Category: Links

Surprisingly good scores for FaceTime and iMessage, given how seamless and easy they are to use.

Micah L. Sifry:

On Tuesday, the company will again deploy its voting tool. But Facebook’s Buckley insists that the firm will not this time be conducting any research experiments with the voter megaphone. That day, he says, almost every Facebook user in the United States over the age of 18 will see the “I Voted” button. And if the friends they typically interact with on Facebook click on it, users will see that too. The message: Facebook wants its users to vote, and the social-networking firm will not be manipulating its voter promotion effort for research purposes. How do we know this? Only because Facebook says so.

Good collection, beautifully presented.

There is of course my year ’round list of things to spend money on here.

Conor McClure:

It just doesn’t make sense anymore. I see photographers buy these new packs like they buy new iPhones—immediately, at whatever price, just because.

Nick Arnott:

To their credit, CurrentC does employ SSL pinning to protect the application's traffic, but at this point it's hard to know if that's to protect their users, or their questionable data transmissions.

I think Gabe is wrong about interleaved replies, clearly, but the rest of his advice is spot on. I’ve long thought email clients should only ask for the recipient at the bottom of the screen, or when you go and hit send.

I used to draft emails like this, but fell out of practice. Consider that changed now I am back to drafting outside of email apps (you guys will never guess which app I am going to use). (First iOS email app to add an extension system for “draft reply in…” wins.)

Add these iCloud bugs, which I see with Twitterrific to the “it takes 15 seconds to delete an app” bug and iOS 8.1 can be very annoying.

John Gruber:

I don’t know that CVS and Rite Aid disabling Apple Pay out of spite is going to drive customers to switch pharmacies (Walgreens is an Apple Pay partner), but I do know that CurrentC is unlikely to ever gain any traction whatsoever.

CurrentC stores your payment information in the cloud and uses QR codes. LOL.

Good overview from Viticci. Add this to Flare 2 and I am now 99% sure that not only do I not need Lightroom, but that I don't even need a Mac to edit my photos. I can't wait to get this entire workflow laid out.

Maurits Martijn:

I will never again be connecting to an insecure public WiFi network without taking security measures.

If you don’t think this matters, read this and you will see why it does matter.

Leo Mirani:

But it also means that Google has effectively redefined what “evil” means. It is whatever Google thinks it means.

Convenient.

Ben Bajarin:

Based on the types of jobs that are extremely mobile and work done out in the field frequently, we estimate there are upwards of 300m jobs, and growing, where computers are not used today because they were in the shape of a notebook or desktop. Yet this is where the opportunity lies to bring a computer in the shape of a tablet.

Brett is doing something I do, which is using Sync for a personal cloud because we have Mac minis in a colocation facility. It works exceedingly well for me.

It’s also amazingly fast. Sitting at home I can upload something I save to my server from my iPhone (via the new Transmit iOS app) and it syncs for that Mac mini server back to my MacBook Pro almost instantly. It’s quite incredible.

(I use the Mac mini server because it is always running. Also the Sync iOS app is really slow in my use.)

Austin Mann:

It’s now super easy to slow down your iPhone Slo-Mo footage on your Mac: just open the slow-motion video file in QuickTime and drag the sliders on the timeline below. This process will be familiar as it’s exactly the same as the process on your iPhone.

Oh, I had no idea. That’s cool.

I downloaded Flare 2, having not used the first version, and I like it quite a bit. I think with some patience it will replace Lightroom for me — but that’s a long post for another month.

Shot from my iPhone, processed in Flare 2 on my Mac. Expired Fujifilm effect, customized to remove the border crap Flare loves to add.

I am pretty sure I may have found a workflow that gives me 90% of the photo editing power of my Mac, while doing all edits on iOS. This could be very cool.

Marco Arment:

They’re not obsessed with messing with developers’ heads — we’re just innocent bystanders getting hit whenever this fundamentally insecure, jealous, unstable company changes direction, which happens every few years.

I don’t think there is much money in developing things for Twitter, which is too bad because I love Twitter.

Despite what most say, I still think a new iPad is the best computer you can get.

System Preference:

At first glance, Ulysses III’ features read like a set of common sense additions to Writer’s spartan feature set. And yet beyond the obvious lies a set of decisions that manage to augment productivity in meaningful ways while sacrificing as little as possible of Writer’s opinionated tabula rasa.

This post, more than any other, perfectly encapsulates why I love Ulysses III so very much.

Justin Williams:

We tend to give Apple grief when things are buggy or don’t work as well as we’d hope. It’s things like this lunch purchasing experience that are why I use and champion their products. When it works, it really works.

Apple Pay and HealthKit are two of those things that will only be really great when they are fully implemented and accepted. I can’t wait for that day.