Category: Links

Mark Bergen writing about a new report suggesting mobile devices have overtaken TV usage, notes:

When it comes to mobile ads, global smartphone users are also noticeably open to watching short videos. “Mobile video is just completely poised to explode,” Ms. McGoldrick said. The agency's data, she noted, is “showing that other markets are utilizing micro-video more effectively.”

So more video ads on mobile then? Great.

Normally $199, on sale for $14.99. I had never heard of it, but it is fantastic, take a look at what it does here.

John Paul Titlow reporting:

“If you look at the logs of people’s search sessions, they’re the most personal thing on the Internet,” Weinberg says. “Unlike Facebook, where you choose what to post, with search you’re typing in medical and financial problems and all sorts of other things. You’re not thinking about the privacy implications of your search history.”

Michael Lopp:

Notifications are intended to be designed for the user’s ease of use, but the system is actually designed (perhaps unintentionally) for the advantage of business. The moment you see this flawed design pattern, you fucking see it everywhere.

Good article, which I would take further. Notifications are piss poor in iOS and OS X. They are user hostile and just plain don’t work. I have 17 notifications in the “all” tab, none of which I give a crap about — but it’s far too annoying to turn them off.

Don’t even get me started on OS X notifications — the notification center there may be the most worthless thing ever made.

Chris Wanstrath, CEO of GitHub:

I would like to personally apologize to Julie. It’s certain that there were things we could have done differently.

It’s a short, and to the point post on the matter. It’s not filled with marketing doublespeak (mostly) and it feels written by one person.

That’s about as good as a corporate response can get. I’m not saying they are off the hook, I’m just impressed by the non-bullshit response which boils down to:

1. We are investigating.
2. All people accused have been put on leave, and the one non-employee has been banned from the offices.
3. We are working to get better in spite of lots of growth (this was the only annoying section).
4. I’m sorry, and I wish her well.

I was seriously considering using Github to replace Editorially. Now? Not so much.

Mike Johnston on the notion that “the best camera is the camera with you”, and on writing in general:

There's only your right way. And yes, that can be difficult to settle on; and yes, it might take lots of experimentation to find out what it is; and yes, you might have to work very hard along the way toward finding out.

But it's nothing so simple as the trite and pat little truisms that have been said a million times in forums.

Fantastic read, and it's more about life than just photography or writing.

Marco Arment commenting on Amazon Prime and larger issues:

In the last few years, Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter have all made huge attempts to move into major parts of each others’ businesses, usually at the detriment of their customers or users.

This is one of Arment’s best posts in a while. His analysis of Twitter and Facebook is especially spot on. Good read.

I don’t agree with his notion that Amazon is going to make it harder to be a retail only customer, but I agree that certainly don’t want you to be a retail only customer.

I largely don’t care about the price increase to Prime, and have never used the video services — but I would use the video services if they were a channel on my Apple TV. I think the key that Amazon is missing right now is ease of access. People don’t use things that are hard to use, but Amazon keeps thinking they will, so they pump out tablets and video services that no one really pays attention too. ((Yes, you see people all the time with Kindle Fires, I’m sure.))

Thomas Fitzgerald:

Many of the comments I’ve received have been wondering if there’s a way to get close to the output of Iridient Developer or Photo Ninja using a combination of Lightroom and Photoshop. Surprisingly, the answer is almost. I’ve been working on this for a while now and I believe that by combining Lightroom and a little bit of Photoshop you can get close. The advantage of this is that you can get clean and organic looking results without having to learn a new piece of software, and by using the droplet as a plug-in approach I blogged about last week, you don’t even have to leave Lightroom.

Iridient Developer really does do the best job at rendering Fujifilm files, but the software is really clunky. Fitzergerald has a really complicated approach. I finish 99% of my Fujifilm files in Lightroom, but if I feel I am missing something that should be there, I won’t hesitate to use Iridient.

My morning routine when I get to the office is pretty set, step two is swiping over to the space where a fullscreen Fluid instance of Flow (my web based task management app) is running. I hit CMD+R to get it refreshed, look at the list and get back to what ever is urgent.

Today there was a bit of a surprise: a new look. Now Flow looks awesome. It was just ok before, awesome now. Got it? Good.

Then, in order to write this blog post, I went to look for their announcement and saw they added subtasks. Holy. Shit. Awesome.

It’s nice to be using a tool that is getting serious, and regular, love to the design and feature set. It’s been quite some time since I left OmniFocus, but I really don’t miss it at all.

This new subtask feature is going to be killer.

Matthew Cole for NBC News:

“It’s clear the CIA was trying to play ‘keep away’ with documents relevant to an investigation by their overseers in Congress, and that’s a serious constitutional concern,” said Snowden in a statement to NBC News. “But it’s equally if not more concerning that we’re seeing another ‘Merkel Effect,’ where an elected official does not care at all that the rights of millions of ordinary citizens are violated by our spies, but suddenly it’s a scandal when a politician finds out the same thing happens to them.”

Patrick Rhone:

God bless hypocrisy.

This should be fun.

Ed O’Keefe and Adam Goldman:

The head of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday sharply accused the CIA of violating federal law and undermining the constitutional principle of congressional oversight as she detailed publicly for the first time how the agency secretly removed documents from computers used by her panel to investigate a controversial interrogation program.

That’s the CIA, imagine how fucking hard it would be to investigate the NSA.

Linking to CNET because they have a screenshot of the new call screen. This is the biggest change for me — that both the active call screen, and the answer screen have been changed. I won’t dive into the design, be it good or bad, but the end button is now something closer to 1/3 the size it used to be.

That’s going to take a lot of getting used to.

I had one of these, and one of the biggest tech regrets I have is selling it off. It was a fantastic design, and the mechanical privacy shutter was light years ahead of its time.

John Carey:

This was just before the hysteria of smart phones took over our lives. If I remember correctly, I was carrying the recently released first generation of iPhone with me which went mostly untouched during the trip. While it was a cool device, my world didn’t revolve around it, I didn’t feel the need to be connected at all times and share constantly to keep everyone in the loop.

He may be known for his image, but the words accompanying his image is fantastic.

File this in the department of things I didn’t know. Mike Johnston, in talking about the Fuji 56 f/1.2 lens, talks a bit about why a portrait photographer doesn’t necessary want the sharpest lens:

The texture of makeup and temporary pimples just aren’t needed for recognition purposes, and the brain tends to naturally “throw away” that information. It’s not that we don’t see it, but we overlook it. To be psychologically accurate, portrait photographs should too.

Worth reading his post, really interesting thoughts.