Paris Air Show - 2011 Edition

I was at Le Bourget today for the 2011 edition of the Paris Air Show, along with several XWikiers. We enjoyed a day in the bright sun, watching aicrafts on display as well as the performance of pilots in the sky.

We got to see an impressive demonstration of the Rafale as well as a part of the Patrouille de France's show. We also saw an A380 flying - so big, yet flying so seamlessly!

It was really awesome, I'm already looking forward to the 2013 edition.

Why Safari Reader won't kill Instapaper

After this week's announcement that Apple will introduce a Reader capability to mobile Safari and a new feature called "Reading list" to the Safari browser across all platforms, I thought it would be interesting to review the differences between Instapaper and that new option.

A number of key points quickly emerge when trying to compare both options:
  • Safari isn't cool: it's not a mainstream browser (its market share is 7.3% overall). Users of a read later feature usually spend a lot of time scouring the web for news and articles. Those people are currently not inclined to use Safari as their main browser (they're way morel likely to use Chrome or Firefox as their main browser).
  • No offline mode: currently, there doesn't seem to be a way to save webpages for offline reading using the Reading list feature. You have to be connected to the internet to read articles, which makes the feature almost useless while travelling by train or plane, which is one of the big places where being able to read saved articles matters
  • No dedicated application: right now, the service is a part of Safari rather than a application standing on its own. This means that it's not optimized for the purpose of reading articles later, which makes its workflow confusing. You have to go the reading list, wait for the article to load, then tap the "Reader view" option to get an article to display properly. Instapaper is much more streamlined in this regard.
  • No API / integration with external services: unless I missed it, Apple did not announce any way for third-party applications and services to push articles to the reading list. One of Instapaper's greatest strength is its integration with services such as Google reader and other native RSS reading apps that make it seamless to send an article for reading later, whereas only Safari can push articles to the Reading list.
  • Platform limitations: Apple will only provide the service on platforms that it supports with the Safari browser. One of the best features for Instapaper power users is the ability to send articles to e-readers such as the kindle. In addition to this, Marco Ament could decide to offer a native Android application in order to broaden the appeal of Instapaper.
Therefore I strongly believe that the conclusions Marco came up to in his 2 blog posts on the topic still stand:
Safari Reader and the Reading list feature will serve to increase awareness about Instapaper and will ultimately help generate more Instapaper sales, the same way Starbucks is good for small coffee shops.

My bet about Mac Defender

Interesting confluence of 2 stories today:

Last time such a big software issue took place (during locationgate), Apple responded by quickly pushing a software update to its user base.

Therefeore, maybe the reason why Apple doesn't want Mac users to uninstall the Mac Defender malware is so that they can publish an update that will fix it for them, which requires that the file is still there?

UPDATE: indeed, here it is: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4650 :-)