Category: Links

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Great post.

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.

Seth Godin:

And so, just as the default for some advertisers is, “if it’s not against the law and it’s cheap, do it,” the new generation of ad blockers is starting from the place of, “delete all.”

Sam Snelling:

You cannot be against government / big business bulk collection of metadata, and not be pro ad blocker. Privacy is important. And leaking tons of identifying info about yourself all over the internet is not good.

Yep.

Clayton Miller:

The iPad as it stands fits the needs of some professionals. Viewed in a jobs-to-be-done framework, there are some jobs for which many will find it the best hire, but these tend to be all of a kind: They are performed by a single application with a narrow scope, such as a note-taking app to brainstorm or a marine navigation app to pilot a boat.

I really like the above passage. The idea that what makes the iPad great is how good it is at just one application. That said, I don't agree with much else Miller has to say. While I don't think the iPad Pro will be for everyone, I bet it is for most people.

John Gruber:

Good advertising goes down easy.

No, not really. Good advertising (well targeted, with no tracking) is acceptable at best.

Marco Arment on his Safari Content Blocker:

I was therefore faced with a decision about The Deck. I had to either:

• Omit The Deck from Ghostery’s database, carving out an exception for the advertiser used by me and many of my friends.
• Enforce Ghostery’s database consistently, potentially angering my own site’s advertiser and my friends who use it.

And once I looked at it like that, it wasn’t a difficult decision. It’s uncomfortable, but I’d rather be consistent and fair.

He made the right decision. Oh, and FYI, if you are using a content blocker to block custom fonts — go for it, but this site will look like shit. I’ve never once tried to optimize it to be useable with fallback fonts. Sorry.

I’m a huge fan of Cloak, and though I run my own VPN, I still pay for a yearly subscription to Cloak. I love the ease of use, and frankly some times my VPN server stops working.

Anyways, Cloak on the Mac has always been amazing: auto blocking of Internet access on non-trusted networks. Auto connect. Etc.

You could never do that on iOS in the past, but now you can. That’s right, Cloak can now auto secure your connection, change server locations, and block internet access on iOS. No brainier. If you care about privacy, you’ll have a year subscription to Cloak.
Update: umm some of this might not be new. Buts it’s NEW TO ME. Oops.