Why Arc90 Built Readability

http://blog.arc90.com/2010/06/10/why-we-built-readability/

by nirmal • 16 years ago

78 26 16 years ago

blog.arc90.com

omaranto• 16 years ago

I did not realize that Safari 5's Reader feature was actually implemented using Readability. That's good to know.

ugh3• 16 years ago

They themselves didn’t know, actually. Until someone told them to look at the Acknowledgements. (If you have Safari 5 installed you can check it out yourself, the Acknowledgments can be found in the Help menu.)

sliverstorm• 16 years ago

So can we assume this means Safari isn't actually calling arc90's servers when it uses Readability?

I really hope it isn't. That'd be INCREDIBLY under-handed. I can't imagine a big company like Apple shipping software that relies on an unrelated company's service, without said other company even realizing.

jonah• 16 years ago

I know there's no requirement to do so, but am somewhat surprised that they didn't get a heads up or thanks from Apple for such a visible implementation.

miguelpais• 16 years ago

Neither did I. So I find it strange that in news articles like this one: http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/travel/13Harry.html?hp Readability still does a better job then the Reader extension that is based on it.

Readability is able to include the images and presents something that doesn't look like a poorly printed page like, sorry guys, the Reader thing does.

andreyf• 16 years ago

I imagine that "thank a developer for using a bookmarklet" is pretty low on the priority list of people trying to implement this feature. Wayyy below "guess where Steve's mood is going, so we can get him at a time he'll think this deserves the precious screen space".

leif• 16 years ago

Of course, you have to wonder, why doesn't arc90's blog use one of its readability themes?

guelo3• 16 years ago

I wonder if they're wishing they had copyrighted Readability with a non-commercial license instead of the Apache License. They should be getting paid for it.

ugh3• 16 years ago

Then this probably wouldn’t have happened. I don’t think Reader is so important to Apple that they would have implemented it no matter what.

JoachimSchipper• 16 years ago

Reimplementing it is not that difficult.

naner2• 16 years ago

Funny, I didn't see "To get paid" anywhere in the "Why we created readability" article.

guelo3• 16 years ago

I'm not saying Apple did anything improper, I'm just saying that it would be nice for Arc90 to get some money out of this. It is the number one feature on the Safari 5 "What's New" page, it's worth something to Apple.

bad_user• 16 years ago

Adding to the other comments ... such a service doesn't have a chance to not be free of charge. In this case the idea can be copied quickly, and not that hard to do.

Having Apple acknowledge and distribute their work is the best thing that could happen.

nooneelse• 16 years ago

If there were a readability+ which accumulated micropayments for participating sites you used it on, so that a site on which you liked the content, but not the view, could be compensated (perhaps exactly equal to the ad-money you were "depriving" them of (assuming that is true)), would you use it? Would enough people use it to make it worthwhile for sites to participate?

brown9-2• 16 years ago

Good for Arc90. They built an awesome tool and deserve more recognition (and for more people to use it, in various forms).

hooande• 16 years ago

Is Readability just opencalais/alchemyapi, or did they build it themselves?

xiaoma• 16 years ago

Ironically, this piece which criticizes pages with no regard for the reading experience cropped off the right 20% of every single line, thus making itself unreadable. Worse yet, when I tried scrolling right, I still didn't get the missing text. Instead, it was a solid wall of dark pixels.

I really wish I had Safari 5's reader for sites like this!

vladocar• 16 years ago

I think that the typography solution that Safari Reader uses is very similar to my ClipR reading bookmarklet http://code.google.com/p/clipr/

Why Arc90 Built Readability

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