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Comment by ronin510 | Hacker News Reader

It looks like Readability doesn't quite like this new feature in Instapaper. From Timothy Meaney, part of Arc90, parent company of Readability:

@marcoarment congrats Marco, great idea out of nowhere to up your game re: typography. Out of nowhere!!

Interesting, considering Readabilty's app is a complete ripoff of the one-man-company Instapaper.

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Marco mentioned their lovely fonts as the impetus for the change: http://www.marco.org/2012/03/08/learning-from-competition

Edit: Even without that context, it seems petulant & rude.

He also mentioned on his podcast that he's been thinking about fonts for a long time, but licensing models for apps are complicated. Forget the details, but I think Readability may have caused him to revisit the issue and find it's now feasible with some negotiation.

Marco said everything that needed to be said. Meaney should have kept smugly quiet.

  "I wish someone had kicked my complacent ass about fonts sooner."

Reading some of the follow up tweets, @chrisdary, CTO of Readability and a partner of arc90 has separated himself from those opinions.

Those comments were very surprising to me, and not just because Marco gave the nod to Readability about fonts. Marco and Readability have both publicly acknowledged each others products and at one point they were approaching a working relationship with each other. It all appeared like it was friendly competition and respect.

It's not surprisng to me, but I still find it fascinating how one partner's comments (who I'm guessing is out of the Readability loop) can change all of that with one tweet -- at least from a business perspective.

He was joking. Relax.

That comment is incredible. Not only did Arment openly credit Readability for competitively spurring him, let's go back to the origin of the Readability bookmarklet (long before the app)-

http://lab.arc90.com/2009/03/02/readability/

Our latest experiment was partly inspired by Marco Arment’s awesome Instapaper application (and equally awesome Instapaper iPhone app).

As well that Marco has been very upfront about the competition spurring him on.

I think Timothy Meaney needs to watch the Everything is a Remix series: http://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/

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