For evidence of this shift, look no further than Apple. The company just reported an absolutely bonkers financial quarter, in which it sold 37 million iPhones and 15.4 million iPads. The two products now make up 72% of Apple's quarterly revenue and the consumer demand shows no sign of letting up.

This month, iOS edged past Mac OS X for the first time, accounting for 8.15% of all Web traffic, compared to the 7.96% coming from Mac desktops. Of course, this data does include Android, which probably constitutes a share of Web traffic that's roughly comparable to iOS. Even so, the combined mobile operating systems likely do not even begin to outnumber desktops overall, as there are still plenty of Windows machines out there.

Indeed, it will be some time before tablets and smartphones truly outnumber desktops and laptops. For now, most consumers are not replacing their computers with smaller devices, but rather supplementing them.

From deadly plant explosions and poisonous screen-cleaning chemicals to unsafe working conditions and long hours, the report was anything but forgiving. In response, there is a small but growing chorus of consumers asking Apple to do more about these issues. A petition demanding a more ethically-built iPhone 5 and other products is said to have amassed 40,000 signatories in its first 24 hours.

The company, like others that make consumer electronics, remains in an awkward position as its quest to meet growing demand clashes with the ethical concerns that naturally arise when the manufacturing is done in countries that lack the U.S.'s labor laws. Apple has stated that achieving the level of efficiency they now boast simply wouldn't be possible in the United States, where manufacturing has waned, labor is costly and regulations too strict to allow for lightning speed turnaround on last-minute changes. To stay competitive, it needs to keep its operations in places like China.

E-Signatures vs. Wallets: Which Votes Count More?

Forty thousand signatures may sound like a lot, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to 37 million. That's how many iPhones Apple sold in its last quarter, in addition to more than 15 million iPads. The pressure from consumer and human rights groups may well ramp up in the coming weeks and months, but for the time being the number of people voicing their concern is only .07% of the number that bought iPads and iPhones in the last quarter. That's not counting iPods and Macs.

To make a substantial impact, there would need to be an actual boycott of Apple products widespread enough to make a noticeable dent in their sales numbers. Some may decline to buy the iPhone 5, iPad 3 or iTV in protest, but probably not enough to make a difference.

Alternatively, the issue would need to turn into a much bigger PR problem for Apple, leading consumers to think twice or forcing the company to preempt an exodus by pressuring suppliers to shape up.

This isn't to suggest that a concerted enough Web-fueled protest couldn't generate the pressure required to encourage change. We saw it happen in more ways than one with the SOPA and PIPA debate. Still, this is Apple we're talking about. Rather than asking citizens to phone their representatives, such a protest would be asking millions to break their addiction to some of the most popular consumer electronics products of all time. These are devices that have woven themselves deeply into our day-to-day lives.

If people were to flee Apple, where would they go? To one of Apple's competitors? They're not exactly innocent either.

What do you think? Are labor rights issues enough to cause you to reconsider buying devices like smartphones and tablets? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

To a hardcore iPhone user, it seems like it should be relatively easy to explain what Launch Center does. But as the many meditative blog posts show, there's more here than meets the eye. Launch Center's creators at App Cubby are still figuring out for themselves what they're onto here. They've broken into something fundamental about iOS that it doesn't have yet, and they've made a $0.99 app we can all use to figure out together exactly what that is.

Launch Center is one app for launching tasks across many apps. It can be a simple speed-dial-Mom or text-my-girlfriend launcher, or it can hook deeply into an app and, for example, go straight to Instagram's camera screen. You can also link to any Web URL, which it will open in Safari. It also comes loaded with some neat shortcuts like a "Flashlight" button to turn on the phone's LED. An update last week added scheduled tasks, so you can now associate an in-app action with a timed reminder. This all sounds so useful, but it's surprisingly hard to figure out how to work it in.

@JonMwords hmm. I have "call girlfriend" and backup website.

