marco arment

There are 6 posts tagged marco arment (this is page 1 of 1).

A response to Marco Arment about ADN Freemium

Today, App.net (ADN), the social network that made me drop all others made an important announcement – that it is going to allow free accounts that are invited by currently paying members. I did not intend on writing a blog post about it because this is news that has already spread through wildfire in the tech community. Some have lauded and some criticized it. But the post that made me write is this commentary by Marco Arment.

Marco argues that while such news is welcome, ADN needs to do more to promote user growth instead of focusing on developing the API. He goes on to state that the main reason people are signing up is the twitter like functionality sans the spam and advertisements and instead of building file storage APIs, the team should develop spam protection and open the gates completely to free members. Continue reading →

DotDotDot.me: Instapaper finally has a replacement

All those of you who still remember reading paper based books, think about one thing – did you ever keep a separate notebook to make notes about your comments on certain sections of the book or to mark sections you really liked? Wasn’t it just better to just mark the sections in the book itself, wasn’t that more convenient and when you’d pick it up again, you’d remember the context? Similarly, in the digital world of web pages and ebooks, what’s better, keeping a separate service that you use to mark web pages you liked or to keep a single service where you can save the web pages, your comments and bookmarks and even be able to search through it all?

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Pythonista + Fever + Instapaper = Quick RSS Magic

I Love Python. It’s a simple, easy and quick to learn language. Before learning Python, the major language I knew was Java and believe me, that’s a pain! Seeing Python grow from a simple scripting language to a major platform is also a great feeling. The recent awesomeness about Python I discovered was Pythonista for iOS. It’s a wonderful app that allows you to run python scripts of varying complexity on your iPhone or iPad without worrying about silly things like Objective C. Of course, it’s not the perfect app, there are limitations to the libraries and you can’t easily transfer scripts to the app from your desktop. But hey, as long as it’s Python, right? Continue reading →

Copy-Paste: The saga of the inferior clone

I love reading two blogs – EggFreckles and Marco.org. Both these blogs talk about technology but are highly personal, reflecting the blogger’s perspective on topics.

Yesterday, I read a recent Marco Arment post talking about his latest offering – The Magazine. The Magazine is a high quality biweekly that has the unique distinction of being an iOS only app. Notice how I’ve used the words magazine, app and biweekly in the same sentence. That’s because this new service, like everything Marco touches, has created a new space for itself. It’s not just a print magazine being published on the web/mobiles *also*. It’s not just an app that has articles, that’s a job for the Kindle or the Instapaper apps. It’s not just a news stream or a ragtag collection of articles from all over the web. Continue reading →

Back to Instapaper

I’ve recently returned to Instapaper.

Why? Because it’s neat. I use Fever exclusively for my RSS consumption but the feed view in Fever is pretty bad. So, almost always, I found myself looking for a way to read interesting articles without visiting their ad-filled websites. Instapaper was embedded in Fever, but I discovered that if I don’t just want to save the article to Instapaper, I want to read it right then, I could easily integrate the “Instapaper Text” bookmarklet into Fever and go from there. Further, Instapaper’s code is smart enough to parse 99% of the sites I want to read cleanly (including, amusingly, Google.com :D)

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