Marco Arment

Steve Jobs famously said that great artists steal, and the company has often taken that mantra to the extreme over the years. Some would say that much of Apple’s current software bears more than a passing resemblance to some of its competitors’ products. Take iOS 5′s Notification Center, for example. You’d need to be blind to say that it does not look eerily similar to the same notification system that Android has packed since day one. Some would argue that there are only so many ways you can handle something like a pull-down notification window. Some would call it stealing. Apple has even taken some cues from its own App Store. Mobile Safari now sports a “Reading List” feature that offers a similar service to that of Instapaper, the famous web app that also has a popular iOS app in the App Store. Instapaper’s developer, Marco Arment, doesn’t seem too concerned, but others were not so happy… With Apple’s history of taking features from the very developers who make the App Store so strong, I got to wondering about what app could be next. One app that may be a little concerned is Instagram. Already hugely popular amongst iOS users – and iOS users only, no Android version here – Instagram’s biggest draw is the way it can add filters and boarders to our photos before sharing them in a photo-only social network. It seems that people really enjoy turning highly detailed photos into something that resembles a Polaroid shot from the 1980s. Apple has already added a HDR feature to its Camera apps. It is, theoretically, a small step from there to adding a selection of filters that could be applied when taking a photo, ready to be shared on Twitter or Facebook. Many will be reading this and shouting at their screens. “But it’s the social aspect that makes Instagram special!” you’re all declaring, and I’d agree. But if you can instantly upload images to Twitter (or Facebook, if iOS 6 adds integrated Facebook support, just as iOS 5 added Twitter) from inside the Camera app, do you really need another social network? Apple has already proven that people will use its built-in features instead of third-party apps when given the choice. We’d wager that HDR apps don’t do so well now that their big feature is part of iOS itself. It may not be the best HDR out there, Read More

By Rob LeFebvre on December 29th, 2011 As 2011 winds on down, we take a look back at some of the finest apps released this past year. Pocket Informant – While iCal is nice, sometimes we need a more robust solution – hopefully one that works seamlessly with Google calendar. This is that app. While there’s no universal app yet, we find this one to be compelling enough on either device type. $7.99 $12.99 Released: 2009-03-27 :: Category: Productivity $9.99 $14.99 Released: 2010-07-22 :: Category: Productivity American Presidents for iPad – With over 300 gorgeous vintage images and photographs, this is an educational app for everyone. There are biographies of every US president, a historical timeline, and detailed quizzes on the text itself. Presidential history never looked so good. $4.99 iPad Only App - Designed for the iPad Released: 2011-08-04 :: Category: Education Camera+ – This one gets a lot of play on our personal iPhones, bringing a ton of extra funtionality we really wish the native Camera app had, including multi touch exposure adjustment, grid line compotition help, and loads of effects and post-processing abilities. Also, it’s super easy to share to a ton of different services, not just the default Apple ones. $0.99 Released: 2010-06-07 :: Category: Photography 1Password – Seriously, we have a ton of passwords out there. Some we use a lot, and remember, while others, well, not so much. We’re guessing you do, too. Enter 1Password, the super vault of all those pesky passwords that we can’t seem to keep track of any more. There’s a version for iPhone only, iPad only, and a universal version. $5.99 $9.99 Released: 2008-07-29 :: Category: Productivity $5.99 $9.99 iPad Only App - Designed for the iPad Released: 2010-04-01 :: Category: Productivity $8.99 $14.99 Released: 2009-06-17 :: Category: Utilities Sketchbook Mobile – Feeling creative? Artsy, even? Want to doodle a little while you wait for your constantly late friend to show up to the cafe? Pull out that iPhone and sketch a little, why don’t you? The smaller version of this app (there’s also a pro version available for iPads) packs quite a punch in a tiny little package, including multitouch navigation, up to 6 layers per image file, and 10 levels of undo and redo. $1.99 iPhone App - Designed for the iPhone, compatible with the iPad Released: 2009-09-17 :: Category: Entertainment $4.99 Released: 2010-04-01 :: Category: Entertainment Band Read More

