David Pogue:
Still, the WWDC announcements reminded small software companies everywhere that their efforts could be duplicated by Apple at any time. Think of Growl (very similar to the new Notifications feature of Mountain Lion); the Classics app (whose bookshelf design was borrowed for iBooks); Instapaper (now made obsolete by a new feature in Mountain Lion’s version of Safari); and so on.
I talk about Instapaper a lot, about how I love it and about how it’s the app I use most on my iPad (and how Instapaper for iPad accounted for more than half of my decision to get an iPad), but I don’t think I’ve ever talked about how I started using Instapaper. It happened because Apple announced Reading List last year, and when I looked into it I learned that there was a much better app for the web and iOS that did the same thing but in a cooler way.
Development of Safari is quite a bit behind that of Chrome and Firefox now. I’d love to switch back to Safari if there was a way to write decent extensions for it that could rival what Chrome can do, let alone what Firefox can do. But I doubt that will happen any time soon. I’m sure some people will use the Safari Reading List feature, but I doubt it makes even a dent in Instapaper’s sales/subscriptions.
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