Today, a fair bit of attention has been paid to the launch of a new app:

Basil – A Smart Recipe Book for iPad

It’s a nicely designed app that lets you search and save recipes from sites (à la Instapaper) and add your own recipes, and it automatically sets cooking timers and tags ingredients.

But, according to its App Store listing…

You must be at least 17 years old to download this app.

• Frequent/Intense Simulated Gambling
• Frequent/Intense Horror/Fear Themes
• Frequent/Intense Realistic Violence
• Frequent/Intense Mature/Suggestive Themes
• Frequent/Intense Alcohol, Tobacco, or Drug Use or References
• Frequent/Intense Profanity or Crude Humor
• Frequent/Intense Cartoon or Fantasy Violence
• Frequent/Intense Sexual Content or Nudity

A laughable App Store policy covered in more depth by Marco Arment.

David Pogue’s NY Times review of the new iPad has attracted some criticism over one of his concluding lines:

The new iPad doesn’t introduce anything that we haven’t seen before, either in the iPhone or in rival tablets. There’s no Steve Jobs “one more thing” moment here; Apple just took its white-hot iPad and added the latest screen, battery and cellular technologies.

John Gruber read this as being overly cynical and weighed-in on Daring Fireball and The Talk Show, saying that nowhere else have we seen such a big retina display or such an impressive battery life on an LTE device.

Personally, I suspect Pogue’s point has been taken a little out of context and, therefore, could perhaps have been better conveyed.

He’s right insofar as Apple has followed a natural progression for the new iPad with the major new features being exactly as expected, and with no real revelations.

That is not to say that the implementation of these features isn’t great or that the new iPad isn’t a great product – greater than the sum of its features and streets ahead of its competitors.

Jack Dorsey is on a tour of Europe, meeting heads of state.

Wednesday:

Walking to @Elysee on a beautiful Paris day to meet President @NicolasSarkozy
– @jack

@NicolasSarkozy thank you for hosting us, Mr. President! It was great meeting you.
– @jack

Thursday:

Just landed in Berlin for a visit with Chancellor Angela Merkel. I’ve been wanting to meet her for a while: the world needs her on Twitter.
– @jack

Great conversation about Twitter w Chancellor Angela Merkel. Loves SMS & has the mind of a scientist: forever curious. I gave her a @Square.
– @jack

Twitter is bigger than social media – Zuckerberg’s not even close to this level of potential influence.

Some background: Readability launched an iOS app last week which essentially replicates the “read later” service popluarised by Instapaper.

Readability initially started as an open source web service (later used as the back end of Apple’s Safari Reader), then became a programme to pay websites for readership, and has now undertaken a “pivot” to become a (free) direct competitor to Instapaper.

Controversy arises as Readability originally hired Marco Arment of Instapaper to produce a Readability-branded version of the Instapaper app before pulling the plug on the project due to Apple’s subscriptions policy and re-launching as a free competitor to the $5 Instapaper app (more detail here).

The Readability apps look great and have motivated a lot of people to switch from Instapaper’s relatively stark (intentionally) design.

If you’re tweeting how happy you are to “finally” be “dumping” my app, feel free to omit the “@” before its name so maybe I won’t see it –@marcoarment

One of the main draws towards Readability is its selection of premium typefaces from Hoefler & Frere-Jones in comparison to Instapaper which currently offers only standard iOS system fonts, and then only Georgia, Helvetica and Times on the iPhone version.

Marco Arment discussed how he had found it difficult in the past to generate interest from type foundries in incorporating their typefaces within Instapaper, which generated an interesting conversation with Erik Spiekermann:

@marcoarment you know we can make any font into mobile or web format. I might even customize my faces (Meta, Unit, Info, Officina) for you –@espiekermann

Erik Spiekermann is one of the great contemporary type designers. He designed the iconic FF Meta family to be “a complete antithesis of the ‘boring and bland’ Helvetica” (Spiekermann represents the against camp in the excellent Helvetica documentary). He is the founder of FontShop and the FontFont foundry.

A partnership with Erik Spiekermann for typography in Instapaper would be a huge coup for Marco Arment and a huge competitive advantage in the design-driven market for iOS apps.