FW Editor: What are your plans or objectives in the near future?
Michael Schneider: My first priority is definitely the university, besides study I would also improve my skills to develop high quality and beautiful looking Mac and iPhone Apps as well as developing websites.

FW Editor: How and when did you start writing the code for ReadNow? What inspired you the most? Do you plan to develop new software, or are you more focused on optimizing the current ones?
Michael Schneider: The first commit to the ReadNow repository was in March this year. ReadNow is my first Mac application and started actually as "scratch my itch". I want a easy, fast and very minimal way to access my Read It Later items on a Mac. Before I started I played a little bit with Cocoa and so this was the perfect opportunity to dive a little bit deeper into Mac programming. Currently I have another project besides ReadNow in the planning state. It will be an iPhone app and maybe not so relevant for most of people, because it's very specific for people at my university.

FW Editor: ReadNow is a great concept and an interesting application. Can you tell us more about it?
Michael Schneider: ReadNow is a little application that sits on the menubar and uses the Read It Later API to communicate to Read It Later. It's trimmed to a minimal looking and fast navigation application.

FW Editor: Why would you recommend ReadNow? What makes it so special?
Michael Schneider: It is very minimal and saves time to access your Read It Later items. With ReadNow it is not necessary anymore to login to the ReadNow website if you want to access your Read It Later websites, just start ReadNow and it's done.

FW Editor: Can you tell us more about the "bound" between ReadNow and Read It Later?
Michael Schneider: To use ReadNow it is necessary to have a Read It Later Account. The users save some interesting websites or websites they would like to read later to the Read It Later Service. ReadNow accesses the Read It Later data via an API and displays the items polished format. Fortunately Nate Weiner makes a really great job to document the API (http://readitlaterlist.com/api/) in detail and so it is really easy for third party developers to write a library to bind the Read It Later Service within their applications.

FW Editor: What are the advantages of using ReadNow over any other similar product?
Michael Schneider: Before I started to develop ReadNow I've searched for other applications that are connecting to Read It Later. Unfortunately I've only found applications that send items to Read it Later but not full client with receiving or show items. So I started with ReadNow.

FW Editor: We know this project is just at the beginning. How do you plan to improve ReadNow? What shall we expect from ReadNow in the future?
Michael Schneider: I'm currently working on missing documentation and the navigation in ReadNow. To improve the navigation speed within ReadNow my goal is that the user can navigate in ReadNow only using keyboard shortcuts, without touching the mouse.

FW Editor: Now, to end our small interview, is there any message you would like to send to ReadNow users?
Michael Schneider: If any ReadNow user has questions or suggestions please send me an email and I will respond as soon as possible!