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.

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 unmistakably jarring sound of an iPhone marimba ring interrupted the soft and spiritual final measures of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 at the New York Philharmonic on Tuesday night. The conductor, Alan Gilbert, did something almost unheard-of in a concert hall: He stopped the performance. But the ringing kept on going, prompting increasingly angry shouts in the audience directed at the malefactor.

After words from Mr. Gilbert, and what seemed like weeks, the cellphone owner finally silenced his device. After the audience cheered, the concert resumed. Internet vitriol ensued.

Many people have been commenting on this event for a while now and Marco Arment pulls many of the various issues and sub-issues together here: Designing “Mute”.

No doubt how the mute switch works relative to all sounds is a meaningful design discussion but what interests me is that few if any of these discussions about the event recommend turning the phone off. Turning electronics off not only solves the unexpected alarm/ring problem, it also solves the problem of people silently texting their friends during a concert.

If I spend the money to go to a concert at Avery Fisher Hall the last thing I want is to be sitting next to someone with a lit up smartphone texting his or her friends.

The answer here is to turn off all electronic devices at a concert like this. Not sleep, not mute, but power down. That takes care of the texting problem and users who don’t know that they’ve set up an alarm to go off during a concert.

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]

I’m not sure Nick D’Aloisio has “hit the jackpot” but he’s come up with an interesting app for iOS devices. He built it to speed up his own use of the web for study and research. The BBC piece is mostly focused on the fact that he’s young and has built a potentially useful app that’s gotten quite popular and gotten him some venture backing to build out the project.

Summly crunches the content of a web page and offers it up in more easily scanned form: it makes shorter executive summaries of web pages.

The app uses an algorithm to recognise what category of information a webpage contains by using “ontological detection” to identify its nature which in turn determines which set of instructions should be used to provide a consolidated summary of its text.

Or to Summlyfy this in Mr D’Aloisio’s own words: “It can detect different genres or topics of webpages and apply a specific set of metrics to them.”

So, for example, an article categorised as business news would trigger a different set of summary guidelines than those applied to a lifestyle feature.

The interesting question is whether using something like this will lead to better and deeper reading and research (one eventually ought to read the articles it summarizes) or even shallower research because of a scanned headline. I really like the fact that he’s experimenting with trying to make a process that’s cumbersome less so, but it may be that real learning requires the inefficiencies (and slowness) of the (old) study process.

I’m going to give it a try (it’s free). Let me know if you do too: Summly in iTunes Store.

Imagine an iPod Nano wristwatch that’s also a bluetooth-connected communicator. Makes perfect sense, the question isn’t if Apple will make this, more like when.

Not sure I want to have even a short phone conversation talking to my wrist but for some things I think it might work out quite well. Bring up a todo list, a shopping list, a music list (on the phone, not the iPod), and more with voice using Siri.

Amazing comment thread at MacRumors, a few are asking why one needs a wristwatch, assuming that if one has an iPhone one can always get the time from it. Man, am I old. Not only do I wear a wristwatch, I wear an analog wristwatch (and it’s not an iPod with an analog screen on it).

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.

Apple has an iPhone app called Apple Store that’s grown to not only help you locate the nearest Apple store and schedule a genius appointment but it also allows iPhone 4 and 4S users to easily buy things in any Apple store using “Easy Pay” which allows the scanning of barcodes of Apple Store merchandise, paying and leaving the store without having to talk an Apple Store employee. Nothing wrong with talking to them, most of them take happy pills and are very nice, but this new system helps you get in and out of a usually mobbed Apple store with the goods you want quickly.

This is brilliant and reminds me of robots building robots except in this case it’s iPhones buying iPhones.

My longtime flickr contact minato has posted a wonderful image of ornamental maple leaves with iPhone with ornamental maple leaves in Japan.

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.