I publish it after the conference? In their FAQ, they say: Our end-user font licenses allow only the production of Workflow PDFs, not Public PDFs. For organizations that need to circulate PDFs more widely, we offer an Embedding License as a supplemental product. For more information, please contact our sales office at info@typography.com. http://www.typography.com/ask/faq.php?faqID=16#Faq_16 http://www.typography.com/ask/faq.php?faqID=16#Faq_16 Font licensing seems complicated. I just want a font that I can use to produce beautiful slides, display them on a screen in front of a large audience, and print them / share them after the talk.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    You can't share the font software with your audience, and since the only good way to share a slide deck with an audience is PDF (otherwise you'd literally have to share the font itself alongside the deck), and PDF embeds the font, you can't share a basic PDF either. So, couple things: (a) You can just not share the deck at all. That's my strategy. Slide decks suck. Sharing them also dilutes the value of your talk; a single talk can be given more than once, as long as you don't publish it. (b) You can ignore the license. Many other people do that. You are unlikely to get burned by the H&FJ police for doing that. One imagines H&FJ is much more concerns about agencies and big companies accidentally publishing their whole font library in their professional PDFs. (c) You can, instead of designing your talk in Keynote, design it in Illustrator (bonus: Illustrator is way better), slice the slides up on artboards, convert the type into outlines (a 1-click operation in AI), export them to individual PDFs, pull them into Keynote, and share that.
teejae 15y ago
Marco, Hope you're reading this. Yes, the fonts are great. Not sure if anyone has noticed, but on IPad3 with Elena font only while in landscape only, capitals are distorted/thin. It's fine in every other font with both portrait and landscape orientations. Good Characters: BCDNST Bad Characters: EFHIJKLUVY Otherwise, no doubt, these fonts are beautiful, and the twilight sepia is a welcome addition, since I use F.lux generally on all my systems. Great release Marco!
- spicyj 15y ago
  That is curious. (I see the same on my iPad.)
  - mattkaar 15y ago
    Seeing the same on my iPhone 4S while in landscape.
- netnichols 15y ago
  I see that too on my iPad 1, but as you say, only in landscape orientation.
- andos 15y ago
  Same on the iPad 2.
ZanderEarth32 15y ago
Looking forward to Build and Analyze next week to hear about how the update process went.
gtcaz 15y ago
The fonts look pretty great on my iPhone 4. (Though I miss my favorite face from iBooks, Iowan.) Unfortunately, they look very strange on my iPad 1. Uneven and partly washed out.
swah 15y ago
How do you owners of devices with retina display feel when you go back to programming on your MBPs?
- aiscott 15y ago
  I look forward to the day when we have super hi dpi laptops. However, while the lower dpi of my macbook pro is noticeable, it is not tremendously so. If the screen were closer to my face it would be much more noticeable, but laptops usually have some distance to the viewer.
- ChrisLTD 15y ago
  I'm seriously considering getting one of those high DPI MacBook Airs now.
  - pflats 15y ago
    They don't exist (yet). Lion supports HighDPI mode, but the Airs have about the same DPIs as the iPad 1/2.
    - ChrisLTD 15y ago
      Still higher DPI than the pros. That's all I meant.
  - teejae 15y ago
    Definitely love the 11 inch Air for 3 reasons: 1. Highest dpi screen of a Mac 2. Keyboard travel 3. Overall solid feel I use both a Pro and Air daily and can say without doubt that I always prefer the Air. However, if there's rumor of a new Air coming out soon, I'd wait for that.
ronin510 15y ago
It looks like Readability doesn't quite like this new feature in Instapaper. From Timothy Meaney, part of Arc90, parent company of Readability: @marcoarment congrats Marco, great idea out of nowhere to up your game re: typography. Out of nowhere!! Interesting, considering Readabilty's app is a complete ripoff of the one-man-company Instapaper.
- aiscott 15y ago
  As well that Marco has been very upfront about the competition spurring him on. I think Timothy Meaney needs to watch the Everything is a Remix series: http://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/ http://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/
- pronoiac 15y ago
  Marco mentioned their lovely fonts as the impetus for the change: http://www.marco.org/2012/03/08/learning-from-competition http://www.marco.org/2012/03/08/learning-from-competition Edit: Even without that context, it seems petulant & rude.
  - mmahemoff 15y ago
    He also mentioned on his podcast that he's been thinking about fonts for a long time, but licensing models for apps are complicated. Forget the details, but I think Readability may have caused him to revisit the issue and find it's now feasible with some negotiation.
  - sambeau 15y ago
    Marco said everything that needed to be said. Meaney should have kept smugly quiet. "I wish someone had kicked my complacent ass about fonts sooner."
- huggyface 15y ago
  That comment is incredible. Not only did Arment openly credit Readability for competitively spurring him, let's go back to the origin of the Readability bookmarklet (long before the app)- http://lab.arc90.com/2009/03/02/readability/ http://lab.arc90.com/2009/03/02/readability/ Our latest experiment was partly inspired by Marco Arment’s awesome Instapaper application (and equally awesome Instapaper iPhone app).
tuacker 15y ago
I haven't used Instapaper yet but why not use the pinch motion to get out of an article as you'd do with pictures?
- amartya916 15y ago
  While I think this a a worthy suggestion, I also believe that "hidden" gestures that have low "discoverability" should be dealt with extreme caution. For example, in a reading app, a pinch gesture can also be assigned to changing font sizes, and perhaps that's what many users will expect to happen. I think keeping gestures to a minimum (in this case, just a tap, which coincidentally, is a feature of many e-book readers) serves Instapaper well. By the way, well done Marco. Solid update, worth working hard for, and I am sure your customers appreciate it.
patman81 15y ago
Great update. I love the new full screen mode. Tab on the screen to go full screen. Tap again to go back.
crazygringo 15y ago
I'm actually quite disappointed that, while Marco added three new fonts (that's great), he completely removed the ability to use the standard system fonts, at least on my iPhone version! The fact is, Times New Roman and Helvetica are two of the greatest typefaces of all time both for legibility, and for "receding into the background", so that you notice the content, not the font. Just because they're tremendously overused doesn't make them any less legible. And while Elena, Lyon and Tisa are not terrible, all of them impose far more typographical personality on the text than I'd rather have. And for an app that people may spend an hour a day reading on, the choice of typeface is actually tremendously important. For me, Elena is just too boxy and spindly, with overlong serifs; Lyon's letterforms just need further work and refinement (the lowercase 'f' has too large of a hook, and feels like it's going to topple over to the right; the commas draw too much attention to themselves because of their size, etc.), and Tisa is just too casual, without enough variation between thick and thin strokes. So please, Marco, bring back Times New Roman, Palatino, and Helvetica as additional options!
- emalminator 15y ago
  In both the iPhone and iPad versions, Helvetica and Palatino are still available, as are Verdana, Georgia, Hoefler Text, and Baskerville. They're just listed below the six new typefaces in the list. No TNR, but I'm personally ok with that--reminds me too much of MS Word. There are certainly some other typefaces I would have preferred (Adobe Minion is one of my favorites), but I would imagine Marco was also constrained by the deals he could cut with the foundries. Especially given how quickly he incorporated the licensed typefaces, it seems like a remarkable upgrade to me, and I'm looking forward to trying it out more extensively.
  - crazygringo 15y ago
    Son of a gun! I just tried, and you're right. Thanks! It's just that there is ZERO indication that area is scrollable. It shows three (on iPhone), has rounded corners, no scroll bar... definitely a failure in user-interface. Strange. Minion would be my #1 pick too.