People didn't understand the iPad immediately. No one believed in the form factor. "Just a big iPhone," people called it. But it caught on, it took off, and now consumers can't let go of their tablets. The intimate, intuitive interface has created its own use case. People curl up with the device and they read. Publishers and app developers have provided a bonanza of ways to read on the iPad and iPhone. Some are free, some cost money, some require monthly subscriptions. All of them are vying for your attention in that new, valuable hour or two of tablet time in the evenings. But one app, Instapaper, sits in the iPad Hall of Fame on iTunes, pushing forward reader behavior just like the iPad itself. Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, answered some questions for us about where this is all heading. It's An iPad Market At this point, Apple's lead in tablets is daunting. At a base price of $499, the 9.5-inch iPad and the devices it inspired are even encroaching on the bottom end of the PC market. Apple's "post-PC world" rhetoric is projected to be surprisingly prescient. But there seems to be room below the iPad in the market. Surveys found consumers clamoring for a cheaper tablet, and Apple competitors have begun to deliver. Amazon announced the 7-inch, $199 Kindle Fire in September, and in response Barnes & Noble unveiled a $249 Nook Tablet yesterday with twice the memory and storage space of the Fire. The Amazon and Barnes & Noble tablets are geared towards consumption, as one would expect from two companies whose businesses were built on selling books and music. Apple is in the content business as well, though it positions the iPad to be for much more than that. Even so, consumption, specifically reading, of quality content has been reborn on the iPad. "The iPhone, and especially the iPad, have brought a fundamental shift to the publishing business: it's now very easy for customers to pay for apps and content directly, with small amounts of money, in large volumes." -- Marco Arment The Reading App Gold Rush Developers have built all kinds of applications to deliver the ideal iPad reading experience, and Big Publishing wants in on the action. Flipboard publishers now show magazine-style full-page ads, and Zite was bought by CNN. AOL made Editions, Yahoo made Livestand, Google's making Propeller, all to do the same Read More

By Rene Ritchie, Monday, Oct 24, 2011 | Georgia, Seth, and Rene are joined by Jim Dalrymple of The Loop to talk Steve Jobs biography, sneak in some iPhone 4S, and dig through iOS 5, battery life, PlayBook 2.0, Ice Cream Sammich tablets, and more. This is iPad Live! Thanks to the TiPb iPad Accessory Store for sponsoring the podcast, and to everyone who showed up for the live chat! Music Hear me Roar by iPad Live theme song contest winner, DieselJesus! Read More

By Chris Oldroyd, Monday, Oct 24, 2011 | Apple has updated its iPad 2 line of Smart Covers, killing off the orange polyurethane version and replacing it with a much more tasteful dark gray version. It has also improved the other colors in the polyurethane range, which it claims are now more vibrant — they all now come with a color matched microfiber lining too. The leather versions haven’t been changed except with the addition of the color matched microfiber lining. The Smart Covers are available in the Apple Store and are still priced at $39 for the Polyurethane model and $69 for the Leather version. Read More

By Leanna Lofte, Saturday, Oct 22, 2011 | Every week a few of us from team TiPb will bring you our current favorite, most fun and useful App Store apps, WebApps, jailbreak apps, even the occasional accessory, web site, or desktop app if the mood strikes us. As long as they’re iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch related, they’re fair game. To see what we picked, and to tell us your pick, follow on after the break! This week’s pick was an easy one. Instapaper has long been one of my favorite apps, and I’ve been using it for years. Developer Marco Arment has released an incredible update to the app this week, one of the biggest (if not the biggest) in the lifespan of the app. Instapaper 4.0 has so many new features, I’m not even going to list them here (plus, if my geek-Cylon intuition is right, a certain other TiPb editor is likely to be talking about them somewhere in this very post – if he doesn’t though, you can read about them here in depth). I will, however, tell you that my favorite part of the new update to Instapaper is without a doubt its interface changes. Marco has made subtle changes to the UI that improve both readability and function without sacrificing anything. I am completely smitten with the extra screen space at the top of saved articles now, as well as the clean, dark theme and the new icon on my home screen. And I haven’t even touched on the incredible changes to the iPad version! (Again, I’m banking on that other editor to go into it.) If you’ve never tried Instapaper, or perhaps tried it in the past and haven’t seen it in a while, check out the update. It’s substantial, and a great new take on an old favorite of mine. Plus, Marco is a super nice guy and I’m sure he’d appreciate it. Just don’t email him… This weeks pick is iTunes Movie Trailers by Apple. By rights I shouldn’t have this as its only available in the United States and I am in the UK; it is not available outside of the US for whatever reason the movie studios thought of at that particular time. Did I tell you how much I hate the movie studios and how they fail to apply any common sense to the decisions they make? Anyway back Read More

