GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

Instapaper, our favorite iOS web reading application, works because it recognizes both the strengths and weaknesses of your device — something most websites either don’t or can’t consider. Just-released version 2.3 provides a terrific example of this in the new way it handles nighttime reading.

Impresario Marco Arment, who recently left his job at Tumblr to work on Instapaper full-time, outlines the changes on the Instapaper blog. Here, I’m going to highlight just one, because I think it’s both very cool and a good illustration of this problem of working within constraints of both a device and a platform.

Instapaper can now automatically switch modes from light (dark text on a light screen) to dark (light text on a dark screen). How the application pulls it off is very clever.

“Theres no API access to the iPhones ambient light sensor,” Marco writes, “so I cant just enable dark mode in dark rooms… And I cant just look at hours and the date, because 5 PM in December is much darker in Alaska than in Costa Rica.”

Instead, Instapaper uses the phone’s location (there’s an API for that!) and the local sunset time wherever your phone is. After dark, Instapaper goes into dark mode. If you mostly use Instapaper indoors, in light rooms, you can always leave the light/dark toggle on manual.

“Leave it to me to come up with the least-social use of locations possible,” Marco writes.

Other changes include text preview snippets on both iPhone and iPad; a smart Kindle-inspired length and progress meter (more dots equal longer articles – darkened dots show progress); improved account syncing and sharing features; and a bookmarklet-installation feature that cuts out a few steps, but is still harder than it ought to be (Apple’s fault, not Instapaper’s).

On another app, the new version’s interface changes would be tweaks. Here, they’re key design choices for better readability. It’s the best-designed undesign service going, stripping the core design from the story and reformatting it in a way that gives the user more control (but also more guidance) over the content’s look and feel.

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Source:wired.com

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Marco Arment created Instapaper, a tool that strips clutter from online articles and saves them for later reading, because he couldn’t concentrate at his desk. As the former chief technology officer for Tumblr, his Mac Pro’s screen was always pulling him away to do something else.

“In the modern desktop environment, with multitasking and alerts and constant activity, there are always more distractions,” Arment told Wired.com in a phone interview. “When you’re at a computer, your hands are always on the controls.” Whether you’re watching a video or reading an article, he explained, you can always click away to check email or switch to another application, ready to do the next thing.

What’s next for Arment is making Instapaper, the one-time hobby that became a beloved and award-winning iOS application, an even more powerful e-reading application. Writer/designer/e-reading expert Craig Mod recently called Instapaper his “favorite digital reading experience,” combining the flexibility of HTML design with the clean minimalism of e-books: “It’s lovely and a great baseline to which other ereaders should aspire.” To get beyond that baseline, Arment recently left Tumblr to work on his former side project full-time.

The purpose of Instapaper is to promote what Arment calls “attentive reading” in the face of digital distraction. It doesn’t reject the web, but affirms it. On the one hand, it recognizes that we increasingly do more reading on computers and other electronic screens. On the other hand, it tries to extract items of lasting value, removing them from the most toxic aspects of that environment, so we can focus on them more effectively.

“People love information,” Arment said. “Right now in our society, we have an obesity epidemic. Because for the first time in history, we have access to food whenever we want, we don’t know how to control ourselves. I think we have the exact same problem with information.”

We accumulate thousands of unread emails — and the attendant guilt about not having read or answered them — only to empty out our inboxes and start over again. It’s as if we’re suffering from an entire range of collective information disorders: when we’re not binging, we’re purging.

Web media, Arment says, has evolved to fit this environment. Everything is shorter, bullet-pointed, structured to catch and hold a reader’s attention for a few moments, and then ideally emailed or tweeted or reposted. Social networks and feed readers have developed their own alerts, guaranteeing that we keep them in our information stream. It’s the office productivity workflow, recycled for institutionalized distraction.

You might think that smartphones and other mobile devices would only accelerate this trend, and to some extent they have. Twitter comes from text messaging, and low-resolution viral videos are tailor-made for tiny screens. But when Arment developed Instapaper as an application for iPhone and then the iPad, he discovered something different.

“Instapaper wouldn’t be of as much value if it weren’t for these mobile and e-reader devices. They give you a separate physical context for reading,” Arment said. Away from the office, desk and desktop, with each application taking up the entire screen, a reader’s eyes and hands all have to learn how to behave again. For the iPhone, Arment even created a function that would auto-scroll through an article if you tilted it backwards, to take the user’s hands completely out of the equation.

The fewer productivity tools a device has, the better it works as a reading machine. “One reason I love the Kindle, more so than the iPad, is that on the Kindle you can’t do anything else but read,” Arment said. “It’s the best because it does the least. It doesn’t even show a clock.”

There are a few ways to get Instapaper articles onto the Kindle in the Kindle’s magazine format, including wireless email delivery and downloading and syncing over a wired connection. And while the iOS apps are still vastly more popular, with the new Kindle 3, he says, requests for Instapaper support on the Kindle have shot up exponentially.