133 points by evanwalsh 15y ago

That's impressive. He stated less than 24 hours ago that it would take 7-10 days [1]. I guess both Marco and Apple are working around the clock. 1. http://www.marco.org/2012/03/16/instapaper-for-retina-ipad http://www.marco.org/2012/03/16/instapaper-for-retina-ipad

artursapek 15y ago
*7-10 days from the launch of the new iPad, which is now.
- mthreat 15y ago
  It's nice when busting your ass pays off, good work marco
xuki 15y ago
This seems to be a expedited review by Apple. He submitted it and it was approved within hours. Even with expedited request to Apple it usually does not get this fast. Being popular helped, I guess.
- oacgnol 15y ago
  It's in Apple's best interest to get this out so they can show off the new Retina Display with native apps. Makes perfect sense from a business standpoint.

Steko 15y ago

The new default iOS font Elena is really gorgeous. There's a few example retina images in TFA that show you how many more pixels the new ipad has then my (and possibly your) display.

ugh 15y ago
I think Marco Arment licensed those fonts. They don’t come with iOS. Would be nice, though, if Apple were to finally step it up again in the typography department, especially now that they have devices that can show beautiful and detailed fonts off.
- Steko 15y ago
  I think you misunderstood me and/or I could have been less ambiguous. It's Instapaper's new default font on iOS as stated in the article. I'm not a big font guy but I've been very impressed twice recently by new web fonts -- first Kottke's redesign using Whitney Screen Smart and now Elena for Instapaper.

pacomerh 15y ago

Great to see that you invested big money in quality fonts. Congrats.

luigi 15y ago

Sad that he feels the need to be so publicly thankful of the App Review team. A sane policy would recognize that he's a popular iOS developer in good-standing, and would not submit him to any review process.