— Federico Viticci (@viticci) January 29, 2012

I talked to App Cubby founder David Barnard today, and it sounds like he and developer Justin Youens are still figuring it out, too. Barnard says they only put Launch Center in their iPhone docks themselves in the last week or two. They're experimenting now with different kinds of interfaces, beyond a simple list of actions, as well as different kinds of tasks to launch.

They're also working with developers of other apps to create good URL schemes for inclusion in Launch Center. iOS apps have URLs for different screens or actions, just like websites. For example, to launch Instagram straight to the camera screen, the URL is instagram://camera. Launch Center users can input URLs themselves, and developers often make these publicly available. But it also comes loaded with some easy and common ones for users who don't want to get their hands too dirty.

But is this something users want? Is the convenience of going straight to a common action, rather than swiping around for the app you need, tapping it and then acting, important enough for most users? Barnard and I discussed that at length, and I think we concluded that there's no way to know without trying. So they went ahead and launched Launch Center at the unbelievably good price of $0.99, and now we can all try it. Barnard says that they're getting about 1,000 downloads a day, and they're especially big in Japan.

A Better Mental Model

Federico Viticci at MacStories wrote a thoughtful post last week about the shortcomings of Apple's iOS home screen. The problem is that its "badges on a table" approach is not quite flexible enough sometimes. It forces users to think about launching an app and then finding a task, even though one or two taps might seem like enough to cut straight to the action. Apple has had to hack its own interface with features like Notification Center to speed things up.

Launch Center started as a way to extend Notification Center, but the first version was rejected by Apple. The Launch Center of today is like a shelf containing its own list of actions chosen by the user. Barnard says they're considering making an "experimental" version for pro users, letting people choose from a variety of different launcher styles to see what works for them.

Whether or not we're conscious of them, I believe these kinds of time-savers and mental models are important to everyone with a smartphone. RWW fans almost certainly don't know this, but I co-host a weekly podcast with my friend Jamie from App Advice about what to do with all these devices. We discussed Launch Center when we first heard of it and again in great detail two days ago, because we're both frantically searching for ways to work this app into our lives. For now, I think we've both decided to just stick it on our docks first and find a way to use it over time.

In my Launch Center right now, I've got the Instagram camera launcher, "compose tweet" in Tweetbot (my Twitter client of choice), and a few Web bookmarks I use all the time, like my Kippt inbox. It's still very much an experiment, but that's the fun of Launch Center. If you're looking for ways to get a little more oomph out of your iPhone, check out Launch Center and share what you come up with.

Despite the company's official disapproval, jailbreaking iOS is still big among a certain subset of users, as evidenced by the popularity of the A5 Absinthe tool that was released last Friday. But should people in the jailbreak community continue to rest easy, assured that freeing their devices will forever remain legal? Probably not.

The only way to ensure that this doesn't happen, says the EFF, is for everyone to let the Copyright Office know that they would prefer to see jailbreaking remain legal, and why. There's a comment form that lets them do that.

In addition to smartphones, the EFF wants the Copyright Office to add exemptions for tablets and video game consoles as well. Two years ago, the tablet market simply wasn't what it is today, let alone the jailbreak community around it.

Video game consoles have been hacked and modded for years, but more recent tinkering with Microsoft's Kinect in particular has brought the true potential of the technology to the forefront. Even though Microsoft itself has embraced Kinect-hacking, the EFF doesn't want to let this kind of user-modification of game consoles slip through the legal cracks.

As quick and painless as this seems, Apple wants to simplify things even further for owners of its iPhones, iPads and other iOS devices. Imagine walking up to your phone or tablet in its dock and seeing the screen light up with a greeting. You pick it up and pull it a few inches closer to your face, and voilà! the screen is unlocked and the digital universe is instantly at your finger tips.

This is a feature already available on jailbroken iPhones, but one that works very slowly and can easily be hacked using a photograph.

