A friend put me onto Instapaper when I got my iPad 2. It took me a while to get the ‘oh, I’ll look at that later’ concept; it’s now indispensable to me. I have bookmarklets on every browser I use. I have the iPad app. Being a weird iMac, iPad and Nexus One user, I even have a third-party Android app for on the go (iPaper. Oh the irony).
Instapaper makes it easy to Inst your Papers in browsers, but what I’ve been missing is a pretty desktop solution that sits alone, in contrast to the less than beautiful website. When seated monkey-like at my desktop, I’d like something elegant. I’m shallow.
The Instapaper site. Function, function, function.
Enter ReadNow by Michael Schneider. Unobtrusively sitting in the menubar, it reveals all your Insted Papers with a single click, bringing with it folder management, drag and drop, search and offline reading. It’s like having the official iOS app in your menubar.
With folders, too! Lovely.
If you use the competing ‘Read It Later’ service,
ReadNow has you covered there too.
ReadNow is about $4, and requires an Instapaper subscription (a buck a month).
If you’re as taken with Instapaper as this late adopter, check out the ReadNow app in the App Store. I guarantee* you won’t regret it.
*Not a guarantee.
This makes me really happy. Perfectly and reliably and without fuss, shares all my iTunes stuff to my XBox 360. Neato!
Trial also available. Connect360
Originally published Dec 24th, 2010 9:00pm.
(None of these happened. As it turns out, Apple is far more interested in things like ‘Launchpad’ (a grid of icons. No, really.) than having middleclick, cut and paste, or proper mouse movement. Silly me!)
1. Native middle-click for Magic Mouse (3rd party fix – try MagicDriver).
2. Adjustable mouse acceleration (3rd party fix, MagicDriver, see above).
3. Cut and paste in Finder (3rd party fix – try TotalFinder).
4. More awesomeness. ‘Cause I mean really. Is there such thing as enough? (No).
Latest in my ongoing ‘I think you care what my desktop looks like’ series.
Wallpaper: Queen of Bells, one of several proposed comics made by Penny Arcade
link: http://www.penny-arcade.com/2010/11/1/
I much prefer this style of dock on OSX. The glass reflecty shelf thing… I just don’t get it.
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock
(change -boolean YES to NO to reverse). Simple, no-fuss.
(Originally published Feb 4th, 2010 10:04pm).
(For the record, I was indeed wrong about the ‘hit and miss’, and now own and enjoy an iPad 2. I think many of the points raised by people like Mr. Chen are still quite valid).
This started out as a little comment on Gizmodo but as I wrote it it became longer.
So we’ve gotten over the sanitary napkin jokes, the kneejerk reactions, and people are looking at this iPad thing. First, let me say, no Apple didn’t invent the tablet. But to be honest, outside of data collection and cartooning/graphics, what use is there for the standard Windows Tablet?
However, I really don’t think there’s much use for Apple’s one either.
Personally I feel Apple has a hit and miss on this one. Then again, I thought that about the original iPhone. I guess that’s why I’m not a stock analyst.
All I can see is Steve Jobs sitting in his office, and saying ‘Hmm… everyone thinks we should make a tablet. I guess if we do, most of these people will buy one. Let’s try something to test the waters, make a big circus act about it, and see what happens. If noone likes it, we’ll call it ‘niche’ like the Apple TV‘.
Jason Chen of Gizmodo wrote a brilliant article about ‘The Two Wrong Ways to Make a Tablet‘. In it, he describes the two wrong ways as being Microsoft’s way to date (make a desktop smaller) and Apple’s (make a phone bigger).
He then outlines that neither of these are good enough. There needs to be a third approach.
I really agree with the ‘third approach’. I haven’t seen a huge amount on the courier, but I definitely agree about the concept of ‘everything talking to everything else’. Which, when you think about it, is the opposite of the iPhone environment.
Separated apps work great on a phone. But it’s a phone. You take it out, tap the screen, any emails? No, any tweets? Yes, reply, check weather, back in pocket.
Come on, seriously, is that how anyone’s going to use a tablet? Where will you get a pocket that big?
Think of Star Trek. Remember the pads they had? (Acronym PADD, Personal Access Display Device). Everything’s accessible on it, everything interconnects, you don’t open the ‘sensor’ app and then the ‘diagnostic’ app, then email the text from that to the ‘communications’ app. You pick it up, open some info, run a diagnostic, and transmit it.
Strangely enough this is the kind of thing Mr. Ive and Mr. Jobs spout… and then they bring out a device that does the opposite, compartmentalise each and every task.
I guess that’s Reality Distortion at work.
(Originally published Dec 29th, 2009 6:28pm)
So I tend to be a bit of a minimalist when it comes to my computer. As few apps as possible, none of that (real or imagined) mess and entanglement of too many things existing together.
Because I’m so anal neat about this sort of thing I keep an eye out for solutions that don’t require a great big install.
Gadgets/widgets/flibbertygibbets fall into this category nicely. I tend to use the built in things – weather, currency converter, a little slideshow of my photos, and a clock (look! it’s a clock! it has hands, like, it’s old-timey! and a second-hand that TICKS!).
The only thing I’ve bothered actually downloading (and keeping) is this one called TweetZ by Blue Onion Software.
Unfortunately for most ‘gadgets’ on Win 7 / Vista, they’re really ugly. I mean, seriously. It’s not helping. Anyway, this one really stands out. Clean lines, not too bright and distracting, nice icons and a simple UI. It even has a built-in URL shortener (although I don’t use it – by the time I got this I was already used to an awesome Firefox extension for tinyurl).
The only problem I have with it – when you view your tweets somewhere else, for example a mobile app or a webpage, it’ll attribute it as ‘x minutes ago from API’ rather than ‘from Tweetz’. Just feels a little unpolished – and of course means that if a follower clicks on it, they get taken to a page about the Twitter Application Interface, rather than the page of the app like it should. A shame.
In any case, this gadget is the only twitter client I use on the desktop/laptop – it’s got it all really. It’s free, it’s simple, and it’s available here.
