I don’t know about you, but I have a bad habit of bookmarking a lot of articles. But there’s a reason I say it’s a bad habit. I bookmark with an app called InstaPaper. InstaPaper is a great little app that simply allows you to save the online articles you’d like to “Read Later.” Big deal you say…well, you can read these articles without Wi-Fi or 3G access, InstaPaper stores them locally on your iPhone to read offline.

Now, enter the media and RSS firehose, Twitter accounts (I have 3,) Facebook and you have a lot of material that might interest you. Me? I fall into the habit all too often of saying, “Read Later,” because somewhere in my brain I think I’ll have the time to read everything I send to InstaPaper. Fortunately (although, that depends on your point of view) InstaPaper only holds 500 articles. I wasn’t aware of this, and to my dismay one day, I was looking for an article and couldn’t find it. That’s when I discovered the cap, which the developer clearly states (and is right) is plenty. If you have over 500 saved articles in InstaPaper, how many do you think you’ll actually get to?

For me it’s a bad habit, chug-a-lugging on the never empty fire hose of content coming at me from all sides. How could I possibly read all of these things? I can’t, but somehow I slide into the habit of pushing that “Read Later” button. It’s pretty easy to say, “Oh wow, this is great! I don’t have time to read the whole thing, I’ll just set it aside for later.”

I have found a way to have my cake and eat it too: Evernote. Evernote is another great app for iPhone and Mac desktop that allows you to throw everything you want to remember into organized “notebooks.” This has become as embedded in my work-flow and life that it might as well be implanted in my forearm…oh wait…I’d want my iPhone there first… but I digress. Evernote’s notebooks are filled with what are called “Notes” and they can be anything from a screen shot, and entire web page in PDF format (yes, it let’s you do that,) and it even read text in photos. If you want to know more, go here, a post I wrote a while back about the app.

The other day, I thought I’d try a little trick I’ve been doing with Evernote on my desktop. Sometimes I just do a “select all,” copy and paste (for Evernote there are special keystoked for this,) and I have that shipped to Evernote for safe keeping. While on my InstaPaper page in Safari on my desktop, I did the same thing, just for fun to see what happened. BOOM! My entire insanely long page of article links, right into Evernote, all in one note! Amazing! Now those article links that were near the 500 or 499 mark, are saved forever! Not exactly pretty, but they’re saved…

Now, being a scholar of all in the GTD (Getting Things Done) way of thinking, it may not be good for me, but it’s cool nonetheless. Just because I can do it, doesn’t really mean I should. But hey, if I’m ever in a pinch, I’ll know what to do. How do you use Evernote or InstaPaper?

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This was new to me, probably because I missed it before and because I don’t travel as much as I used to. Alaska Airlines has added seven cities to it’s mobile boarding pass options. As Everything Long Beach reported yesterday: “Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air’s electronic boarding pass and optimized mobile Web site meet the needs of today’s high-tech traveler, ” said Steve Jarvis, Alaska Airlines’ vice president of marketing, sales and customer experience. “Starting today, our customers can expedite the airport check-in process even more and get from curbside to planeside in record time.”

So there we are…which makes me wonder about other paper oriented service options that will pop up as mobile instead? With a quick Google search, I pulled up several interesting paperless services that are intriguing. I found Zumbox (a paperless postal service,) Fandango will soon offer tickets on the iPhone, and of course Starbucks has the Starbucks card iPhone app. Many others are on the way, and there are many that I haven’t found yet. How about you? Found any apps that ditch paper>

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Yes, I say thankfully – because as a magazine publisher keeping up-to-date on the current pulse of media, I decided to chuck $3 for WIRED Magazine’s iPhone app. Let’s just say it was not a pleasing experience. It reminded me of a tree type architecture…and it wasn’t (wait for it…) intuitive!

But, to give them credit, they did show what they intend to do with the iPad version of the magazine as you’ll see below. It is pretty sweet and basically tells you something about the iPad: Print media’s shackles of limitation are off! This new medium is limitless, really. Look at how they pull those cars or products around to view them in 360º – it is awesome to say the least. Oh, and what they can’t say in-depth in text, there’s video for that. This my friends is the future…and say what they may, but iPad has opened Pandora’s box and we all are going to be wowed now and in the next few years to come.

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To celebrate the approach of Apple iTune’s 10 Billionth download, Apple has something special up it’s sleeve: The lucky person who makes that special purchase wins a $10,000 iTunes gift card, the largest ever.

As many have looked back at the entry of the iPod and the negativity that tech pundants are spewing on the new iPad, it wasn’t the iPod that made Apple successful in this arena…it was iTunes. Nobody liked the iPod either, it was just another MP3 player. Then iTunes was born, and Apple had agreements with all major labels to purchase music buffet style. My have times changed. Get on over there an sign up to enter to win!

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BNET asked Apple’s Steve Jobs arch rival Bill Gates about the iPad…his remarks were somewhat comical to me anyway.

