This is a great interview. The Planet Money guys are brilliant and Marco gets right in sync with their style.

Marco made and sells one of my all time favorite utilities: Instapaper. In a nutshell, if I start reading an article on my computer and want to finish it or read it on my iPad, I hit a button on my browser “read later” and the article is sent up to Instapaper, a cloud-based service that acts as my breadcrumbs in the clouds. Later, when I’m using my iPad (still connected to wifi) I click the Instapaper app and update its cache of saved stuff. The article appears and I can read it there.

What many don’t realize is that Instapaper caches the articles on the iPad and/or iPhone and so, I can read them there when I’m not connected, like when I’m on a plane. So, before my regular trips to LA I routinely load up my Instapaper account with things I want to read on the plane, then update the iPad’s Instapaper cache memory and I’m set.

Instapaper has many iBook-like reading tools including typographic control and more.

I’m hoping to use Instapaper to help my mother read The New Yorker as its app is totally worthless for anyone who can’t read small type.

A very nice routine using the iPad for close up sleight of hand (in German).

[via Hank Murrow]

Marshall Soulful Jones, part of Team Nuyorican 2011, 2nd place finishers at the National Poetry Slam in Boston, perform “Touchscreen”. The Bowery Poetry Club NY.

Brilliant, down to the head movement.

[via wimp.com]

The piece of Guy’s essay that appeals to me most is this:

So if you’re in an Apple based household the odds are good that your new Apple TV will be able to talk to one of your other devices and get the required network info from it. I’d bet heavily that this capability makes its way into AirPort devices and Macs. “Want to let this device on your network?”, is exactly the level of simplicity that Apple tends to aim for.

Setting up and using an AirPort network is much simpler than any of the other wifi routers I’ve played with over the years and my guess is that Apple is going to continue to make it simpler to add new devices to the network, including the AppleTV. It’s easy now and it will be even easier which is part of the puzzle of making a living room appliance that’s easy to use and integrate with other devices you already own.

I’m not entirely convinced that Apple will get into the flat panel TV business but I’m convinced that they’ll expand the capabilities of the current AppleTV, turning a Sony or Samsung flat panel TV set into a dumb HD screen, which is fine by me, I hate the menus on my Sony Bravia.

[via Steve Splonskowski]

If you don’t think Apple is making a lot of iOS devices, read the numbers on this: Samsung built a 1.6 million square foot, $3.6 billion plant in Austin, Texas to build Apple A5 processor chips for iPhone 4S and iPad 2 devices.

Since the devices are assembled in China at the moment I wonder if this marks a move by Apple to have an assembly plant in the United States. I’d love that. But, short of that, the more components in these devices that are manufactured in the US, the more Americans will have jobs even if the factories are owned by other countries, in this case, Samsung is a Korean company.

While the implementation may not be the best, this is a killer good idea and it allows family members to log into the account and set up reminders.

Of course, someone might write an app like this for iOS and then one could have all the benefits of an iPad plus a custom reminder system.

The problem with any idea like this is it has to be made fully accessible to people who can’t see, hear, or use the tablet’s UI well.

I think this is a job for my friend David Niemeijer at AssistiveWare.

Watch the video, it’s quite spectacular. I have a Square account. It’s free. Highly recommended. Works on iPhone or iPad. Amazing.

PS: Thanks Edward.

David Pogue is pretty worked up over AssistiveTouch and I can see why. After reading his piece I just played around with it and it’s quite fantastic. Settings/General/Accessibility/AssistiveTouch.

Try it (iOS 5), it’s quite interesting.

I’m most interested to see if it might make the iPad more accessible to my 96 year old mother. I don’t think so but it would be great if Apple worked on making iOS devices more accessible to the elderly.

Election workers are taking the iPads to disabled voters who might otherwise have difficulties marking their ballots, the AP wrote. These voters are able to pull up the ballot on the iPad and tap the screen to mark the candidate of their choice before printing out their completed ballot. After that, voters will send in their votes in a much more traditional way: by mail.

Apple Inc. donated five iPads to the state for the program, and Oregon shelled out about $75,000 to make the software, the AP reported. According to Secretary of State Kate Brown and the state elections director, Steve Trout, the office tested several different types of devices before settling on the iPad.

Now, how about using iPads so the rest of us can “vote different.”

[via Gary Sharp]

Marco Arment (creator of Instapaper) has done a very nice comparison of the Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and iBooks on the iPad. He’s comparing availability of content (books and periodicals) less usability of the various tools.

By the way, Instapaper on the iPad is an incredible way to read articles that you’ve stored there. It caches the articles so they can be read offline and has many of iBooks’ reading features like type size and face control and more.