Apture was one of those services that annoys a user every time they highlight text. Google bought the company in November and is planning on closing it tomorrow and integrating the service into Chrome at some point in the future. A team of hackers has managed to clone the very irritating service, creating Highlight.
I don’t know who won. I suspect nobody.
Marco Arment improves Amazon’s iPad vs. Kindle Fire comparison chart.
The patent issued in 1999 and, in general terms, covers a device that scans computer text for data, like a phone number, and turns that number into a link that the user can then select to perform an act, like calling the number.
This is a win for Apple, but a loss for consumers. Apple will probably license this patent (like they attempted to do with Samsung), but it’s unfortunate that this is a patent in the first place.
In this phenomenal rebuttal to Kurt Andersen’s Vanity Fair critique, Maria Russo makes a solid case for the further internal development of the last twenty years instead of the somewhat superficial baby boomer years.
Fortune favors the bold, in style and in artmaking as in everything else, but what looks to Andersen like the vigorous innovation of decades past was in many cases a flashy railing against convention, producing work that was equally ephemeral.
This is intellectual disarmament as its best.