donohoe 15y ago
Sad that you have to be so publicly critical of someone you think is being so publicly thankful. Moving on... given that he thought it would take 7-10 days I think it was completely appropriate of him. He worked hard and got an extra boost. I'd rather be supportive than snarky.
- luigi 15y ago
  I was remarking on the Stockholm Syndrome effect that Apple has inflicted on its most popular third party developers. It's a sad situation.
  - rdl 15y ago
    Especially now (vs. when they first launched the App Store), Apple is seamless and efficient compared to the way mobile apps worked before the open smartphone platforms. You had to negotiate for 6-24mo to get on a carrier's deck. I wish Apple provided a way to install non-approved apps without jailbreaking, either in some kind of custom security container or entirely at your own risk. I specifically would like to see "adult" (porn) apps allowed (as a free speech issue, and because I think they could be popular), but I'm aware of both Apple's desire to be PG rated and the likely influx of crappy spam which would ensue from porn apps. HTML5 pretty much covers this niche now.
Steko 15y ago
"A sane policy" From all the information we have it appears that, indeed, Marco's app was fast tracked for approval. So why are you questioning the sanity of Apple here? Apple's store is a blockbuster success and follows millenia of tradition in shopkeepers having veto power over what they sell in their shops.

tptacek 15y ago

These typefaces are so great. He's actually one-upped Readability, which uses H&FJ faces exclusively, and makes hay of that. H&FJ is one of the great typography design houses in the world, but the net result of Readability's implementation is... quirky; nobody in the world wants to read large amounts of body text set in Vitesse! (And I love Vitesse; it's my slide deck font now.) Marco wrote a blog post recently saying he had trouble getting responses from type designers, but what he managed to pull off here is a survey of some of the best reading faces in the world, ranging from venerable (FF Meta) to brand new (Elena).

eneveu 15y ago
Vitesse looks great. I might be interested in using it for my slide decks, too. I'm wondering about the licensing model, though... When I go to buy it, pricing depends on the number of CPUS. If I were to buy this font and use it in a slide deck, could I publish it after the conference? In their FAQ, they say: Our end-user font licenses allow only the production of Workflow PDFs, not Public PDFs. For organizations that need to circulate PDFs more widely, we offer an Embedding License as a supplemental product. For more information, please contact our sales office at info@typography.com. http://www.typography.com/ask/faq.php?faqID=16#Faq_16 http://www.typography.com/ask/faq.php?faqID=16#Faq_16 Font licensing seems complicated. I just want a font that I can use to produce beautiful slides, display them on a screen in front of a large audience, and print them / share them after the talk.
- tptacek 15y ago
  You can't share the font software with your audience, and since the only good way to share a slide deck with an audience is PDF (otherwise you'd literally have to share the font itself alongside the deck), and PDF embeds the font, you can't share a basic PDF either. So, couple things: (a) You can just not share the deck at all. That's my strategy. Slide decks suck. Sharing them also dilutes the value of your talk; a single talk can be given more than once, as long as you don't publish it. (b) You can ignore the license. Many other people do that. You are unlikely to get burned by the H&FJ police for doing that. One imagines H&FJ is much more concerns about agencies and big companies accidentally publishing their whole font library in their professional PDFs. (c) You can, instead of designing your talk in Keynote, design it in Illustrator (bonus: Illustrator is way better), slice the slides up on artboards, convert the type into outlines (a 1-click operation in AI), export them to individual PDFs, pull them into Keynote, and share that.

teejae 15y ago

Marco, Hope you're reading this. Yes, the fonts are great. Not sure if anyone has noticed, but on IPad3 with Elena font only while in landscape only, capitals are distorted/thin. It's fine in every other font with both portrait and landscape orientations. Good Characters: BCDNST Bad Characters: EFHIJKLUVY Otherwise, no doubt, these fonts are beautiful, and the twilight sepia is a welcome addition, since I use F.lux generally on all my systems. Great release Marco!

spicyj 15y ago
That is curious. (I see the same on my iPad.)
- mattkaar 15y ago
  Seeing the same on my iPhone 4S while in landscape.
netnichols 15y ago
I see that too on my iPad 1, but as you say, only in landscape orientation.
andos 15y ago
Same on the iPad 2.

