512 Pixels

This morning, Readability announced a new service that lets users’ fees go to the content-providers they like.

Marco’s excellent Instapaper service will support Readability, allowing users Instapaper’d items to count as Readability items. This will let content providers see traffic and income, regardless of which service their readers use.

I — like almost every web writer I know — have setup my site to work with Readability’s new feature, hopefully creating a little income. I have “Send to Instapaper” links ready to go, but I am not going to implement them on ForkBombr quite yet. I think that the reader should decide what service — if any — they want to use.

At first, I’m sure I won’t recover my $5/month, but once Instapaper logs can get sent to Readability, I’m hoping to make enough for a cup of coffee every so often. Maybe I can even score coffee with a doughnut during good months.

At the end of the day, it is cool to see two competing services work together for the good of content producers. It’s good for everyone. As a consumer, its good, too. I currently use Instapaper, but since I just handed Readability $5, I’m going to use their service this month, just to see what its like. So far, I’m impressed.¹

At the very least, I can help support sites I love until Instapaper is integrated into the system.

The New York Times:

The company has told some applications developers, including Sony, that they can no longer sell content, like e-books, within their apps, or let customers have access to purchases they have made outside the App Store.

Apple rejected Sony’s iPhone application, which would have let people buy and read e-books bought from the Sony Reader Store.

Apple told Sony that from now on, all in-app purchases would have to go through Apple, said Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading division.

I think this means that the Kindle app is also in danger.

This is a frustrating turn of events. I really thought Apple was past this kind of thing. Sadly, I’m sure this has everything to do with the company’s rumored subscription system set to be unveiled tomorrow.

What’s that sound? Its just me smashing my head into my desk. Over and over.

Chris Foresman at Ars, discussing Omni Group’s free OTA sync service:

The cloud syncing service is built to work with any WebDAV server, so users can use iDisk, their own server, or use Omni Group’s free hosted service.

“We actually host over 10,000 users on one Mac mini,” [Omni Group CEO Ken] Case said, explaining that as long as the service can scale on such modest hardware, Omni will continue to offer free syncing. However, some corporate customers would likely prefer to host their own data for security purposes, and WebDAV gives them an easy way to do that with minimal effort.

The new syncing back-end is also designed to work with OmniFocus, which will let individual team members sync tasks assigned to them with either the desktop, iPhone, or iPad versions. “All three versions use the same underlying engine, so once we have that update in place, we’ll be able to roll out OmniPlan syncing to all versions of OmniFocus,” Case told Ars.

That really makes Cultured Code’s lack of OTA sync that much more pathetic.

Netgear CEO Patrick Lo:

Once Steve Jobs goes away, which is probably not far away, then Apple will have to make a strategic decision on whether to open up the platform. Ultimately a closed system just can’t go that far … If they continue to close it and let Android continue to creep up then it’s pretty difficult as I see it. Right now the closed platform has been successful for Apple because they’ve been so far ahead as thought leaders because of Steve Jobs.

Eventually they’ve got to find a way to open up iTunes without giving too much away on their revenue generation model. Steve Jobs wants to suffocate the distribution so even though he doesn’t own the content he could basically demand a ransom.

What’s the reason for him to trash Flash? There’s no reason other than ego.

Classy.

[via Engadget]

While it looks like killer hardware, this thing doesn’t run OS X Server. So calling it an “Xserve replacement” is something I really can’t bring myself to do.

Marco weighs in on the future of Apple’s portable lineup:

I’m predicting the next 15” to be, effectively, the halfway point between the current one and what you’d expect a 15” Air to be.

I have little doubt that this is the future of the 15”, but I do think it’s risky to predict it now. Apple always kills off old technology and moves forward a little too soon for some people’s comfort (which usually works out very well), but this is a major change, and it might be too much at once.

He also thinks the 13-inch MacBook Pro will disappear¹ and only the 17-inch MacBook Pro and white plastic MacBook will retain SuperDrives.

In my weekly column at Macgasm, I shared my thoughts on the hype surrounding the next iPad.

Mr. Blanc:

OmniFocus Aid would be lightweight, easy to use, and built for the sole purpose of throwing tasks into your OmniFocus database when at your Mac. Or, put another way, it would be a utility that consisted of just the top-notch ways that OmniFocus for Mac currently lets you capture action items:

• Quick Entry Pane (not unlike the one that already ships with OmniFocus)
• It knows your projects and contexts
• Supports clippings, Mail rules, and bookmarklets

It should install in the Menu Bar to be accessible for those who don’t swear by the keyboard, and it should sync in the background. It could sell for a few bucks to anyone who purchases the iPad or iPhone versions.

Mr. Hines:

The obvious concern from OmniGroup’s perspective is that offering a “lite” version would hurt overall OmniFocus for Mac sales. I expect that, in actuality, the opposite would occur.

A free—or cheap—“lite” Mac version would dramatically lower the barrier to entry for most potential customers. I know that, personally, I avoided trying OmniFocus for months—despite intense interest and curiousity—because I knew that I couldn’t afford to spend $80 on software. I imagine that’s common.

A thousand times yes. I know several people who just use the iPhone or iPad version, and it would be great to be able to toss things into the OmniFocus cloud from the Mac easily and cheaply.

Why can’t companies like Cultured Code pull this off?

Ian P. Hines:

Deleted. Deleted. Deleted.

Suddenly, I’d gone from having 60 third-party apps on my phone to having a mere 20. That’s enough to fit on two screens (if you stuff the Stock Apps you can’t delete and don’t use into a folder). It’s been about 15 minutes since I finished, and already I can’t remember half the apps I deleted. I think that’s a great sign that I did the right thing.

I love this, and am going to give it a shot on my iPod touch in preparation of ordering an iPhone on February 3.

Tumblr co-founder David Karp seems like a fun guy. This is from an article about an email he sent to a Tumblr user who was complaining about the service’s recent issues with uptime:

Karp responded abruptly, saying that “…we have no interest in customers that will go out of their way to discourage our entire team” continuing to say that this is a “…team that regularly spends their nights and weekends working feverishly to provide the best service we can against extraordinary challenges”. He signed off saying that “Plenty of services will import Tumblr blogs. Please go away.”

[ via TBR]