Update: As some of our diligent commenters have pointed out, facial recognition unlock feature is also available in Ice Cream Sandwich, the latest version of Android. That implementation, however, has been shown to be easily fooled and Google has acknowledged that its not as secure as a traditional passcode.

The technology required to get this type of feature to work effectively is pretty sophisticated and, as Patently Apple describes it, "computationally expensive." The trade-off for using an alternative method is weaker security, which defeats the purpose.

In a somewhat jargon-loaded post, the Apple patent-watching blog describes how the company plans to overcome the challenges associated with implementing such technology. Their method would use a two-dimensional analysis of the placement of facial features as well as skin tone and check those details against "target images" previously captured by the device. This patent comes about a month after news of Apple's acquisition of a patent for advanced 3D object recognition, which could be used in a similar fashion.

Exactly how they would thwart creative attempts to hack the system wasn't detailed, but presumably they would have that sorted before this feature sees the light of day.

Plans like this point to the future of our interaction with computers and data. Motion-based gestural control is already here thanks to Microsoft's Kinect and the iPhone 4S has brought the most capable voice-controlled artificial intelligence application yet to the mass market. Siri is rumored to be coming to other iOS devices, including the iPad 3 and Apple's much-rumored HD television set, due to launch next year. Thanks to the curious tinkering of developers, we've begun to see what tools like the Kinect and Siri are capable of, and their potential goes way beyond desktop computers and mobile devices.

But Ink361, formerly known as Inkstagram, has built a few original features on top of Instagram. Today, it launched a map viewer, allowing users to browse a world map displaying geotagged Instagram photos.

In September, the site added hashtag albums, enabling topical grouping of photos in a way that isn't possible on Instagram alone. While Instagram uses hashtags to sort photos, Ink361 allows users to create their own albums and share them as links.

What's Up With That Name?

I asked van Apeldoorn what the new name was about. "We help you to share your world in 360 degrees and add something extra to that," he said. I noted that the old name - Inkstagram - was quite similar to Instagram itself, and I asked whether that had anything to do with the change. "The rebranding was not our idea, but based upon an offer we couldn't refuse ;-)," was his response.

I asked van Apeldoorn directly whether Instagram asked Inkstagram to change its name. "We had a friendly conversation over this topic that resulted to the rebranding," he said.

It's all settled now, and Ink361 has a few features that make it stand out from the rest. Ink361 gets around 220,000 unique visitors per month and has 27,000 followers on Instagram.

Which Instagram Web viewers do you use? Let us know in the comments.

The growth of smartphone adoption and associated mobile technologies has been staggering. As of the end of 2011, the majority of U.S. adults under the age of 35 now own a smartphone. Sixty-two percent of them have downloaded apps (mostly games), and mobile Web usage among these consumers has grown 45% since last year.

Video is huge among smartphone owners, who watched about 35% more video content on their devices than they did last year. From the looks of Nielsen's list of top apps, most of that video is coming from YouTube.

While many of the results drawn in many of these types of studies are not exactly breaking news, what's intriguing is the massively increasing degree to which we're all walking around with tiny, Web-connected computers in our pockets and the ways in which those devices are embedding themselves deep into our day-to-day lives. From the iPhone alarm that goes off in the morning to the miniature news reading and emails we check just before bed, these things aren't just gadgets. They're practically extensions of ourselves.

As we approach 2012, we expect to see this growth in the smartphone market continue unabated.

The app has long been beloved by owners of the iPad, the only device on which it was available until recently. By bringing the app to the iPhone, the Palo Alto-based startup made good on a promise they had been making for several months.

It was a busy week last week for this breed of news reading applications. On top of Flipboard's news came an update to Flud, a Zite app for iPhone and Google's launch of Google Currents, a somewhat underwhelming Flipboard competitor for iOS and Android.

Flipboard, which was named App of the Year by Apple last year, remains the leader of this particular space for now, as crowded as it's becoming.

