Charles Apple

Ernie Smith — of the Washington Post’s Express tab and creator of the fabulous Short Form Blog — has found a new interface with Getty Images. But the chewy goodness works only with the iPad.

He writes:

This is a killer app for creative people and photo editors. It’s significantly easier to use than the front end for Getty.

Ernie writes:

I used it tonight. I’m going to use it at work tomorrow.

It’s good enough that every large newspaper should have an iPad just for this.

Read more about it here.

Now that the Poynter ‘tablet conference’ is over, here’s the real scoop on the Apple iPad from a source you can trust: Mad magazine.

The cover to the new issue:

Ouch! But funny.

The story on the inside is by John Caldwell, whose work used to impress me back in the 1980s, when he cartooned for National Lampoon. Click for a larger view:

That’s the only page Mad previewed for us on its web site. My pal Darren Sanefski says his copy just arrived in the mail, so look for it soon at your nearest newstand or trash heap.

In other news, Darren Sanefski subscribes to Mad magazine. Rumor has it that he looks forward to the annual swimsuit edition in February.

Find Mad’s home on the web here. Better yet, find Mad uber-artist Tim Richmond’s cartooning blog here.

John Lettice of the U.K. Register reports this morning news that could spell doom — or, at least, a giant pain in the ass — to efforts by media companies to finally stumble upon an advertising-based online business model that actually works.

Lettice reports:

Steve Jobs didn’t get around to mentioning Safari 5 in his WWDC keynote last night, but it rolled out anyway shortly after he finished up, and today publishers throughout the world are surely beginning to wonder, ‘hang on, what’s this Reader thing?’

Safari 5 has a nice little button next to the URL that effectively kills the ads, strips off the site’s branding and presents the text in nicely-formatted book-style pages.

According to Apple, “Safari Reader removes annoying ads and other visual distractions from online articles… So you get the whole story and nothing but the story.” Well thanks Steve, that’s a real big help.

The Reader button appears for pages where Safari has figured out you’re on a web page with an article. Then if you click on the button the web view is greyed out and drops into the background, and the content of the article is displayed in crisp type on a white background. If the article has illustrations in it these will be picked up, but it seems interactive content might not be.

There’s more. Read it all here.

What’s even funnier? The new Safari tool is “lifted” from another company’s application. All hail open source.

Cade Metz of the same U.K. Register reports:

In the wake of the browser’s release, Arc90 praised Apple for including a tool that mimics its own — a tool that strips a webpage of its ads and site branding, reducing to text and core images — and only later did the outfit realize that Steve Jobs and cult had actually dipped into its code.

Find that story here.

Bonus irony points: Steve Yelvington of Morris Communications tweeted this today, so I followed his link. Only to find…

…my browser hijacked by an ad. Don’t you hate these? The more publishers try to cram ads down my throat, the more determined I am to avoid them. Only after clicking “skip ad” was I delivered to the story:

A pox on these ads.