The Brooks Review

Month: September 2015

  • The iPhone 6s Plus Video is Amazing

    I’ve become one of those 6s Plus elitist who chastises their pals for using a non-plus model of an iPhone. There’s a lot of arguments to be made for the 6s Plus, but the biggest argument must be seen to be understood.

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  • Reeder 3 for Mac

    It’s out now, and it’s my new go to for RSS on the Mac. What a beautiful looking app.

  • What it means to be great

    Good insight.

  • Content Blockers Testing Update No. 334.71

    Since my initial testing, a lot more content blockers have come to market, and many have seen large updates. I ran through and tested all the content blockers I own once again, and added everyone I could find in the App Store. All told, I tested 32 content blockers on my iPhone 6s Plus to determine which is the best.

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  • These Pictures of You

    MG Siegler on Live Photos:

    That is, static pictures which suddenly come alive. But the true power comes from the re-creation of a memory, in front of your eyes, on your iPhone. It sounds like I’m overplaying it, but I’m not.

    As a parent, it’s one of my favorite features.

  • Live Photos are Great

    One thing that I keep hearing, is people trying to figure out if Live Photos are a gimmick or not. No one has had access to Live Photos long enough to know for sure, but I can say, that when I get little moments like you see in the video of a live photo below — well that makes it something I will always cherish.


    (Should be on Vimeo soon if this embed fails on you.)

    So far, it seems Live Photos are anything but a gimmick.

  • Is the iPhone 6s Faster Than a Mac?

    Holy shit:

    CPU SPEED IS KNOCKING ON THE DOOR
    The single core CPU performance of the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus is roughly comparable to that of the 12″ MacBook Retina. The multi-core CPU performance is ‘knocking on the door.’

    GPU SPEED MATCHES OR EXCEEDS 13″ APPLE LAPTOPS
    The iPhone 6s and 6s Plus blow away all the dual-core laptops in the Manhattan OpenGL 3D animation. And they beat all but the 13″ MacBook Pro in the T-Rex 3D animation.

  • Updated Content Blocker Results

    Updated my content blocker test with Adblock Plus (slow) and Blockr 1.0.1 (much improved). Also updated the data savings post.

  • Propelled By Apple, Ad Blocking Cottage Industry Emerges

    Jack Marshall:

    Mr. Murphy said he’s taken Eyeo up on its offer, and plans to implement an option within his app whereby “acceptable” ads will be displayed to users. The feature will be switched on by default, Mr. Murphy said, and he will receive a flat monthly fee from Eyeo in return. Mr. Murphy declined to disclose the fee, but said he expects to make less money from Eyeo’s payments than from sales of the app itself.

    Go ahead and scratch Crystal off the list of content blockers to buy.

  • Why the ‘Queen of the Mommy Bloggers’ had to quit

    Michelle Dean:

    The problem, Armstrong says, was that because she felt so beholden to them, she was agreeing to do just about anything to keep the advertisers happy.

    I hate the title of this post, but it encapsulates so well what I talked about in the native advertising post. It’s not that people who do this are evil, or have bad intentions. It’s that they get caught up in it.

  • On bias, dishonesty, and native advertising

    Some great responses here to my native advertising post from Alvaro Serrano, well worth the read.

  • Making money along the way

    DHH with some interesting thoughts on Evernote and Dropbox:

    Both Evernote and Dropbox are facing increasing indifference from customers and competition from simply Good Enough features in someone else’s more complete offering. “You’re a feature, not a product”, as Steve Jobs famously dismissed Dropbox (see The case against Dropbox and Evernote, The First Dead Unicorn for but two deeper analyses).

    I know a lot of nerds will revolt against that theory, but they really shouldn’t. You may not like iCloud, but I assure you that it is very good and a lot easier to understand and setup for the average user. Notes is also getting closer to Evernote, is easier to understand and setup, and just there.

    When something is already there, and is almost good enough — in most cases that’s all you need to kill a 3rd party service or product. Dropbox and Evernote’s biggest problem was never someone doing what they do better, just someone building something close to what they do into something popular. Apple has already done that with iCloud and Notes.

  • What Would Your Ideal Workspace Look Like?

    Shawn Blanc:

    The way you default to concentrating when you are doing something enjoyable can give you some insight into how you may best be able to concentrate when doing all of your work.

  • Native Advertising is a Bad Solution

    Along with all the talk about content blockers, there has been a lot of talk about what the future of web publications might be. Whereby “future” people really mean: “how they will make money at some point in time that is decidedly not today”. People seem to be in one of three camps on this matter: nothing can change and we are doomed; “native” advertising is the bees knees; and what I shall call “lala land” whereby people think some form of magic will happen without any effort.

    I want to focus on native advertising, since it keeps popping up everywhere (likely because someone gave it a fancy new name). Let’s break down some examples of this so called “native” advertising:

    • Sponsored posts/reviews/infographics
    • RSS feed sponsors
    • Podcast ads read by the podcasters themselves and largely improvised

    Those are the three most popular methods of this advertising — you can currently see these on a lot of blogs and pretty much any podcast, but there are various other methods floating around as well.

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  • Why the iPad Pro will be my laptop of choice: Accessibility

    Steven Aquino:

    Therein lies the rub. For as much as I adore the MacBook, the problem is that it’s still a laptop. In my experiences with laptops, I’ve found that their form factor works against me, accessibility-wise. As someone with low vision, I often need to get super close to the screen in order to see it. The issue, though, is that I find a laptop’s screen to be too “far away” to see comfortably. I have to lean in to see, almost to the point where my nose is touching the glass. Adjusting the screen’s position does help a bit, but it’s still too far away to be comfortable. There are things I could do on the software side to compensate for this, but it doesn’t negate the fact that the device’s form is less than ideal. To again paraphrase Jony Ive, with a laptop, I feel like I have to fit the device.

  • Ye Olde Content Blocking

    This is part four in a four part series on content blockers in iOS 9. Read part one, part two, and part three.

    I’ve been writing a lot this week about content blocking on iOS 9, and a large part of that is because the coverage for content blocking has largely been negative. I think a lot of that negativity is less about content blocking, and more out of the fear of losing of income from the chief income source for most sites. And since almost all of the sites rely off of ads to make money — it would be near impossible for any of them to cover content blocking with objectivity.

    That said, this site, only relies on membership for income, so it is in my best interest to do things to attract members. I also have a long track record of being privacy conscious and loathing ads in general. You are getting a fairly opposite view of advertising, as I neither need it, or like it.

    So far I have covered just the apps: which are the fastest, which are the most full featured, and which save you the most bandwidth. With those things out of the way, it is now time to talk about what content blocking is, how it is done, and the ethics surrounding the usage of content blocking.

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  • Obi – A Smart Laser Toy for Pets

    Dan and Tom are friends of the site, but regardless of that — this looks like an awesome product. I sure hope it gets made.

  • Ads are dead, long live ads!

    Great post.

  • Saving 30% or More of Your Data Transfer With Content Blockers

    This is part three in a four part series on content blockers in iOS 9. Read part one, part two, and part four.

    I grabbed my iPhone 6 plus, all my content blockers, updated my testing site list to add more, and ran the tests while connected to my MacBook to record the total page sizes. This measure has a direct effect on speed, and I believe it is a bit more accurate than pure timing. Either way, here are the results:

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  • Disruption is better when it’s other people’s jobs

    DHH:

    The natural response to having your livelihood threatened is universally to FREAK OUT. It doesn’t matter if you’re a French farmer or cabbie or if you’re an internet writer or publisher.