The next logical step for Flipboard, especially if it wants this growth to continue, is to put out a version of its beloved social reading app for Android. Cofounder Evan Doll told us in a call last week that an Android app is a top priority for the company, but declined to give even a rough timeline for its launch.

The app is nicely designed and integrates a wide variety of features, some of which are available for free. It's both cool and very frustrating. Why aren't more apps like this? Why is the paper of record paywalling its best content about a subject of such great public importance?

I can hear that - but there's something that makes me feel uncomfortable about paywalling information about an election. It feels like something that oil barrons would do with secret dastardly newsletters they trade among themselves.

What's Inside

What's included in the app? Free users can access a selection of top election-related Times stories. "Six news stories for free," is how Raju Narisetti, Managing Editor of the Washington Post, summarizes the whole app on Twitter. Each story is appended by related Twitter messages, which is a unique feature. I'd love to know how they figured out what tweets to put on those pages - it seems to be automated and of moderate relevance.

Free users can also navigate to the election coverage of other publications through the Times app. The Washington Post, WSJ, MSNBC, Politico, Fox News and others all have prominent links in the app. That's a great move, even if it is very simple in execution. How many other major media outlets send their readers pro-actively to the content of competitors?

Unfortunately, that's where the free content ends. Everything else requires that you pay for either a $15 monthly subscription to access the NYTimes.com web content, the basic smartphone apps and presumably this app. Or you can pay an extra $20 each month to access the iPad app too. I like the Times iPad app but I'll read the WSJ or Al Jazeera or the Guardian or Flipboard or watch Newsy or read the Bloomberg app before I'm likely to pay $20 every month for the Times iPad app. Maybe I don't know what I'm missing; I would hate it if the New York Times wasn't around in 100 more years.

For those who do subscribe (and a lot of people do) other parts of the app are then unlocked. They include access to Times political blogs, an opinion section and a big election guide full of resources. Those include a Primary Calendar of the Republican nominating contests, a section of polls, updates on Republican candidates, stats by state and a calendar of debates. Finally, there's a big selection of videos by the Times video crew. These are great videos, I'm sure, and I am a little jealous that I can't watch them here.

So this is cool - and the participation of stats master Nate Silver of political research blog Five Thirty Eight is getting this thing closer to going over the line where I'd pay for it.

"But no interactivity?" asks Richard Robbins VP and Digital Strategist at the giant PR firm MWW Group, on Twitter. "Big miss. Suggestion for v2!!" Brooklyn designer Douglas Back asks on Twitter if there will be a web app version of the Election app content - and he probably wants it all for free, too!

You can't please all of the people all of the time and sometimes you've got to focus on the people who are paying you. Given the topic of this app, I feel a little uncomfortable about it - but maybe I need to get over it.

At the very least, the publishing experiment with high quality coverage of important matters, on mobile, is worthy of commendation.

Despite a violent crackdown on the protests, the rabble rousers just won't quit, and they're using their smartphones to keep in touch and get around your stringent controls on freedom of the press. What ever do you do?

Why the iPhone? It's not the only mobile device being used by Syrian protestors, but it's a significant one. Activists have been using at least one iPhone-specific app to disseminate information about the uprising and spread sometimes gory photos illustrating the government's violent response.

Technology Poses a Threat to Dictators, But This is Silly

Syria's government knows all too well how dangerous mobile technology and the Web can be to its existence. While these revolutions are spurred by real-life, on-the-ground circumstances and grievances, increasingly technology is providing some grease for the wheels.

With this move, we can't help but be reminded of the time the Egyptian government shut off Internet access in the country amidst the uprising there earlier this year. Of course, not two weeks later, Hosni Mubarak resigned.

In this case, the crackdown seems even more short-sighted, even putting aside the absurdity of logistically trying to enforce such a law. If you ban iPhones, people can still use a wide range of other devices to stay in touch and connect to the Web. If Internet access goes away, people can still use SMS as an organizing tool. Of course, in a country like Syria, shutting down mobile service all together is not a difficult task.

