Update

I’m sorry for the update delays, everyone – my wife and I just moved to a new apartment last weekend, and as I’m sure you’re aware, that can be more hectic and time-consuming than expected. For instance, I didn’t actually find my iPhone sync cable until last night, and I’ve had zero time to write code at home for the last 10 days as we packed, moved, cleaned, and are now unpacking.

Here’s where things stand:

iPhone app: The next major version is in final beta testing. Very little work is needed to finish and release it. I expect this to happen within 1-3 weeks. It’s a major upgrade and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. Instapaper Pro will be upgraded first, with Free following a few weeks later. Either release may be further delayed if Apple rejects their submissions for whatever minor, inconsistent, or nonsensical rule they’re enforcing that day – but I expect approval delays to be short.

Website: The Instapaper web interface will have a couple of major feature additions when the iPhone-app update ships, corresponding to the app’s new features.

Kindle: Many users have written to report bugs about the Kindle digests being incomplete or not being delivered. I’ve fixed a few issues but there are still a few remaining. Please do not email or call Amazon about this: it’s my bug, not theirs. Thanks. I apologize for the delay – I didn’t foresee the popularity of this feature and didn’t build in enough capacity initially.

The New York Times: While it still works for most users, I’ve received occasional reports of NYT URLs saving their login page instead of the story. I’m not prioritizing this very highly because, honestly, I believe NYT support is short-lived. It’s only a matter of time before they either ask me to stop parsing their content for offline/text use or they implement a limited-view paywall. I’d be happy to work with them on other ideas, such as letting them charge Instapaper users or requiring a premium NYT.com subscription, but all of my inquiries have gone completely unanswered, so I assume they’re not interested in interacting with me at all. I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up for any other outcome, nor do I want to spend much development time on this when I could be improving Instapaper itself or the way every other site works.

I believe that compatibility with most big-name newspaper and magazine sites is not guaranteed long-term. They’re all struggling to be profitable online, and they’re likely to try a lot of tricks (limited-view free access, required logins, paywalls, forced interstitials, etc.) that will break most offline viewers and content parsers like Instapaper. I’m not interested in playing the evasion cat-and-mouse game – if they don’t want me accessing their content for offline/text use, I’ll comply.

Ultimately, Instapaper is a web reader, optimized for sites and blogs that want to be openly accessed, and there’s a ton of great content out there beyond the handful of popular magazines and newspapers that get most of the readers. Maybe the big-name sites’ paywalls and tricks will give other web publishers and individual writers a chance to find bigger audiences – and I’d love for Instapaper to help make that happen.

Finally, while I don’t have time to respond to every email, I appreciate all of the encouraging words and suggestions. Thanks, everyone.