The next ten years of Instapaper

Straight from the Instapaper blog:

To ensure Instapaper can continue for the foreseeable future, it’s essential that the product generates enough revenue to cover its costs. In order to do so, we’re relaunching Instapaper Premium today.

As a reminder, Instapaper Premium is a subscription for $2.99/month or $29.99/year that offers the following features:

  • Full-text search for all articles in your account
  • Unlimited Notes
  • Text-to-Speech playlists on mobile
  • Speed reading to get through all of your articles up to 3x faster
  • An ad-free Instapaper website
  • “Send to Kindle” using a bookmarklet or our mobile apps

Instapaper is back!

And that’s not all:

We are very sorry for the extended downtime and, as a token of our apology, we are giving six months of Instapaper Premium to all EU users affected by the outage.

I’m getting off Pocket this instant, and moving back to Instapaper.

Expect to hear more from me about this.

An Apple Watch Jailbreak is Probably the Worst Idea Ever

Matt Birchler:

9to5Mac has a good breakdown of what this jailbreak entails, but I will reiterate that you should not even think about finding this jailbreak. One, I don’t think that watchOS is really in need of a jailbreak community to push it forward right now, but two, this is an incredibly high risk jailbreak! – BirchTree

I completely agree with all the sentiments here.

Mimeo Photos Offers All Apple Photo Products, Formats & Themes Globally

If you were upset about Apple’s photo printing service no longer being available from the Photos app, you’ll be glad to know that the partner they used, Mimeo, now offer these identical services themselves.

“This is a real opportunity for us to expand our successes as a prominent Apple Photos extension since the beginning,” said John Delbridge, CEO, Mimeo. “We are really excited to see an increase in demand from countries like Australia and Japan in addition to our strong US customer base.”

It’s no longer integrated into the Photos app by default, but there is now the Mimeo Photos app, that will make the service available from Apple’s Photos app.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: iPhone or Android?

Neil deGrasse Tyson talks with Brian Tong about his new series Cosmos: Possible Worlds and settles the world’s greatest debates! iPhone or Android? Kirk or Picard? Millennium Falcon or Enterprise? BB-8 or R2-D2?

A few things about Neil deGrasse Tyson you probably didn’t know before.

Native UI

I’m working on an app at work where I’m regularly implementing new sections/views. And I’ve become really fond of the “native” design look.
It’s something I’ve tried to do with TextCase and Slate, but it’s now spreading to my actual job.

I think it’s down to two facts:

  • I like Apples design for apps.
  • I don’t think users should have to “learn” a user interface.

There’s also a whole bunch of benefits you get from using native controls, such as accessibility support, and standard designs for certain contexts. An example of that is a system alert, where you specify if an action is a “cancel”, “destructive”, or “default”, and then the formatting is applied.

I’m not doing this as a way to make the apps feel more generic though, as I’m making use of accent colours, and in some cases, fonts, to make sure the “branding” still comes through.

John Voorhees: The Way Apple Succeeded May No Longer Be Possible at Its Current Size

John Voorhees, the developer, podcast, and editor, has done an interview over at iPure. I must say it’s very fascinating, and there’s a sneak peak of something I’m sure a lot of people have been looking forward to.

How to get from apps development to writing for one of the best-known blogs about Apple? How works international team located over several continents? Who could replace Tim Cook? Our second interview with foreign speaker – John Voorhees, editor of MacStories.net and a passionate podcaster.

Buying a Hammer

Matt Birchler at his finest, turning a subject such as buying a hammer into a thought provoking piece about making judgements upon people’s tech purchases:

You’re certainly not going to shop around from store to store for the best hammer deal. You’re not going to watch YouTube videos demoing an array of hammers, and you’re not going to read reviews for the top 5 hammers this season. You’re certainly not going to check to see if Craftsman is going to release a new hammer in the next few months that will be better than what’s on the shelves now.

Nope, you’re not going to do any of that, you’re going to go to the store, pick one that seems fine (they all seem fine, don’t they?), make sure it’s one of the cheaper ones available, and get on with your life.