Gates told Brent Schlender, “You know, I’m a big believer in touch and digital reading, but I still think that some mixture of voice, the pen and a real keyboard – in other words a netbook – will be the mainstream on that,” he said. “So, it’s not like I sit there and feel the same way I did with iPhone where I say, ‘Oh my God, Microsoft didn’t aim high enough.’ It’s a nice reader, but there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‘Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.’”

Familiar? It was Gates who herlded the awesomeness of the tablet long ago, and it didn’t take off as he had wanted. Here we are how many years later? And he’s still insisting that a stylus and keyboard must be a part of a successful…netbook.

Again, right back to a netbook. Maybe that’s ok. It’s all well and good, because the crystal ball doesn’t even have a clue about what’s going to happen with the iPad, Kindle, Nook, or the now unveiled iTablet. We can look at what the naysayers said about the iPod or the iPhone. History is already repeating itself.

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Electronista is reporting that a leak Wednesday says that Apple could drop the sale of some TV shows to $1. A few unnamed studios had been approached by Apple and agreed to cut the price as a way to gage interest.

This would make sense, looking at the iTunes music model…sales have actually dropped since the $1.29 price per song was launched (although now some music is as low as .69.) Which would you rather have? 4 million songs at .99 or 2.3 at $1.29? Warner Music Group saw 8% growth in sales in the holiday season in ‘09 as opposed to 20% from the same time the year before.

Electronista continues that the Financial Times reported that only some studios were approached with this offer, which may mean it is to spur sales of certain shows in particular. They don’t believe that Apple will do this with it’s 720p version of shows.

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MacDailyNews tweeted about a report by Nadia Cameron of Computerworld; Microsoft launching it’s Surface Table in Australia at an event today:

“Microsoft has officially launched its Surface line of touch computer units in Australia with a focus on retail, education and finance markets,” Nadia Cameron reports for Computerworld.

Cameron reports, “At an event in Microsoft’s Sydney headquarters on Tuesday, Microsoft’s entertainment and devices division president, Robbie Bach, said the main targets would be businesses and not consumers.”

I personally enjoy MacDailyNews takes on these types of announcements, this one really got my attention:

Let’s see: $18,284 for Microsoft’s 42.5″ x 27.2″ x 22.3″ and 198.4 pound non-portable Big Ass Table
or
$499 for an Apple iPad that’s just 9.56″ x 7.47″ x 0.5″ thin, weighs just 1.5 pounds and does 150,000+ more things? Oh, however would one be able to decide?

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Lexcycle strips USB book sharing feature from Stanza app for iPhone at Apple’s request – If You Use Stanza for iPhone w/USB, don’t upgrade to new Update. Which, to me, I don’t understand, and have never used Stanza that way. I load up PDFs via WiFi, why do it via USB? If you do it this way, please let me know.

However – the real story here is Apple demanded the USB function to be stripped. Now, this is where it gets funky: you would have had to have a third party app called iPhone Explorer in order to move files back and forth direct from iPhone to desktop – circumventing the iTunes software. Any developer knows that Apple clearly states, this is your sandbox, you have to stay in it. They have a long history of restricting the way you move files around on the iPhone. So – taking that into consideration, the Stanza app made a workaround that created a security loop-hole. Of course Apple would find fault with it, them’s the rules baby.

Of course the web is all up-in-arms over this, claiming Apple is slamming down it’s “Iron Fist” again with it’s control-freak ways. Well, maybe – but maybe they are actually righting a developer program wrong that has gone on for too long. Maybe there’s a reason it has the rules in place, for like, I don’t know…security, bug and hacker prevention? It is really that simple – you sign an agreement, you agree to play by the rules, and if you don’t you get caught.

One of the main reasons people are raising a stink is that this company is now owned by the iPad’s biggest competitor – Amazon purchased Lexcycle (creator of Stanza) in April of 2009. People are screaming that it’s all being done out of malice, etc. Yeah sure…more like out of protecting their domain and millions of dollars spent on this product called iPhone.

It’s crazy to see all of this massive action on the e-book front these days, most if it leading back to Amazon. All of it seemed to start after the iPad announcement. Intriguing…I really can’t wait for Apple to finally start defending their Touch patents, when is that going to start? The Google phone Nexus One just got it applied on their device with a software update. I say, now the fight between Apple and Google really begins.

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Looks like we get a crumb or two before iPhone 3.2 – iPhone OS 3.1.3 is available now through iTunes.

Engadget reports that we get fixes for apps crashing at start-up, improved battery level reporting with iPhone 3GS, and something to do with Japanese keyboard issues…we’ll take what we can get!

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And the battle ends almost as surprisingly it started. Amazon has now buckled to MacMillan’s demands. From Mashable:

Now Amazon has made its own statement on its forums. The gist of the message: you win, Macmillan.

Specifically, Amazon is giving into Macmillan’s demands because it “has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books.” Clearly Amazon is going along with this unwillingly and believes that consumers will prove that Macmillan’s new prices are unreasonable by not opening their wallets.

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