Bruce Schneier:
It’s a measure of the popular interest in this issue that the German/Danish story isn’t being reported by the US press, and I had to search to find the Congressional vote on the New York Times and Washington Post sites. Only the Guardian had it as a home page headline. No one is reporting today’s renewal of the telephone metadata program.
Come on people, really?
Great app for keeping prying eyes out of your camera roll. You select the photos you want to show someone, then hand them your iPhone and that’s all they can see. Love the concept, and it works pretty well.
Yesterday Adobe had a big shindig where they updated a lot of their apps. I am a Creative Cloud user, so it was nice to see updates, but they are updates I really don’t care much about. ((Except better retina display support in InDesign, finally.))
There was one biggy for me: Lightroom for iPhone.
Adobe has had Lightroom out on the iPad for a bit now, and I really didn’t use it. It works well, but my photos are usually processed by the time they hit my iPad. So well, yeah, it was a convenient way to get photos from my Mac to iPad.
But on the iPhone? Well now. You see Lightroom can import all your snaps since the last Lightroom launch, and sync those back to your Mac/iPad Lightroom copies. And, oh baby, is that cool.
Lightroom still has a long way to go to be my only, or even favorite, image editing app on iOS, but it is going to close that gap quickly if you ask me.
Lightroom already made it to my iPhone main home screen.
Robert McGinley Myers:
Begin’s limited time window feels exactly right. The only reason I don’t use it more regularly is the lack of companion apps, especially on the Mac. I’d love to have it in the upper right hand corner of my screen as I sit working at my desk.
I’d love that too.
Mike Arrington on Virtru (an encryption startup):
Which is great except that the founders are ex-NSA guys who used to be paid to do things like collect emails and phone call information from hundreds of millions of
terrorist suspectsAmericans.
That’s a really tough problem we are going to be facing. The people who are likely best qualified to build secure and robust encryption systems, are also the people who work at, or have worked at, places like the NSA, CIA, DOD, etc. That’s not to say these agencies are the only source of the talent, but they are certainly the largest talent pool of people.
On the one hand, Virtru can be seen as shady because there are ex-NSA people involved. On the other, every person would jump all over a Snowden backed startup — and the same argument about his former employer can be made as can be made of Virtru.
Which is why independent security audits are going to become a larger part of these narratives. We are basically at a point where we now know, and act, as though we cannot take people at their word. So now we need to start hiring people and asking them to please find where someone has fucked up the encryption.
Mike Johnston:
There’s nothing worse than seeing a fantastic picture when you don’t have a camera with you. But seeing a fantastic picture when you have the wrong camera with you is almost as bad.
Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan writing about Nest:
We’re a long way off from a future where Google can access any of that data—and in fact, it may never. So fret not, if you’re concerned about privacy. Both companies would have to make major changes to their privacy policies before anything even remotely like this will come to pass.
Thank GOD privacy policies are hard to change. What’s that? They aren’t hard to change? Oh, they change all the time? Well that sucks.
Aswath Damodaran on FiveThirtyEight:
For all these companies, the key selling point is “disruption,” one of the tech industry’s worst buzzwords. The companies argue that they’re upending existing ways of doing business — hailing a taxi, with Uber, or finding lodging, with Airbnb — and given the sizes of the businesses they’re supposedly disrupting, the sky’s the limit when it comes their value. But is Uber, which was founded five years ago, really worth $17 billion? My answer, as I hope to detail below, is only if we make some big assumptions about the taxi market and Uber’s place in it.
I know this has been a hotly debated topic for the past two(?) weeks, but this analysis is pretty hard to argue about. Investment in a company like Uber isn’t about current revenue, or even future expected revenue — it’s about future potential revenue. Hence the ridiculous use of “disruption” in investing.
I like Uber, but I think you are kidding yourself if you think it is worth $17 billion. But, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad investment at a $17 billion valuation.
Why? Easy: all you need to do is persuade someone else to come buy it for enough money that you get rich. And if Snapchat is any indication, that shouldn’t take long.
Nice. Beats those AppleScripts I have been hacking away at.
Awesome. Excuse me while I try this out.
Update: I made these. They rock.
Dan Kois:
2:41 Definitely having trouble getting work done. The idea of opening up a new document to edit feels crushing, as though each task I take on carries with it the additional burden of standing the whole time. But hey, it’s the first day! I’ll get used to this.
His experiences, and pain, yes that all happens when you convert to standing. But dear lord, do not stand all day — that’s bonkers.
This is epic:
A suite of custom actions for LaunchBar 6 that provide access to Pinboard bookmarks.
There’s been a lot in the news about Amazon not selling products from companies or publishers that it is having a spat with. It’s childish, but I am sure makes sense to someone at Amazon.
The latest, as I’ve linked to with this post, is that it seems Amazon is restricting some books purchased from being read on the Kindle iOS app.
I’ve long switched to purchasing from the iBooks store since it is easier, but this kind of shit is going to keep happening unless the DOJ takes Amazon to task for it. ((Unlikely, as it seems Amazon has paid off the DOJ. Not really, but probably. No, no, not really. But likely.))
I’m sure most reading this either have the Breaking News app on your iPhone, or follow the account on Twitter/App.net. Breaking News provides a very real, but only sometimes, very important service. In my opinion there is no doubt that it is the best at what it does.
Over the past year I’ve noticed the Breaking News push notifications get less annoying, and more accurate with their urgency.
But today they have launched a feature on the iOS app that I think takes the service to the next level — it does something that seems futuristic:
A first for a news app: proximity alerts for big breaking stories near you
Allow the app access to your location and you get notifications for important things happening near you. Very cool. I (thankfully) have not seen this in action, but I love knowing it is there.
One other thing: how is something like this not a built-in part of iOS/Android/Windows/Macs? Seems like this could be better done at the OS level. Like the Amber Alerts already built in.
Joseph Lichterman on Slack:
The Times of London built a bot that pulls in people’s schedules — so you can ask the bot if someone is busy before you bother them directly. Vox Media’s product team gets alerted through if there’s an issue with any of their sites — and they’ll also get an alert that notifies who was assigned to fix the problem. At BuzzFeed, one developer loves to eat at a certain Mexican food cart, so they built a Calexico Bot (named, appropriately, after the food cart) that asks if someone wants to go to the cart every time someone types his name.
Slack is such great tool. I absolutely love it, and the stuff listed above is so clever.
If you sign up for Slack with this link and you get a $100 credit and I get a $100 credit (if you upgrade or something).
Kirk McElhearn:
There’s a serious problem when your emails may not be delivered and you are not notified.
That’s messed up, I’m glad I switched from using iCloud as my primary email last year.
Made the rounds yesterday:
It was the 74th school shooting since Adam Lanza’s infamous assault on Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut — and, as this map shows, they’ve happened all over the country.
Ridiculous…
Epic post about launchers, and the power of LaunchBar 6 from Shawn Blanc
Watts Martin:
While Android has had a lot of these capabilities for years, I haven’t found anything like Launch Center Pro or Editorial in terms of automation and scriptability, and those apps manage to do what they do on today’s iOS. Imagine what we’ll see when these arbitrary restrictions get lifted.
The thing is: I can’t imagine, and that excites the hell out of me.
John Carey:
Some of us live in the past, others are perpetually stuck in the future, lest not we forget the present for it is what dreams are made of. That is, if you’re doing it right.