that same area up top is used to show your signal, battery, and WiFi status, but it only drops down if you touch or swipe the upper part of the screen. And in some apps (like pictures) it doesn’t appear at all.

Just don’t show the bars at all!

However, after reading the full article (and Marco’s comments), I have to admit it seems like a great idea. I wonder if they’d get better results if they reversed the scheme, and paid readers for worth-while comments.

If we’re expecting people to show up and use our application, or site, or product, we will need to understand the people we are trying to serve. Expecting them (or worse, forcing them) to use it because they’re paid staff isn’t enough; for real long-term adoption, these people will need to voluntarily use it because it serves their needs and interests. They’ll need to enjoy it. They’ll need to believe that we built it for them. The easiest way to convince them of that is to do it: build it for the people who use it.

Keep it coming, Zondervan team.

Filmmaking has just been placed in the hands of anyone who owns an Apple iPhone 4. Now it’s up to you.

—iphone4filming.com

Update: Looks like Gruber beat me to linking to this, using the same wording no less.

There are ways to hack the Notes app to use Helvetica, but they all require SSH access, or, in other words, a jailbroken iPhone. I just discovered an easier way that doesn’t require hackery and takes just a few seconds to set up.

Open the Settings app and tap on General.

Then tap on Keyboard.

Then tap International Keyboards.

Then tap on Chinese - Simplified (Handwriting).

Now go back to your home screen and open the Notes app. Select a note, and tap anywhere to bring up the keyboard. Now tap on the International Keyboards key to bring up the character drawing interface.

Draw a line, and the font your note uses will change to Helvetica.

Tap Done. Hello, Helvetica.

The obvious drawbacks to this method are that (1) you have to repeat the last few steps for every note you edit or start, and (2) you now have another key taking up space in your keyboard, which effectively halves the size of the Number/Symbol key.

Still, Helvetica.

For everything that the blog format has been adapted for, there’s a healthier alternative that won’t steer you ever closer towards running a tablog.

If your users are activating Safari Reader on your site, this means that the default user experience of your site is so bad that your users first consciously notice that they have trouble reading an article on your site, then remember that they might be able to fix it using Safari Reader, and then actually activate that feature.

His suggestion:

Don’t fight Safari Reader. Instead, make it obsolete.

[A ‘periodic network request’] would allow Instapaper to download updates in the background, and would also greatly benefit RSS readers, Twitter clients, chat programs, weather and news widgets, and a huge number of other applications that currently can’t get much benefit from iOS’ multitasking.

I like this idea better than background notifications because it doesn’t require user interaction via a modal-type popup that interrupts everything.

Beyond just a “clean” reading view, Readability has proven invaluable for people with vision problems and cognitive difficulties. We’ve received countless emails from users thanking us for making the Web usable again for them.

Excellent.