With these costs, paying an additional $15 to $50 to tether your iPhone to your laptop can seem difficult to stomach. Well, now you may not have to. For whatever reason, Apple has approved an iOS app that lets you do exactly that for a one-time fee of $15.

Still, it's not the first time Apple has embraced a feature that poses a potential threat to the revenue streams of the carriers. In iOS 5, they launched iMessage, which replicates the functionality of SMS text messages among iOS device users. It allows people to send and receive texts and pictures without relying on the carriers. If you know and routinely text enough people using iOS 5, you can reduce your monthly texting plan and save some money.

It's also possible that the carriers are less concerned about this feature now that most of them offer limited data plans for smartphone users. If you eat up your monthly data using your laptop, it's no skin off their back. You're just going to have to pay extra to stay connected on either device.

Of course, those of us who have been grandfathered in to unlimited data plans have the luxury of avoiding those extra costs, assuming Apple doesn't pull this from the App Store as many are predicting. It wouldn't be the first time such a thing has happened.

UPDATE: Aaaaand Apple has already pulled the app. We'll update this post if anything changes.

The search bar is front and center, collapsing to a top menu bar instantly when you put in your query. You can also access search history, Google Web apps, voice search and "Goggles" - image search using the iPad's camera - right underneath. The new Gmail app for iOS may be a dud, but this update to an already-great Google Search app makes it the best Google iOS app by a longshot.

Google.app, which is a universal app for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, was last overhauled in August, adding more search filters and Instant Pages for pre-caching result pages, so they load faster. In today's update, the search results themselves are instant, too, showing up as soon as you type in your query.

The app now has even more tablet-friendly UI features, like a swipe-able carousel for viewing image results. It also has visual history, instead of just a text list of queries. It adds search previews that pop up before you choose which search result you want, a feature recently added to desktop search. And, of course, there's a +1 button.

Google Search App Is Also A Launcher

This excellent release leaves iOS users with an obvious question: How can the search app be so good, while the new Gmail app is so bad?

Today's update gives two possible answers. It's now even easier to launch all of Google's great Web apps from the search app, which was already one of its most useful features. That includes Gmail, and the Web version of Gmail is more or less the same as the native app, if not better in some ways. So using the Google Search app puts users one tap away from a menu with Gmail, Calendar, Docs, News, Plus and more, even Google Voice, which has its own (lame) native iOS app, too. This launch screen got a nice overhaul today.

The other reason this is Google's best iOS app is voice search, also available with just one tap on both the iPad and iPhone versions. Apple's voice-powered AI search assistant, Siri, bypasses Google for some searches on purpose, and Apple is buying Google competitors, such as 3D mapping companies, to find even more ways around Google. By building an excellent iOS search experience, with voice search just one tap away, Google can train iPhone and iPad users to keep using it for search, even with Siri on board.

Do you use the Google Search app on your iPad or iPhone?

What's indisputably clear is that regardless of what's sparking and fueling these revolutions, technology is certainly helping to spread information and facilitate communication among the protesters.

The app, which works on both the iPhone and iPad, includes recent news about opposition groups and their activities, as well as videos, maps and photos, according to a story in the Daily Beast. It even rounds up jokes about al-Assad, adding a light-hearted twist to an often gruesome conflict.

Mobile technology and the Web are providing opposition groups a unique and unprecedented opportunity to disseminate news and propaganda about their cause, something that previously would have been quashed by government censors. Bloggers and journalists have routinely been arrested in Syria, with one prominent blogger recently being disappeared.

Technology-Fueled Protests Around the World

Even before the resignation of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in February, pundits and journalists were already debating the role that tools like Twitter and Facebook played in the revolution. However central the Internet was to Egypt's revolution, it was evidently important enough that Mubarak shut it down. That said, as some have pointed out, the uprising managed to succeed in ousting Mubarak even without Internet connectivity.

