A great overview of Instapaper by Milind Alvares. Especially this line:
If there’s one thing about Instapaper, is that it’s a habit. You’ve got to get yourself addicted to it for it to make any sense.
The more I use Instapaper, the more I love it and the more I find better ways to use and enjoy it.
A few things you may not have known about today, July 2.
July 2nd in history:
People born on July 2nd:
Jim Ray:
Besides all of the new typography, navigation, color and multimedia, the real story is the fundamental rethink of what a story page should be. For too long, the formula of online news has been a spine of text that media elements hang off of like a sad Charlie Brown Christmas tree, competing with ads and widgets for attention. What these new pages do is suggest that a story is more than a jumble of these parts, in fact, it works best when every element ties together cohesively.
Required reading for writers. Especially nerdy ones:
Humans, especially nerds, are creatures of habit. Often, these habits are designed to make the world a predictable place so that our brains can focus on the creative task at hand.
Mike Davidson on the just-redesigned story page for msnbc.com:
This weekend, msnbc.com launched a sweeping redesign of the most important part of their site: the story page. The result is something unlike anything any other major news site is offering and is a bold step in a direction no competitor has gone down (yet): the elimination of pageviews as a primary metric. […]
We like big risks with big payoffs though and we feel that when you take care of the user and the advertiser at the same time, you’re probably onto something.
The new design really is fantastic. It’s readable, clean, has all related content inline, and seems to be showing the least amount of ads I’ve ever seen on a news site. Also: how clever is that “upscroll” header?
Michael Slade in response to my tongue and cheek link yesterday about CSS being the new Photoshop. Michael’s point is that CSS, HTML, and JavaScript are to the webpage what PostScript was to the printed page, and what’s missing is a webpage version of PageMaker (now InDesign). (Sure there’s apps like FrontPage and iWeb, but no serious Web designer would be caught dead using these tools the way a serious print designer uses InDesign and Illustrator.)
Check out Jeff Batterton’s iPhone drawing done entirely with CSS — no images. (You’ll need need the latest version of Safari or Chrome to view it properly.)
And speaking of impressive CSS, look at these iOS icons Louis Harboe made. (Again, IE users need not click through.)
Cameron Hunt magically stops and starts the data network connection of his iPhone 4 using only his index finger.
Fraser Speirs posted a video demonstration of the reception on his iPhone 4 dropping down, bar by bar, when holding it incorrectly. This is exactly what I’m experiencing on my iPhone 4 as well.
Cameron Hunt has created a website which documents the incorrect ways to hold the iPhone 4 as demonstrated by Apple itself.
John Gruber, who’s lucky enough not to be having any problems, guesses that “the issue pops up in areas with spotty 3G coverage”. But I experience the left-handed signal drop regardless of my location — well, anywhere I’ve been since yesterday: home, my office, and church — and Kansas City has fantastic 3G coverage. (I can count on one hand the number of dropped calls I’ve had with AT&T since June 2007.)
At home where I have full signal, holding the phone in my left hand will cause the bars to drop down to 1. Though I am still able to retain enough connection strength to make phone calls, browse the web, and even stream Pandora.
My office, however, has poor reception. And yesterday if I held the iPhone 4 “incorrectly” it was literally unusable as a phone. I never had this issue on my 3GS. Even with poor 3G reception at my office I could always establish a connection and have a phone conversation.
This morning I installed Marco’s antenna booster, and it actually does seem to help a little bit. Using it at home the signal only drops to 2 or 3 bars instead of 1. I have not been in to the office yet to test it there.
Also, here’s a chart of 11 consecutive speed tests I did on the iPhone 4. The drop in bars does mean a worse connection.
Thorough, full of one-liners, and very well written. The best article I’ve ever read on Engadget.
Pat Dryburgh:
If you put an item on a reflective surface and lift one side, the reflection of that side will appear to “sink†down into the reflection, rather than follow the upwards direction of the object. In Apple’s recreation of a reflection, however, the icon and its reflection appear to be physically joined, and follow the same movements on the same axis.
That’s some good design.
Nice.
(Via Jim Ray, who also has a non-busy wallpaper that is iPhone 4 ready.)
You can sync them via iTunes and send them into iBooks from various contextual menus (in Mail, Dropbox, etc…) on your iPhone / iPad. (Via Cameron Moll.)