Jump to Post

Today we’re making Instapaper Premium available to all Instapaper users, free of charge. Instapaper Premium is the best way to experience all that Instapaper has to offer, and we’re excited to open it up to everyone.

I’ve been an Instapaper user for as long as I’ve known about the service, and a premium subscriber for as long as it’s been available. I was worried when Marco sold Instapaper to Betaworks, but Betaworks did some good work on the service. I started to hope that Instapaper had found a stable home and that my Saturday afternoons were safe for catching up on interesting reading.

When Pinterest bought Instapaper, and acquired a majority share in Betaworks, I started to wonder about the long-term viability of the service again. Would Pinterest keep it around? Would Instapaper line up with Pinterest’s future goals? We’ve all seen popular services be acquired by larger companies just to be unceremoniously scrapped. Thinking through the goals of the two services however, I believe that Pinterest is more interested in watching user behavior than making Instapaper a profitable stand-alone service.

In that light, yesterday’s announcement that they were doing away with Instapaper’s revenue model of selling premium subscriptions makes sense. It’s in Pinterest’s best interest to get as many subscribers frequently using the service as possible, presumably to leverage machine learning on the back end to be able to serve up better targeted advertising in their main Pinterest service. So, I think the service will be fine, at least for the time being. While I’m often adverse to such intrusive monitoring of my online activity, with Instapaper I’m completely fine with it. My Instapaper queue comprises who I wish to be, my ideal self is interested in reading everything in the queue. My actual self sometimes selects all and deletes.

Sometimes, not all the time. When that lovely Saturday afternoon comes and I’ve decided to read, Instapaper is waiting for me. Sometimes on a Sunday morning, early in the day before the kids get up, I’ve made my coffee and found my seat on the couch. The house is quiet, Oliver settles at my feet, and Instapaper opens up the world to me.

Jump to Post

macOS Sierra 10.12.1, released yesterday, includes hidden Apple Pay images that depict the brand new MacBook Pro with an OLED touch panel that’s set to be announced by Apple on Thursday, October 27.

The “magic toolbar” looks like it will replace the function keys, along with the escape key necessary for using Vim. I’ve seen questions asking what Vim users are going to do. For a moment I started to worry myself, although I’m not using MacVim on my Mac anymore, I still need to use it regularly on servers, and on servers I’ll have no .vimrc customizations for remapping keys.

However, since the point of the touchscreen is to be able to dynamically assign keys as needed, I bet when the Terminal is open, the escape key will be right where it needs to be.

Jump to Post

But isn’t it expensive, and doesn’t it overload IT? No. IBM found that not only do PCs drive twice the amount of support calls, they’re also three times more expensive. That’s right, depending on the model, IBM is saving anywhere from $273 - $543 per Mac compared to a PC, over a four-year lifespan. “And this reflects the best pricing we’ve ever gotten from Microsoft,” Previn said. Multiply that number by the 100,000+ Macs IBM expects to have deployed by the end of the year, and we’re talking some serious savings.

There’s a few guys at a place I used to work who really need to read this article.

Previn ended the session with a fact worth noting. “Every Mac we buy is in fact continuing to make and save IBM money.”

(Via DF, of course.)

This is fantastic, pure Phish. I’m so glad that they’ve just been getting better over the years.

Vibrating with love and light, pulsating with love and light, in a world gone mad, a world gone mad, there must be something more than this!

Perfect.

Jump to Post

Apple today announced an event that will take place on October 27. Here’s what the invite looks like:

I would have loved it if they’d used the same cursive font.

Jump to Post

The better you write, the higher you go in Ogilvy & Mather. People who think well, write well. Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches. Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well. Here are 10 hints:

Reminds me of a saying I heard first from 37 Signals:

If you are trying to decide between a few people to fill your position, always hire the better writer. I don’t care if that person is a designer, programmer, marketer, salesperson, whatever. Assuming your candidates are fairly equally skilled and qualified overall, always hire the better writer.

Jump to Post

How it works: Tiny chips implanted in Nathan Copeland’s brain are bypassing his broken spinal cord, relaying electrical signals that govern movement and sensation to and from that robotic arm.

What was science fiction when I was a kid is quickly becoming science fact. What a time to be alive.

Link

2. Effective immediately, Sailors in paygrades E1-E3 will be addressed as “Seaman,” E4-E6 will be called “Petty Officer Third/Second/First Class” as appropriate, and Senior enlisted in paygrades E7-E9 will be “Chief,” “Senior Chief,” or “Master Chief” depending on their paygrade. • For example, a Sailor will no longer be called YN2. Instead, they will be called a “Second Class Petty Officer” or “Petty Officer.” • There will no longer be a distinction between “Airman, Fireman and Seaman.” They will all be “Seaman.” • This cultural change will not happen overnight. It will take a measured approach to make it the norm.

Wouldn’t you know it, as soon as I post something about my time in the Navy, they up and change how it works. Ridiculous idea to get rid of the rates. Learning another sailor’s rate and rating let you know immediately what their specialty was, and how much you might have in common with them.

I worked hard to be IT1, glad I’m not active duty to see this.

9to5 Mac in reference to “courage” from the September Apple event:

It’s likely a reference to a comment by Steve Jobs when he was asked to explain another controversial omission of an established standard: the lack of support for Flash in the iPhone and iPad …

The video of Jobs makes a good point, and comes across better than Schiller did.

Jump to Post

We will make Vesper for iOS, Vesper for Mac, and Vesper’s JavaScript sync service open source on my personal GitHub account. This code will also be provided as historical artifacts: they’re not intended as active projects. They’re also not intended as examples of how to write apps these days.

I applaud the team’s decisions to open source the Vesper code base, especially the syncing component that Brent put so much work into. Perhaps, like the ill-fated Letters.app, Vesper’s demise will give way to new applications that may fare better.