In the United States, Occupy Wall Street and related protests across the country have largely been organized online and extensively documented using social media tools like Twitter, Storify and YouTube. Attempts to brand the Occupy movement as the American equivalent to the Arab Spring may or may not prove to be accurate in the long run.

Either way, it's evident that where ever major uprisings and popular protests are occurring in the world today, the Web and mobile technology are there to help facilitate them. This isn't exactly a new phenomenon either, as Wired's David Kravets wrote in January. The 1979 revolution in Iran saw use of the audio cassette to spread propaganda, and word of the Tiananmen Square protests a decade later was spread by fax machine.

So, what's happening in Syria today is hardly new. It's also not clear how widespread iPhone adoption is in that country, so it's difficult to gauge how much of an impact the Souria Wa Bas app can have. Still, it may well be the first app of its kind, as the Daily Beast points out. For the protestors who have access to it, the app provides a flow of information that simply wasn't possible before in a country like Syria.

Protest photo by Syriana2011.

There's plenty to learn from the biography. Here are three of the main lessons that I took from the book. Each comes from an aspect of Steve Jobs' own personality, which he managed to instill into his company Apple. (Note: don't worry, there aren't any spoilers in this post!)

The Magician Genius

One of the reasons why Steve Jobs was so different and successful was his Buddhist and Zen sensibilities. Jobs traveled to India when he was a young man and the book explains how this led to his key business philosophies. I was particularly taken by the importance of intuition for Steve Jobs.

Jobs is quoted as saying, "I began to realize that an intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant than abstract thinking and intellectual logical analysis." He also said that "intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That's had a big impact on my work."

You can see that intuitive sense in Jobs' incredible ability to foresee - and then design - what users will want next. The iPhone is a great example. The following passage from the book, from 2005 when Apple was looking for the next big thing after the iPod, illustrates how Jobs kept one step ahead of the market. In this case, by thinking about what could eventually usurp the market leading iPod.

"The device that can eat our lunch is the cell phone." As he explained to the [Apple] board, the digital camera market was being decimated now that phones were equipped with cameras. The same could happen to the iPod, if phone manufacturers started to build music players into them. "Everyone carries a phone, so that could render the iPod unnecessary."

Later in the book, Isaacson describes how Jobs' Zen training helped him develop his love of simplicity in design:

He attributed his ability to focus and his love of simplicity to his Zen training. It honed his appreciation for intuition, showed him how to filter out anything that was distracting or unnecessary, and nurtured in him an aesthetic based on minimalism.

I also loved this description of Jobs:

He was, indeed, an example of what the mathematician Mark Kac called a magician genius, someone whose insights come out of the blue and require intuition more than mere mental processing power.

A Metamorphosing Butterfly

Another key learning from this book is how Steve Jobs reinvented both himself and his company many times. According to Mike Markkula, who became a one-third owner of Apple in 1977 and went on to be CEO (1981-83) and Chairman (1985-1997), the legacy of HP was a big influence:

They [Jobs and Markkula, in 1997] spent the rest of the time talking about where Apple should focus in the future. Jobs's ambition was to build a company that would endure, and he asked Markkula what the formula for that would be. Markkula replied that lasting companies know how to reinvent themselves. Hewlett-Packard had done that repeatedly; it started as an instrument company, then became a calculator company, then a computer company. "Apple has been sidelined by Microsoft in the PC business," Markkula said. "You've got to reinvent the company to do some other thing, like other consumer products or devices. You've got to be like a butterfly and have a metamorphosis." Jobs didn't say much, but he agreed.

That nugget of wisdom eventually led to the iPod, iTunes, iPhone and everything else that Apple achieved in the '00s.

As an aside, one of the things I learned from the book was that the iPad idea actually came before the iPhone one. The multi-touch interface was perhaps the biggest innovation in the iPhone and it came from a team developing a prototype tablet. Jobs decided to use it in the iPhone and put Apple's focus on that product first:

That project [what was to become the iPhone] was far more important [in 2005], so he put the tablet development on hold while the multi-touch interface was adopted for a phone-size screen.

