Hasta La Gadget!

Marco Arment’s Instapaper is one of two* killer apps for the iPhone: It’s so useful that it just about justifies the phone’s purchase price all by itself.

Now Arment has cut the price of the Pro version in half, to $5, and you should buy it.

Instapaper started out as a simple web service. To use it, you drag a special “Read Later” bookmarklet to your browser. Whenever you find something that you’d like to read but don’t have time for at the moment, just click that “Read Later” button. The article gets added to your personal page on Instapaper. When you’ve got time later, just visit that page and read away. Conveniently, every article is automatically reformatted (all excess HTML and graphics are stripped out) leaving nothing but highly-readable text.

The Instapaper iPhone app lets you view all those saved articles in an iPhone-friendly format. The free version is so useful that I use it several times a day: On my commute, in the evening, during the odd moments of downtime.

In effect, it turns the iPhone into a super-convenient mini-reading tablet, great for catching up on the news, reading long-form articles, and more.

Instapaper Pro adds a couple new features. It now downloads articles in the background, so any time you have it open, it’s updating the list of stories for you to read. It handles the “graphical version” (with photo) of articles better than the free version. It lets you archive articles that you’ve read more easily. And it adds some minor interface enhancements, such as a reversed mode (light text on a dark background, good for reading at night) and tilt-scrolling.

And, it adds features that let you optionally share your articles with the wider Instapaper community, or read popular articles that have been shared by others.

But even if you don’t feel like you need those features, you should still get the Pro version. It’s only $5, and most of that goes to Arment. For developing such a great app, he certainly deserves it.

One side note: Instapaper pro is rated “17 and up” for “Frequent/Intense Mature/Suggestive Themes,” which is an indication of Apple’s bizarre and arbitrary approval and rating policies.

* The other killer iPhone app is Tweetie, a $3 Twitter client that, if you’re a Twitter user and have multiple accounts, is as indispensable as a needle to a heroin addict.

Just a day after we published a feature about smartphones accelerating the development of augmented reality, Yelp sneaked a secret AR feature into an update of its iPhone app.

Exclusive to iPhone 3GS owners, the feature is accessible through an Easter egg, which is activated by shaking the handset three times. A message will appear reading, “The Monocle has been activated,” and then a Monocle button will appear in the upper-right corner. Tapping that button will launch your iPhone camera, and digital overlays of business listings, accompanied by star ratings, appear on screen. The app presumably draws its geo-aware powers from the iPhone 3GS’ digital compass and GPS. Mashable demonstrates the feature in the video above.

We use the word “sneak” because Apple doesn’t provide an open API to access live video from the iPhone’s camera, making it impossible for developers to provide AR apps without hacking the software development kit. We’ve put in a query to Yelp requesting clarification on how its developer coded the AR feature.

If Yelp submitted a hacked version of its iPhone app and Apple approved it, it’s unlikely this victory will last very long. In May, Wired.com reported on the first developer to use an Easter egg to trick Apple. Apple had rejected his app Lyrics because it contained swear words, so he filtered them and added an Easter egg enabling users to remove the filter. That app is no longer in the App Store. The developer said Lyrics was “pulled temporarily” due to licensing issues, but the app still has not returned.

However, even if Apple pulls the Yelp app for sneaking in AR, it would likely become available in the near future. Brad Foxhoven, co-founder of augmented-reality company Ogmento, said Apple has told him the next version of the iPhone OS (3.1) “would make [AR developers] happy,” implying the live-video API will become open, and legitimate AR apps will become available very soon.

Yelp App Download Link [iTunes]

See Also:

• If You’re Not Seeing Data, You’re Not Seeing
• At the Dawn of the Augmented Reality Industry
• Augmented Reality and atemporality
• Augmented Reality: Ogmento
• How it Works: Augmented Reality
• Blink-182 Rocks ‘Augmented Reality’ Show in Doritos Bag …

As Engadget’s resident former attorney, my first instinct when I sat down to re-read Apple, AT&T’s and Google’s FCC filings regarding Google Voice was to put on my lawyer hat and try to find inconsistencies that might shed some additional light on what had actually happened — if Apple’s account differed from AT&T’s, for example, perhaps those subtle differences would reveal the actual truth. This proved to be much more difficult than I had imagined, however: not only had Google redacted the most interesting part of its statement, I came to a profound realization after just a few moments of work.

I don’t care.

Each of the responses was long, dense, and polished to a high-gloss shine that made each company’s actions seem not only rational and justified, but almost inevitable in a way — as I wrote at the time, Apple isn’t exaggerating when it says that these are entirely new problems, and simply reading the individual letters paints a fairly sympathetic picture of how this whole chaotic process ended up in such disarray. But that’s a perspective that assumes deeply-rooted interest in the systems and procedure of the App Store, a perspective that assumes there’s a good reason we should be looking to lawyers and government regulators to figure out what’s going on with the most exciting and vital software market that we’ve seen in a long time.

Continue reading Editorial: Apple, the FCC, and the sideloading solution

Editorial: Apple, the FCC, and the sideloading solution originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 Aug 2009 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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At Best Buy’s Zune HD preview today a certain Matthew Arkin on Qik was able to shoot footage of the “Apps” item that resides within the “Marketplace” section on the device. It’s still incredibly unclear what Microsoft’s plans are for that functionality — they’ve long admitted its existence, but have waffled on the name and have been reticent to show it off in meetings with us. Microsoft so far has only promised to have applications on par with the games currently available for Zune, but there’s obviously a lot of implied competition with Apple’s App Store that the word “Apps” on a touchscreen device conjures up. On video (embedded after the break) the rep is asked if there’s an SDK, and apparently Matthew got a “yes” offscreen, but we’re not really sure of the veracity of that statement, or what it means for developers at the moment — hopefully good, freedom-ey things.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Continue reading Zune HD’s “Apps” menu item spotted in the Marketplace, still short on details

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

Zune HD’s “Apps” menu item spotted in the Marketplace, still short on details originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 23 Aug 2009 02:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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While Apple was busy batting away the FCC with its litany of reasons why its app approval process is totally hunky-dory, Google was apparently having its own VoIP-related firefight. It seems that an article in the USA Today which hit newsstands this morning alleges that the internet giant sought to block (dare we say reject) a full Skype application from making its way into the Android Market. The story claims that the application was neutered to become “a watered-down version of the original that routes calls over traditional phone networks” — which would obviously cast a decidedly malevolent slant to the benevolent company’s policies.

Here are the facts, clear and simple: While the first generation of our Android software did not support full-featured VoIP applications due to technology limitations, we have worked through those limitations in subsequent versions of Android, and developers are now able to build and upload VoIP services.

As we told USA Today earlier in the week Google did not reject an application from Skype or from any other company that provides VoIP services. To suggest otherwise is false. At this point no software developer — including Skype — has implemented a complete VoIP application for Android. But we’re excited to see — and use — these applications when they’re submitted, because they often provide more choice and options for users. We also look forward to the day when consumers can access any application, including VoIP apps, from any device, on any network.

[Via TechCrunch; Image courtesy eBoy]

Read – Google-AT&T-Apple fight over Net calls draws FCC interest
Read – Android and VoIP applications

Filed under: Cellphones, Software

Google refutes USA Today report on blocked Skype application originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 21 Aug 2009 18:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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