iPhone « Irfan’s Corner on the Web

23Oct/090

Today’s App of the Day: Instapaper

Screen shot 2009-10-23 at 10.56.29.png

Instapaper is a great app. I bought the paid version a few months ago. Every time I find some interesting article or blog post I save it to "Read it later" in Safari so that I can read it when its convenient for me. There are primarily three things I particularly like about the app.

1. Instapaper does not simply bookmark a page for you and show it to you later. It rather saves the page and formats it in a manner that makes it very suitable for reading in an iPhone. This means that the page is convenient to read (As you can judge form the screenshots below) and you can read those articles/blog posts offline.

2. Another amazing feature of the app is "tilt-scrolling". Click on the tilt-scrolling button in a the toolbar and if you tilt the iphone to the back, the page automatically scrolls down, tilt it forwards the back scrolls back up. The more you tilt the iphone the faster the page scrolls.

3. I can save pages directly to my Instapaper account from everywhere. From Firefox, from the iPhone Safari and Mac Safari, all saved pages are accessible and can be organised from the Instapaper.com site.

This is an app I'm glad to have purchased! Its worth every penny. You can get it from here.

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26Mar/091

Is there really a App Store refund policy? I don’t think so!

Today morning I read a blog post at Techcrunch on App Store refund policy. The article stated that "users can get a refund within 90 days, according to Apple policy". I was glad to hear that as I had purchased various iPhone apps, which I frankly did not require at all.

I asked for a refund for two applications. For one I got it, and the mail clearly stated that the refund was a "one time exception" only and all sales are final. See attached Screenshot.

Picture 6.png

For the other application I got this mail:

Picture 8.png

Both Apps were bought within 90 days, so why would TechCrunch state that there is an Apple policy? Am I missing something?

Tagged as: iPhone 1 Comment

9Feb/090

Zinio for the iPhone is a good idea but…

I tried to access my magazine subscriptions on Zinio from the iPhone. It turns out that Zinio has a special website for iPhone users, and the website does display the content in a manner which is suitable for viewing from an iPhone.

But the actual text is horrendous. The displayed text is a compressed bitmapped image, rather than vector based text as in a PDF. This is a problem because once you zoom into the text you start seeing a lot of "noise" surrounding the text, and when you zoom out you don't see the noise, but you don't see the text clearly as well, as shown in the screenshots.

As a general rule, you should only use bitmapped based formats for static displays ie. an image sized at only 1024x780. However if some scaling maybe involved, one should always go for vector based formats, because it is redrawn at every size.