Given this surge in interest, I asked Arment about whether he might be gearing up to release an Instapaper app for Kindle. “It’s definitely a bigger market now,” he said, hedging a bit.

The problem for a content-delivery app is that Amazon restricts the amount of 3G bandwidth applications can use. Any Instapaper app would have to be Wi-Fi only and abandon backwards compatibility.

Another problem is that the current Kindle Development Kit also doesn’t allow as much access to core technologies like web rendering and hooking into other applications as Apple’s iOS. Essentially, any Instapaper app for Kindle would require recreating all of the coding work Arment did to originally turn Instapaper posts into Kindle magazines.

“Amazon didn’t anticipate this kind of use of their devices,” Arment said. “What I’d like to do is work with Amazon to make what I’m doing now [delivery as a Kindle magazine] better.”

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Source:wired.com

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Photograph of Stphane Mallarm’s Un Coup de Ds, Public Domain

E-readers have tried to make reading as smooth, natural, and comfortable as possible. The ideal is for the device and text to fade away and immerse you in the imaginative experience of reading. This is a worthy goal. It’s also a profound mistake.

This is what worries Wired’s Jonah Lehrer about the future of reading. He notes that when “the act of reading seems effortless and easy… [w]e dont have to think about the words on the page.” If every act of reading becomes divorced from thinking, then the worst fears of “bookservatives” have come true, and we could have an anti-intellectual dystopia ahead of us.

Lehrer cites research by neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene showing that reading works along two pathways in the brain. When we’re reading familiar words laid out in familiar sequences within familiar contexts, our brain just mainlines the data; we can read whole chunks at a time without consciously processing their component parts.

When we read something like James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, on the other hand — long chunks of linguistically playful, conceptually dense, sparsely punctuated text — our brain can’t handle the information the same way. It goes back to the same pathways that we used when we first learned how to read, processing a word, phoneme, or even a letter at a time. Our brain snaps upright to attention; as Lehrer says, “[a]ll the extra work the slight cognitive frisson of having to decipher the words wakes us up.”

I think Lehrer makes a few mistakes here. They’re subtle, but decisive. I also think, however, that he’s on to something. I’ll try to lay out both.

First, the mistakes. I think Lehrer overestimates how much the material form of the text — literally, the support — contributes to the activation of the different reading pathways in the brain. This actually deeply pains me to write down, because I firmly believe that the material forms in which we read profoundly affect how we read. As William Morris says, “you can’t have art without resistance in the material.”

But that’s not what Dehaene’s talking about. It’s when we don’t understand the words or syntax in a book that we switch to our unfamiliar-text-processing mode. Smudged ink, rough paper, the interjection of images, even bad light — or, alternatively, gilded pages, lush leather bindings, a gorgeous library — are not relevant here. We work through all of that. It’s the language that makes this part of the brain stop and think, generally not the page or screen.

Second, it’s always important to remember that there are lots of different kinds of reading, and there are no particular reasons to privilege one over the other. When we’re scanning the news or the weather (and sometimes, even reading a blog), we don’t want to be provoked by literary unfamiliarity. We want to use that informational superhighway that our brain evolved and that we have put to such good use processing text.

Reading is, as the philosophers say, a family-resemblance concept; we use the same words to describe different acts that don’t easily fall under a single definition. It’s all textual processing, but when we’re walking down a city street, watching the credits to a television show, analyzing a map, or have our head deeply buried in James Joyce, we’re doing very different things. And in most cases, we need all the cognitive leverage we can get.

Now, here’s where I think Lehrer is right: overwhelmingly, e-books and e-readers have emphasized — and maybe over-emphasized — easy reading of prose fiction. All of the rhetoric is about the pure transparency of the reading act, where the device just disappears. Well, with some kinds of reading, we don’t always want the device to disappear. Sometimes we need to use texts to do tough intellectual work. And when we do this, we usually have to stop and think about their materiality.

We care which page a quote appears on, because we need to reference it later. We need to look up words in other languages, not just English. We need displays that can preserve the careful spatial layouts of a modernist poet, rather than smashing it all together as indistinguishable, left-justified text. We need to recognize that using language as a graphic art requires more than a choice of three fonts in a half-dozen sizes. Some text is interchangable, but some of it is through-designed. And for good reason.

This is where we’ve been let down by our reading machines — in the representation of language. It isn’t the low-glare screens, or the crummy imitative page-turn animations. They’ve knocked those out of the park.

In fact, we’ve already faced this problem once. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, book production went into overdrive, while newspapers and advertising were inventing new ways to use words to jostle urban passers-by out of their stupor.

Writers wanted to find a way to borrow the visual vitality of what was thought of as ephemeral writing and put it in the service of the conceptual richness and range of subject matter that had been achieved in the nineteenth-century novel.

That’s where we get literary and artistic modernism — not only Joyce, but Mallarm, Stein, Apollinaire, Picasso, Duchamp, Dada, Futurism — the whole thing. New lines for a new mind, and new eyes with which to see them.

That’s what e-books need today. Give us the language that uses the machines, and it doesn’t matter if they try to get out of the way.

Source:wired.com

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