A $5 App That Justifies Your iPhone Purchase: Instapaper (opens in new tab)

I do the same thing, but I use Safari which can only restore tabs from the single most previous session. At some point my browser will crash, and then will crash again before I’ve restored the previous session. And then my reading black log will be cleared. I can’t decide if this is a bug or a feature.

I use instapaper for articles I really want to read. The tilt to scroll is amazing. It might be my favorite way to read.

That is why I like Opera. You can actually save sessions, and return to them. So you can have more than one session going on at a time. I usually save a session once a month. It's quite interesting seeing what I was into 5-6 years ago.

Its design is brilliant—I am similarly a fan, though I don't Twitter—but my point was that "killer app" means something that "the best twitter client I've ever used" does not.

Tweetdeck syncs with our desktop experience. For people that need to filter the stream to grok it better (read: eventually everyone), Tweetdeck is better.

You and your fucking snark. Hacker News is a place with lots of smart people saying smart things. Snark is for when people say something that is obviously stupid and not worth a debate. If you want to disagree with me, do it earnestly, because perhaps this is worth a discussion.

Twitter is the #13 site globally according to Alexa. Does that mean that a Blogger app would be more of a killer app than a Twitter app? What about a MySpace app? MSN? Windows Live? Google? If I told you that the iPhone's killer app was a Google search, wouldn't that sound stupid?

But Wired isn't just saying that. They're saying that Tweetie, one of a hundred Twitter applications, is a killer app and that the other applications aren't. Furthermore, Tweetie is a killer app if you use Twitter with multiple accounts. That is an incredible weird rare fringe thing. I'd bet most Twitter users have a single account.

Now do you want to attempt sarcasm again? Because I'll warn you: Not only do I know more about what I'm arguing than you do, I'm a better snarker than you, and I will tear you to little fucking pieces.

I remember when I joined HN and routinely felt dwarfed by the intellectual discourse here. Now I say something and the response is likely as not bullshit like yours. I feel so goddamn old.

Try this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Serial_Visual_Presentatio... http://www.zapreader.com/

I've found instapaper during my morning commute is an app that buys me time to catch up on reading. Works even better if you commute by tube and there is no phone signal to distract you (with email, twitter, etc).

I get that...what irritates me is they don't do the same with Safari. With this logic, one could complain that the alphabet isn't kid safe because you can make naughty words out of it, or that a clock app promotes pot use because it reads 4:20 twice a day. A 17+ rating applied on such general grounds really creates a false impression about the products it's applied to, suggesting they are somehow more likely to expose the user to objectionable content and thus hurting sales.

FYI: That's absolutely not true. Read It Later came out 5 months before Instapaper and had offline reading nearly a year before IP.

I didn't know that, so thanks!

But I find the way that ReadItLater works inside Firefox to work well - the fact that it's an icon on the toolbar, showing me how many unread things I have is kinda nice.

It strips content down to plain text, removing any advertising, promotional links, social networking buttons, etc., and it does so without the permission of the originating site. Digg tried to pull something similar when they introduced the Digg toolbar (embedding original content in a frame) and people got hopping mad. But I guess on the iPhone anything goes, since Apple owns the copyright for rounded rectangles.