ZanderEarth32 15y ago

Looking forward to Build and Analyze next week to hear about how the update process went.

gtcaz 15y ago

The fonts look pretty great on my iPhone 4. (Though I miss my favorite face from iBooks, Iowan.) Unfortunately, they look very strange on my iPad 1. Uneven and partly washed out.

swah 15y ago

How do you owners of devices with retina display feel when you go back to programming on your MBPs?

aiscott 15y ago
I look forward to the day when we have super hi dpi laptops. However, while the lower dpi of my macbook pro is noticeable, it is not tremendously so. If the screen were closer to my face it would be much more noticeable, but laptops usually have some distance to the viewer.
ChrisLTD 15y ago
I'm seriously considering getting one of those high DPI MacBook Airs now.
- pflats 15y ago
  They don't exist (yet). Lion supports HighDPI mode, but the Airs have about the same DPIs as the iPad 1/2.
  - ChrisLTD 15y ago
    Still higher DPI than the pros. That's all I meant.
- teejae 15y ago
  Definitely love the 11 inch Air for 3 reasons: 1. Highest dpi screen of a Mac 2. Keyboard travel 3. Overall solid feel I use both a Pro and Air daily and can say without doubt that I always prefer the Air. However, if there's rumor of a new Air coming out soon, I'd wait for that.

ronin510 15y ago

It looks like Readability doesn't quite like this new feature in Instapaper. From Timothy Meaney, part of Arc90, parent company of Readability: @marcoarment congrats Marco, great idea out of nowhere to up your game re: typography. Out of nowhere!! Interesting, considering Readabilty's app is a complete ripoff of the one-man-company Instapaper.

aiscott 15y ago
As well that Marco has been very upfront about the competition spurring him on. I think Timothy Meaney needs to watch the Everything is a Remix series: http://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/ http://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/
pronoiac 15y ago
Marco mentioned their lovely fonts as the impetus for the change: http://www.marco.org/2012/03/08/learning-from-competition http://www.marco.org/2012/03/08/learning-from-competition Edit: Even without that context, it seems petulant & rude.
- mmahemoff 15y ago
  He also mentioned on his podcast that he's been thinking about fonts for a long time, but licensing models for apps are complicated. Forget the details, but I think Readability may have caused him to revisit the issue and find it's now feasible with some negotiation.
- sambeau 15y ago
  Marco said everything that needed to be said. Meaney should have kept smugly quiet. "I wish someone had kicked my complacent ass about fonts sooner."
huggyface 15y ago
That comment is incredible. Not only did Arment openly credit Readability for competitively spurring him, let's go back to the origin of the Readability bookmarklet (long before the app)- http://lab.arc90.com/2009/03/02/readability/ http://lab.arc90.com/2009/03/02/readability/ Our latest experiment was partly inspired by Marco Arment’s awesome Instapaper application (and equally awesome Instapaper iPhone app).

tuacker 15y ago

I haven't used Instapaper yet but why not use the pinch motion to get out of an article as you'd do with pictures?

amartya916 15y ago
While I think this a a worthy suggestion, I also believe that "hidden" gestures that have low "discoverability" should be dealt with extreme caution. For example, in a reading app, a pinch gesture can also be assigned to changing font sizes, and perhaps that's what many users will expect to happen. I think keeping gestures to a minimum (in this case, just a tap, which coincidentally, is a feature of many e-book readers) serves Instapaper well. By the way, well done Marco. Solid update, worth working hard for, and I am sure your customers appreciate it.

patman81 15y ago

Great update. I love the new full screen mode. Tab on the screen to go full screen. Tap again to go back.

crazygringo 15y ago

I'm actually quite disappointed that, while Marco added three new fonts (that's great), he completely removed the ability to use the standard system fonts, at least on my iPhone version! The fact is, Times New Roman and Helvetica are two of the greatest typefaces of all time both for legibility, and for "receding into the background", so that you notice the content, not the font. Just because they're tremendously overused doesn't make them any less legible. And while Elena, Lyon and Tisa are not terrible, all of them impose far more typographical personality on the text than I'd rather have. And for an app that people may spend an hour a day reading on, the choice of typeface is actually tremendously important. For me, Elena is just too boxy and spindly, with overlong serifs; Lyon's letterforms just need further work and refinement (the lowercase 'f' has too large of a hook, and feels like it's going to topple over to the right; the commas draw too much attention to themselves because of their size, etc.), and Tisa is just too casual, without enough variation between thick and thin strokes. So please, Marco, bring back Times New Roman, Palatino, and Helvetica as additional options!

emalminator 15y ago
In both the iPhone and iPad versions, Helvetica and Palatino are still available, as are Verdana, Georgia, Hoefler Text, and Baskerville. They're just listed below the six new typefaces in the list. No TNR, but I'm personally ok with that--reminds me too much of MS Word. There are certainly some other typefaces I would have preferred (Adobe Minion is one of my favorites), but I would imagine Marco was also constrained by the deals he could cut with the foundries. Especially given how quickly he incorporated the licensed typefaces, it seems like a remarkable upgrade to me, and I'm looking forward to trying it out more extensively.
- crazygringo 15y ago
  Son of a gun! I just tried, and you're right. Thanks! It's just that there is ZERO indication that area is scrollable. It shows three (on iPhone), has rounded corners, no scroll bar... definitely a failure in user-interface. Strange. Minion would be my #1 pick too.