This Steve Jobs quote, in which he references his beloved Bob Dylan, is a nice summary of his reinvention capability:

"That's what I've always tried to do--keep moving. Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you're not busy being born, you're busy dying."

Focus

Steve Jobs' personal intuition helped the company to reinvent itself across many different product lines. Isaacson named seven industries that Jobs revolutionized or reimagined over his career: personal computers, animated movies, music, telephones, tablet computing, digital publishing and retail stores.

Apple achieved all of that because of the focus and decisive leadership provided by Jobs:

One of Jobs's great strengths was knowing how to focus. "Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do," he said. "That's true for companies, and it's true for products."

Jobs was ousted from Apple in 1985 in a failed leadership battle with the CEO at the time, John Sculley. In 1997, he returned to Apple and one of my favorite Jobs stories comes from that time. On his return, he reduced Apple's bloated computer product range from about 40 to just 4. This passage, set in an internal meeting, describes how he did it:

He grabbed a magic marker, padded to a whiteboard, and drew a horizontal and vertical line to make a four-squared chart. "Here's what we need," he continued. Atop the two columns he wrote "Consumer" and "Pro"; he labeled the two rows "Desktop" and "Portable." Their job, he said, was to make four great products, one for each quadrant.

Another part of Jobs' leadership was creating a remarkable organization chart around him, whereby all of the key decision makers were just one or two steps from Jobs. He also implemented a culture of accountability over the whole company.

Towards the end of his life Jobs even counseled the CEO of Apple's primary competitor, Larry Page of Google, about focused leadership:

"The main thing I stressed was focus. Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up."

What Did You Learn From Steve Jobs' Bio?

Those are just three of the things that I learned from this biography of Steve Jobs. Although it's a sympathetic portrayal of Steve Jobs' life and career, the author Walter Isaacson does point out some of the downsides of these characteristics. Jobs' drive for focus, for example, often led to callous treatment of his employees.

But we have to accept that Steve Jobs was a unique individual and it's impossible for anyone else to even come close to being the person he was. The best we can do is learn from what Steve Jobs taught us about product innovation and leading a technology company. If you're at all interested in those topics, I strongly encourage you to read this biography. If you have already, I'd love to hear your thoughts about it in the comments.

Publishers and app developers have provided a bonanza of ways to read on the iPad and iPhone. Some are free, some cost money, some require monthly subscriptions. All of them are vying for your attention in that new, valuable hour or two of tablet time in the evenings. But one app, Instapaper, sits in the iPad Hall of Fame on iTunes, pushing forward reader behavior just like the iPad itself. Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, answered some questions for us about where this is all heading.

At this point, Apple's lead in tablets is daunting. At a base price of $499, the 9.5-inch iPad and the devices it inspired are even encroaching on the bottom end of the PC market. Apple's "post-PC world" rhetoric is projected to be surprisingly prescient.

But there seems to be room below the iPad in the market. Surveys found consumers clamoring for a cheaper tablet, and Apple competitors have begun to deliver. Amazon announced the 7-inch, $199 Kindle Fire in September, and in response Barnes & Noble unveiled a $249 Nook Tablet yesterday with twice the memory and storage space of the Fire.

The Amazon and Barnes & Noble tablets are geared towards consumption, as one would expect from two companies whose businesses were built on selling books and music. Apple is in the content business as well, though it positions the iPad to be for much more than that. Even so, consumption, specifically reading, of quality content has been reborn on the iPad.

The Reading App Gold Rush

Developers have built all kinds of applications to deliver the ideal iPad reading experience, and Big Publishing wants in on the action. Flipboard publishers now show magazine-style full-page ads, and Zite was bought by CNN. AOL made Editions, Yahoo made Livestand, Google's making Propeller, all to do the same thing. It's a gold rush.

