Posts Tagged ‘shameless-hucksterism’
Imagine that: I was right about Safari 5’s Reader
Download Squad has confirmed that I was more right than even I suspected in yesterday’s post about the Reader function in Safari 5 browser. It doesn’t just mimic Arc90’s Readability bookmarklet — it is Arc90’s Readability bookmarklet.
That means Apple is making big marketing hay out of its adoption of a feature PC users have enjoyed for years. Somehow, Cupertino has made this sound like a revolution in browsing. Well, it may be a revolution for the 10 percent or so of folks who live on Mac technology only. For the rest of the world, the proper reaction is “What took you so long?”
Read Dan Kennedy (@dan_kennedy_nu) for an outline of Reader’s Mac usability and a smart kinda-sorta counterview.
Safari 5: Apple hype in overdrive
(Fun update at the end!)
Besides its speed, which is real and impressive, the big feature everyone seems to be touting in Apple’s new Safari 5 is something called Reader, which strips a page to its simple text. Setting aside the hand-wringing over whether it Presages the Death of Ads (© Every Blogger With a Media Job Inc.), the truly impressive thing about Reader is how Apple has swallowed a simple java bookmarklet, which already works in Chrome, IE, Firefox and as far as I know Netscape 1, and spit it back out to Apple fanboys as some major advance.
People, this is just Arc90’s Readability bookmarklet, or a very convincing ripoff. If you’re reading this in any other flavor of browser, you can enjoy the exact same utility. It’s free, and it’s at http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/.
Screenshots after the jump.
Alex Johnson - Journalist at Large 