Merlin Mann dechiffriert, warum ich Instapaper (3.99 €; universal; App Store-Link) so sehr mag: So, thanks, Marco. You’ve made my life better by making it easier to decide to read. Then, you made it way easier to do the actual reading. Die Entscheidung zum Lesen – wann, was und wo – war eine meiner (unbewussten) Schwierigkeiten der letzten Jahren. Instapaper bastelte dafür einen virtuellen Postkasten, der Empfehlungen ausspricht, als Archiv dient und sich mittlerweile plattformübergreifend eingenistet hat. Mein dortiges Artikel-Depot sorgt für eine Kanalisierung der (täglichen) News-Strömung; versenkt öde Textwüsten und spült Aufsätze von besonderer Güte an die Oberfläche. Instapaper zeigt sich jedoch außerdem dafür verantwortlich, dass ich weniger Bücher und Magazine lese. Und ich glaube, mit dieser Veränderung von Gewohnheiten bin ich nicht allein. Das bedeutet im Umkehrschluss für mich, der hauptberuflich ‘ins Internet schreibt‘, dass Leser meine Artikel leichter – weil ausgewählt, flexibel und zeitlich ungebunden, konsumieren können. Read More

posted by Trey Trawick on Monday, October 17, 2011 at 8:00 pm.   Instapaper for iOS has been updated with loads of new features, including a revamped user interface, support for fetching information from Wikipedia, and dynamic footnotes. If you don’t already use Instapaper, check it out. It’s a great tool for saving interesting web articles for later reading. For example, if you see a great post that you want to read in the bathroom later, just hit the “Read Later” bookmarklet on your web browser, and next time you fire up Instapaper on your iPad, the article will be beautifully formatted and ready to read. Instead of just showing Liked articles from online friends who use Instapaper, the Friends panel can now show all links posted to your Facebook news feed, Twitter timeline, or Tumblr Dashboard. So even if your friends don’t use Instapaper as much as you do, you can still find plenty of great articles to read. The service itself is free, but the app will run you $4.99—not cheap by App Store standards, but it’s a worthy investment if you have a long commute on the metro or a fondness for reading on your mobile device. Read More

Like to read? Got an iPhone or iPad? You really ought to have Marco Arment's US$4.99 Instapaper, which just got an upgrade to version 4.0. Instapaper's free web service allows you to flag stories to 'Read Later' with a single click, and you can always get your complete reading list via the site. For reading on the go, however, the cached stories in the app are ideal. The Instapaper app now features an iPad-specific article list interface; it swaps out the simple headline-by-headline scroll for a more spacious grid arrangement, complete with the first few lines of the story. The iPhone version has been streamlined too, with story excerpts, bylines and site information clearly visible. iOS 5 users get true hardware brightness control, making it easier to read under varying lighting conditions. Instapaper wants to let you know what your friends are reading, so now in addition to the stories flagged by your Instapaper-specific social connections, you can also browse all the linked stories posted by your Twitter and Facebook friends or by the Tumblr microblogs you follow (Arment is a founder and former CTO of Tumblr). For Instapaper subscribers who choose to fork over $1 a month to support the service, the app now includes full-text search of all the articles you've ever saved to Instapaper -- downright handy. You can see the full list of new features at Arment's blog. If you're only using Instapaper via the website, you're not getting the full-on experience. There are very few apps that have made themselves a home on the front screens of both my iPhone and iPad, and even fewer that rate a spot in the app Dock for both devices. Instapaper has been firmly lodged there since version 1, and I don't anticipate pulling it out anytime soon. Read More

by Instapaper, a bookmarking tool that lets you save items to read later, released version 4.0 of its apps for iPhone and iPad Monday. We’ve highlighted the major changes in the gallery below. The apps are available for download in the App Store. 1 of 7 You can view a new, grid-like layout and navigation bar is in vertical or horizontal mode. Instapaper for iPad 1 Many article pages now display title, author name and publish date when available. Instapaper for iPad 2 When you select text, you can view information from Wikipedia as well as the dictionary. Instapaper for iPad 3 Users can tap to pull up the footnote instead of scrolling to the bottom, which are now demarcated as "…" Instapaper for iPad 4 You can now browse articles posted by friends to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, as well as those liked by your Instapaper friends. The speed of the "Give Me Something To Read" section (pictured) has also improved. Instapaper for iPad 5 The "Read Later" pane has been cleaned up. Search is now located via the main navigation screen. Instapaper for iPhone 6 New features have been added to the iPhone navigation, including search (subscribers only). Instapaper for iPhone 7 Instapaper for iPad You can view a new, grid-like layout and navigation bar is in vertical or horizontal mode. Instapaper for iPad Many article pages now display title, author name and publish date when available. Instapaper for iPad When you select text, you can view information from Wikipedia as well as the dictionary. Instapaper for iPad Users can tap to pull up the footnote instead of scrolling to the bottom, which are now demarcated as "…" Instapaper for iPad You can now browse articles posted by friends to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, as well as those liked by your Instapaper friends. The speed of the "Give Me Something To Read" section (pictured) has also improved. Instapaper for iPhone The "Read Later" pane has been cleaned up. Search is now located via the main navigation screen. Instapaper for iPhone New features have been added to the iPhone navigation, including search (subscribers only). Read More