Publishers are even building their own apps now, and the new iOS 5 Newsstand provides a home for them. The Guardian iPad edition launched the same day as iOS 5. The New Yorker iPad app has surpassed 100,000 readers. These are first-rate iPad experiences, not just crumpled Web views, and they're finding traction as subscription publications.

Instapaper's Content Shift

But one $5 app, not affiliated with any publishers, showing no advertisements, requiring no "monetizing" other than its modest price tag, and created by one person, has remained near the top of the heap of iOS reading apps all along. Instapaper continues to introduce iPad and iPhone readers to the notion of content-shifting, saving one's daily Web reading with one click, so that it can be read later from one sparse, quiet place, even offline.

Really, Instapaper can be read in three places; anyone can use Instapaper.com from her or his desktop, tablet or smartphone. But it's also a universal $5 app for iPhone and iPad, and the release of Instapaper 4.0 last month redesigned the experience as the self-curated, instant newspaper for iOS 5.

Arment recently answered a few questions for us about Instapaper, iOS and the future of reading:

***ReadWriteWeb:** Do you think about the big picture for Web content, or is that not really your concern?*

Marco Arment: "I want Instapaper to be a tool that people use to read longer pieces, and more attentively, than they otherwise would have. By doing this, I hope to make it more feasible for publishers to maintain an audience while publishing articles more substantial than what we usually see on formulaic high-volume blogs."

***RWW:** What are your plans for Give Me Something To Read?*

MA: "Give Me Something To Read serves Instapaper very well as a curated list of the best long-form nonfiction writing and reporting. My plans are to keep it going, really -- it's exactly where I want it to be."

***RWW:** You said recently that you don't like to emphasize the offline part of Instapaper. Why is that? Isn't that a distinguishing feature?*

MA: "It's certainly a very good and useful feature, but it's not a feature that a lot of people know that they need, so they aren't looking for a solution to that problem. Once they have Instapaper, it's a feature that most customers use and benefit from very often, but it's not a very good selling point."

***RWW:** Is iOS changing the way we read at a platform level? The great RSS readers have some of their most compelling apps ever on iOS, and the competitors in the publishing biz are there, too. Even major content sites (like The Guardian) are starting to put save-for-later functionality into native apps. Is the nature of the whole platform responsible for this? Or have you just inspired everyone?*

MA: "The iPhone, and especially the iPad, have brought a fundamental shift to the publishing business: it's now very easy for customers to pay for apps and content directly, with small amounts of money, in large volumes. This wasn't (and still isn't) practical on the web. And with the rising popularity of iOS, many millions of people are devoting more of their computing time to devices that are much better suited for reading than desktops and laptops.

"These two shifts, more than anything, have brought new life to the publishing business, from big newspapers and magazines to individual bloggers, by increasing demand for content and making it easier to make money without wedging ads everywhere.

"Instapaper and its various clones help bridge the web and iOS worlds. There's relatively little competition only because it's a very new problem that the mass market has yet to realize that they have. It's not just "read later", but "read elsewhere" - most people would prefer the reading experience on an iPad to a web browser on a PC."

The iPad And The Couch

Instapaper is not the only cross-platform content-shifting app out there, and we've argued that all tablet reading apps should have the feature. The Guardian's new iPad app does.

But the single content-shifting app, - like Instapaper or Read It Later - pulls all the day's articles into one familiar place, like the iPad's equivalent of the couch on which we read it. That's the most important part of the future of content, which the ad-riddled Web is only just starting to understand: the experience.

Marco Arment is the creator of Instapaper. He also blogs about technology (and coffee) at Marco.org, and he hosts Build & Analyze a weekly news and discussion show about iPhone, iPad, iOS and mobile Web development with Dan Benjamin on 5by5. Follow him on Twitter @marcoarment.

Do you use any content-shifting apps for your daily reading? Share your digital reading habits in the comments.