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Instapaper Wants To Know Where You Are

Instapaper, the “read it later” app we love to love, has released a pretty significant upgrade. But one new feature in particular caught our eye: Instapaper has added geo-location, an extra even developer Marco Arment calls a little ridiculous. Or is it? One of Instapaper’s many popular “who would have predicted” features is the ability […]

Instapaper, the "read it later" app we love to love, has released a pretty significant upgrade. But one new feature in particular caught our eye: Instapaper has added geo-location, an extra even developer Marco Arment calls a little ridiculous.

Or is it? One of Instapaper's many popular "who would have predicted" features is the ability to invert the display, so you can read black fonts on a white background, or vice-versa. Turns out this is a very nifty alternative to brightness control, because the decision really is black and white. In a dark setting, if this matters to you at all, you'd want as little light and glow as possible, not just to reduce the backlight — and readability.

Arment came up with two new solutions in Instapaper version 2.3, which was release this week. You can toggle between the light and dark skins without leaving the page you are on and retreating into settings, or set it to switch automatically at sunrise and sunset the way your GPS display does.

Arment reveals he gave a lot of thought to how to make Instapaper do this automatically:

... [H]ow, exactly, do you define “night”? There’s no API access to the iPhone’s ambient light sensor, so I can’t just enable dark mode in dark rooms.

And I can’t just define hour boundaries, because 8 PM in December is much darker than 8 PM in June.

And I can’t just look at hours and the date, because 5 PM in December is much darker in Alaska than in Costa Rica.

So I used with the most reliable method I could think of: sunset times in your location. Yes, Instapaper is now location-aware, but only for this feature. (Leave it to me to come up with the least-social use of locations possible.)

It may or may not be the least social use but it does raise an interesting question about what Apple considers "beneficial information." In a Feb. 3 bulletin to developers Apple created that standard, saying it would not approve apps that used "location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user's location."

That decree was seen by some as a move to protect its own mobile ad network ambitions -- iAD would be launched in July -- by crippling the ability of app developers to, essentially, be build their own ad platforms.

We've seen Apple hoisted by its own petard with the enforcement of broad rules, as when it denied and then approved Pulitzer-Prize-winning cartoonist Mark Fiore's satirical app under a section of the developer's license agreement which bans "materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic, or defamatory.”

So we're delighted that Apple considers Instapaper's geo-location-enabled night vision as a "beneficial feature" -- if it indeed has, and just got in under the radar. And we wonder with the bar now set here, what other non-obvious uses are in the offing. Because as clever as this use of location awareness it, it doesn't have anything to do with populating an app with local knowledge. Instead, Instapaper examines local conditions to programatically alter the behavior of the app.

Educate me in the comments: Anything else like that out there?

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