The New Instapaper Bookmarklet

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Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, announced a fantastic set of updates to the Read Later bookmarklet:

[…]the bookmarklet now sports a completely new design that’s highly visible at every screen size, and works in more browsers[…]

The new bookmarklet now also supports automatic saving of every page in multi-page articles.

And best of all, if you already have the bookmarklet:

You don’t need to reinstall your Read Later bookmarklet to get this update. It applies automatically to the one you already have.

It’s a great experience, and is just one more of those little details that makes me love Instapaper so much.

'Missing the Surprise'

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Stephen Hackett on the 24/7 rumor cycle:

In the world of 24-hour news, Twitter accounts and blurrycam photos, it’s hard to be surprised by much anymore.

[…]

Without these stories, the Apple new cycle would be much slower, and many sites would have far fewer page views.

But the events would be a lot more fun.

Mountain Lion’s announcement was a complete surprise, and I have to say, it really was fun.

With the iPad 3 announcement, I already know my twitter feed will be filled with “that’s it?” and “it doesn’t do [insert asinine feature]!”.

Sigh.

'TV is Broken'

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Another great story by Patrick Rhone, this time about how Cable TV is utterly broken, especially in the mind of a young child:

When the commercials are over, it is some live action teen show. She is not impressed.

“Can I choose?”, Beatrix asks. She’s still confused. She thinks this is like home where one can choose from a selection of things to watch. A well organized list of suggestions and options with clear box cover shots of all of her favorites. I have to explain again that it does not work that way on television. That we have to watch whatever is on and, if there is nothing you want to watch that is on then you just have to turn it off. Which we do.

I then do what I should have simply done in the first place. I hook up the iPad to the free hotel wifi and hand it to her. She fires up the Netflix app, chooses a show, and she is happy.

This, she gets. This makes sense.

Read the whole thing. There’s a part about his daughter’s first exposure to ads and how frustrating it is for her (and as far as volume goes, frustrating for Patrick). This experience is part of why I ditched Cable TV nearly two years ago. My three year old has no idea what traditional television is like. His idea of television is the on-demand experience of using our Apple TV to stream from Netflix or iCloud.

iMessage Notification Overload

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Since the Messages for Mac beta came out, it’s become even more annoying when receiving a message sets off alerts on three devices.

Graham Spencer at MacStories has a great idea for handling iMessage overload with multiple devices:

Whilst the ability to change the text tone (and ringtone) on a per-contact basis is really cool (and can be used for a number of other purposes), perhaps there should be another way to control message notifications differently — especially now that iMessage is bundled in iChat, and may lead to an increased number of messages sent to iOS devices. Specifically I’m talking about muting specific message conversations. This would allow me to mute the message thread that has all of the MacStories members, but still receive notifications from Federico, in case he urgently wanted me to cover something.

Apple could easily implement the option inside the Messages app, simply displaying a mute icon next to each message thread when in the ‘Edit’ mode. Just like changing the text tone on a per-contact basis, this power-user option wouldn’t make the UI messy, because it would only appear in the ‘Edit’ screen. That way, users could choose between completely muting on a per-contact basis or on a per-message thread basis — all whilst still receiving notifications for your other messages.

Be sure to click through and check out his mock-up of what such a system would look like. It is simple and elegant. The only thing I would add is that muting a thread would push the mute setting to all devices via iCloud, so I don’t have to go around to all my devices to toggle it.

'Microsoft's Biggest Miss'

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Patrick Rhone shares a conversation between himself and his wife about Microsoft Office:

To my clients, Microsoft Office was a “must have” no matter how much I tried to convince them otherwise. And I tried very hard for a while before even I just finally gave up. If a client told me they had to have it I just nodded along and told them what to get and where. They were as sure as the sun rises that, without Office, they would not be able to work, open attachments, write letters, anything. They had to have it.

Then, she explained, the iPhone came. There was no Office. People got things done. Then the iPad came. There was no Office. People got things done. Android came. People got things done. All of those things that they, just a couple of years ago, were convinced they needed Office to do. They got them done without it. And thus, the truth was revealed.

I haven’t had Office installed on my Mac since graduating college in 2007. Even then, I rarely used it since iWork’s debut back in 2005. Today, I do nearly all my writing in plain text in Byword. Otherwise I reach for iWork.

‘Google Tracked iPhones, Bypassing Apple Browser Privacy Settings’

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I saw the following bit from a Wall Street Journal article on The Brooks Review this morning:

To get around Safari’s default blocking, Google exploited a loophole in the browser’s privacy settings. While Safari does block most tracking, it makes an exception for websites with which a person interacts in some way—for instance, by filling out a form. So Google added coding to some of its ads that made Safari think that a person was submitting an invisible form to Google. Safari would then let Google install a cookie on the phone or computer.

This is downright shameful behavior. It isn’t just Google doing this, either. But I expected better from Google. I used to really like the company, but in the last couple years many of their moves have left me considering closing off my account.

Thankfully, this loophole is already patched in Webkit (by two Google engineers, no less) and should make it’s way to a shipping version of Safari soon, according to a companion piece by the WSJ:

An Apple spokesman said: “We are aware that some third parties are circumventing Safari’s privacy features and we are working to put a stop to it.”

An update to the software that underlies Safari has closed the loophole that allows cookies to be set after the automatic submission of invisible forms. Future public versions of Safari could incorporate that update. The people who handled the proposed change, according to software documents: two engineers at Google.