Sweating the small stuff deserves recognition, wouldn’t you agree?

I just bought Instapaper for the iPad for $4.99. I’m not convinced that I’ll use Instapaper on my iPad, but I did just shell out for it. Why? 

Beside the fact that I’ve been using the Web service daily for a few years (and for $0) and don’t want it to go away, when this much care and attention is provided to an app, I take notice.

It’s clear to me that Marco’s interested in helping people deal with having access to way too much information, and I particularly marvel at the ways in which he’s trying to make access to that information easier and more enjoyable. 

This kind of effort deserves support simply to help ensure Marco keeps applying his smarts to this problem. And hearing more about his efforts via the latest release notes, I wouldn’t be surprised if Instapaper becomes a staple app on my iPad.

Here are just a couple of the items covered in the latest release notes:

  • Article lists now include approximate article lengths and the progress of your reading. For me, depending on where and when I’m reading, I’ll have an idea of whether I have time to dig into a particular article.
  • Dark mode improvements: In addition to having an in article option to change how the article displays with different ambient lighting, some fancy work on Marco’s part now automates a nighttime switch to dark mode. So many times the mostly white screen of the iPad has bugged my eyes out at night. Anything that helps prevent escaping to the Settings panel to adjust brightness is fantastic.

More on the fancy work required to automate dark mode. In Marco’s words:

You can now have Instapaper automatically use dark mode at night and normal (light) mode during the day.

But how, exactly, do you define “night”? There’s no API access to the iPhone’s ambient light sensor, so I can’t just enable dark mode in dark rooms.

…

So I used with the most reliable method I could think of: sunset times in your location. 

More release notes here.

And you can download Instapaper now from Apple’s app store for just $4.99.

The iPhone sucks for developers.

I keep seeing this mantra repeated again and again, with the latest attack coming in Dave Winer’s “zealotry sucks” article where he concludes:

“I thought about returning my Droid and decided to keep it. Because while it is a piece of shit phone, at least it’s good for developers, and Verizon knows what it’s doing with its phone network. It sucks less than the iPhone. But it still sucks.”

So, people are switching from the iPhone to make a stand against it’s mistreatment of developers (and because of AT&T, but that’s another topic), but the only current serious issue Apple developers face is the patriarchal application review process. Which, based on a set of seemingly arbitrarily applied rules, has caused a very, very small number of uncool rejections and otherwise operated at a somewhat startlingly impressive pace given the volume of apps and updates Apple’s been pushing.

In the meantime, developers are cutting back development on other mobile platforms due to lack of sales or not bothering at all because the development platform is a fractured, bloated nightmare.

So, I wonder, is the multiple millions of dollars of heretofore unseen revenue for Apple developers really eclipsed by Apple’s management of the application approval process? (You know, other than the bullshit exclusionary policy.)