Category: Articles

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

When I speed tested the content blockers I laid out the top three fastest ones:

• 1Blocker
• Ad Block Multi
• Adamant

What I didn’t do is really tell you very much about each of these, ((Apologies I was running late to take the family to a birthday party.)) so I want to go ahead and right that wrong now.

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

Which content blocker for iOS 9 is the best? I have no clue, but I did test a bunch to find out which one is the fastest.

URLs tested:

• iMore
• Daring Fireball
• The Sweet Setup
• The Brooks Review
• New York Times
• New Yorker
• Businessweek/Bloomberg
• Apple

Testing Method:

All tests done on an iPhone 6 Plus, from the same position, on a fast wifi network, in this order:

1. Clear history and website data
2. Restart phone
3. Adjust Safari settings for the test
4. Launch each site from a bookmark
5. Timed with iPhone (original)
6. Assumed margin of error: 0.3 seconds.
7. Time stopped when Safari stopped showing the X and instead showed the reload symbol

Note: When I turned on each content blocker, I left Do Not Track on as well, as this is how you really should be using the app to begin with.

Results

Here’s the chart for iMore, shortest bar is the fastest.

Nothing on it was 18 seconds, the fastest blocker loaded it in 2.3 seconds.

Here’s Daring Fireball, shortest bar is the fastest.

Nothing on it was 2.2 seconds, the fastest blocker loaded it in 1.3 seconds.

Here’s this site, shortest bar is the fastest.

Nothing on it was 5.5 seconds, the fastest blocker loaded it in 2.3 seconds.

Here’s the Sweet Setup, shortest bar is the fastest.

Nothing on it was 2.7 seconds, the fastest blocker loaded it in 2.5 seconds. A note about this site: some blocks failed to fully load this site, and repeated loading was needed to complete tests with blockers on. This was the only site that did this.

Here’s the New York Times, shortest bar is the fastest.

Nothing on it was 11.6 seconds, the fastest blocker loaded it in 2.6 seconds.

Here’s the New Yorker, shortest bar is the fastest.

Nothing on it was 5 seconds, the fastest blocker loaded it in 2.9 seconds.

Here’s Bloomberg/Businessweek, shortest bar is the fastest.

Nothing on it was 17.6 seconds, the fastest blocker loaded it in 5.8 seconds.

Here’s Apple.com, shortest bar is the fastest.

Nothing on it was 2.9 seconds, the fastest blocker loaded it in 2.1 seconds.

Insights

When I tried with all blockers on, I did not get the performance of the fastest blocker, and instead got performance on the slower side of the blockers tested. It is my recommendation that you only use one blocker at a time.

In order to determine a clear winner, I took the average load time of all the sites, and then calculated how fast each blocker was (as a percentage) compared to no blockers.

As you can see, 1Blocker is the winner. It was (on average) 61.83% faster than having nothing turned on at all. That’s staggering. The worst of the lot seems to be Vivio, which was marginally faster than simply just turning on ‘Do Not Track’ in your browser settings.

1Blocker is also highly configurable as well. If you want something on the simple end of things, which makes decisions for you to unblock ads from places like The Deck, Adamant is a great option. It was the third fastest overall, and is trying to support the indie sites ad revenue the best it can.

Top three are (in this order):

1. 1Blocker
2. Ad Block Multi
3. Adamant and Blockr 1.0.1 ties as well.

For me, it is 1Blocker. I’ll check back again in a month or so. Go get it.

Updates

• Here’s some more thoughts on the three fastest.

• Turns out that 1Blocker whitelists The Deck ads by default. To block them you need to add a custom rule, that rule should have the URL Filter that reads: http.*://connect\.decknetwork\.net/* (You will need a \ before each period to make it work) — putting that in will block those ads. Hat tip to: Marcelo Marfil

The last time I went to Disney it was the mid-to-late 1990s — I don’t remember much of the logistics from back then, but I knew things would be different on this visit. I had heard about the ‘Magic Bands’ that you wear at Disney, but I still didn’t know the full scope of that magic. As it turns out, the Disney Magic Band really is quite magic.

The band itself is shitty, mind you, but the things it enables are amazing.

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The 12” MacBook brought OS X hardware as close to iOS as it can possibly be. The MacBook is slim, light, silent, and doesn’t get to burn your thigh levels of heat. The iPad Pro? The iPad Pro brings iOS hardware as close to MacBook hardware as one can, with massive performance gains. And iOS 9 brings iOS as close as you want it to be to OS X.

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When I first got a Mac, one of the first pieces of software that I fell in love with was NetNewsWire — it was a revolution in how to keep up with news. It was quite something, and so it took a lot for me to move away from it. But years of stagnation meant I had to try other services. For quite sometime that was Fever, a self-hosted RSS reader, but that too started to get long in the tooth. A while back I went through the plethora of great RSS services before deciding on FeedWrangler + Reeder + Unread.

While FeedWrangler isn’t the prettiest offering, it is the fastest, and it is damn reliable.

On September 3rd, Black Pixel announced that NetNewsWire 4 was out. I didn’t even bother to try it before buying the iPhone and Mac version and making the switch over to it.

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A while back I mentioned that I had switched to the CGP Grey method of organizing my main home screen on both my iPhone and iPad. This method is simple:

• One page of apps only
• At least one row of apps empty
• Three icons in the dock

I was highly skeptical that this method would work, but as it turns out this method is supremely good — as long as you are ok with using Spotlight search. I’ve only used this setup on iOS 9, so I can’t speak to how it works on iOS 8, but I can say that there is no going back at this point.

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I was recently perusing Huckberry — something I really should not do — and I saw the Fave knife. It’s a 4” fixed blade, full-tang, knife with an interesting tag line:

With this in mind, we set out to create the perfect take-it-anywhere, use-it-for-anything knife, the one that you would always keep close by – for slicing vegtables, cutting a rope or opening a package. A simple, well-built, useful knife that would be equally at home in the kitchen, a workshop, on your desk or out in the backyard.

Oh really? So I picked one up because I had to know. I mean I really had to know: could a fixed blade knife really be a true utility knife? I was skeptical if this knife could both be good around my garage, and also good in the kitchen.

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I have this terrible habit: once I find something I deem to be near perfect enough — such that continuing to find something better would be not worth the extra effort — I just stop looking around. I am now happy and I move on with my life.

Such was the case with pocket knives.

Was.

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(Editor’s note: This product was sent to me at no cost for the purpose of a review.)

I should start this by saying that I have never been a skateboarder and in general I am not the best at things which require good balance. So it is with that in mind that I met The Level, a product for standing desk users made by FluidStance, with a bit of fear. I was fairly certain that I was going to end up on my ass after standing on the Level for just a day — maybe with a broken hip, or ankle to show for it.

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