Opening the Instapaper API (opens in new tab)

> Is there any reason to do that?

That it's RPC over HTTP, POSTing everything is the normal (and, really, proper) way to do RPC over HTTP.

It gets even better:

> If the response is not valid JSON, it should be interpreted as an HTTP 503 "Service Temporarily Unavailable" error, and the request should be retried later.

Why not just return 503?

The xAuth authentication method is suspect as well:

    xAuth provides a way for desktop and mobile
    applications to exchange a username and password for
    an OAuth access token. Once the access token is
    retrieved, xAuth-enabled developers should dispose of
    the login and password corresponding to the user.

https://dev.twitter.com/oauth/xauth

Asking users to trust third parties with the access details to your application? Sure they "review" the API token requests but who knows what that means.

Reading the page there seems to be a lot of talk about "keeping it simple" as if using the HTTP protocol is hard and confusing for developers. This is a bad sign, if they don't understand or care to understand something simple what are their security practices like?

I think we've encountered another situation where developers who don't fully understand HTTP best practices and standards, are asked to adapt their internal API services to work on the web :(

Instapaper actually stagnated before Macro sold it (which he will admit to). Betaworks has been very active on it since day one.

> I feared that Instapaper development would stagnate after Marco sold it.

Unfortunately "not stagnating" and "developing a lot of new features" these days usually means you will in fact soon start seeing tweets, related articles and what other people think besides your texts.

Which is a shame, because I too love the minimalistic approach of Instapaper.

I am looking for something to replace pocket now that the old extension is dead and the new sucks. The service is still great on the phone but the firefox extension is crap:

- slow

- no red visual icon to signal the page is already stored

- no access to pages from firefox (bookmark not working for french locale or sthg)

- and the `new' button is just an add button that you have to stare at for 5 seconds because it will lose the focus and cancel the submission if you move to another tab.

Wallabag isn't quite ready yet :(.

Interesting. I did the opposite a couple of months ago.

And they remove some images, so Wikipedia articles about math (with symbols as images) don't make sense. Diagrams and illustrations are often silently gone.

I keep reporting "some text/images missing", but overall I lost faith that I can read articles on Instapaper without missing anything.

It's provided as a `link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"` on the /archive page (or any other folder). Sadly less and less browsers display these (or even indicate there's one) so you'll have to dive into the JS console or page source to extract the URL. I don't think there's an easier way to get at the RSS feeds.

There was never any "official" 3rd party access to the API other than an "add article" action. And when the API was made available, it was only to subscribers since the main revenue stream was sales of the official app. Since the official app is now free, that revenue stream doesn't need to be protected, and thus the API is now available to everyone.

Did you even read the article? The "full" API was always for premium users only.

On Android especially, the Instapaper app is way behind the Pocket one.

Pocket mostly applies successfully the latest Android design principles. It is not perfect, but it is a solid implementation.

Instapaper looks like it has been written by somebody discovering the support lib along the way. Bad drawer implementation, no attention to detail. It does not even look like the dev is using its own app, because there are some seriously low hanging fruit that should be easy to solve (for example I can't click on the drawer icon, only on the title for some reason).

It's hard to justify a subscription with such a weak effort and it is probably a vicious circle where the dev doesn't have a reason to improve his app either.

> But the API appears to be write-only

You can list your bookmarks (= saved articles), your folders and you can even fetch the processed-text HTML content for the bookmark, what else do you need?

> Why do I have to POST everything?

Because it's an RPC-based API?