Category: Links

Comically I read this criticism on News+, and wouldn’t have seen it otherwise. If you skip past the first 1/3 of the article where the writer talks about who would want this, etc etc, there are good points about how the app works. News+ really isn’t there from a software perspective on Apple’s side. There’s no way, for instance, to say “these are the magazines I care about” — and that’s pretty basic shit. Trying to explain to my wife how to use it really revealed the comical level of shortcomings. I didn’t even know tapping in Wall Street Journal’s channel outside News+ would get me more content.

All that aside, here’s why this matters: quality over quantity. Apple News has always been stellar at filtering out the noise, and News+ is only doubling down on that. Don’t forget about that.

I’m not a huge fan of the way Evergoods bags look, but damn if I don’t appreciate this nerd level of caring.

Good setup and delightfully simple. But someone get that guy a better keyboard.

Image previews for all! Ulysses has always done this polarizing thing among Markdown purists: they previewed images you put in your document. If you step back, this was and is a great innovation and one that I have always loved, but never been able to use.

Until now. With Ulysses 15 the app will now preview images from remote web locations, even if that web location is hosted in Australia — truly global.

Joking aside, this is the one feature they added this time around which has really impacted me in a good way. I love this feature, this app, and it keeps getting better.

Side note: I complained about how this changed some of the image adding flow. A smart person at Ulysses, let’s call him Max for the purpose of this article, chuckled and wondered why I inserted images the hard way. Turns out if you have an image URL on the pasteboard, you can just paste that URL in any part of the document and Ulysses magically makes this work like you inserted the image. How cool is that? Thanks “Max”, if that’s even your real name.

Yes, I know you can paste URLs on to text to make a link, I literally never tried it with images I guess.

The title of this link is likely to be extremely unpopular among those who read this site. The common belief basically amounts to “fuck daylight saving time” and I certainly have held that opinion for a while. Especially this morning.

However this article is an extremely interesting counter point to the common refrain. Worth your time.

This post is meh, but this quote from Kevin Roose is gold:

I even use an app to pretend to meditate.

Perfect.

Interesting poll:

The Axios Harris Poll 100 ranks the reputations of the most visible companies in the United States. The survey is conducted among 18,228 Americans in a nationally representative sample. Powered by twenty years of proprietary research from The Harris Poll Reputation Quotient, The Axios Harris Poll 100 is a measurement of what real people think right now about the companies in our cultural conversation.

Amazon is at #2, while Apple is down at #32. What’s amazing though is Facebook, which dropped from #51 last year to #94 this year.

Comcast is #91 this year. Spirit Airlines is #90.

If you’ve had the misfortune to interact with either of those companies you should be amazed Facebook is lower then them, but also proud that people recognize how shit Facebook really is. The US Government is #100, which seems a tad high.

I don’t love this post from Amy Olberding, because I don’t think it applies s neatly to Marie Kondo as it does to the examples of Sun Tzu in the article (which is misused and the analysis is spot on). With Kondo it is a bit different but bordering on stupidity at this point, that said I still think many people I know should read Kondo’s book.

Anyways, the entire reason for this link is so I can quote this bit:

Kondo is, in several ways, a Mr Miyagi for the anxious, late-capitalist, consumerist age.

I mean you can just carry a bag, but for the love of everything don’t call it a man-purse or a murse. There’s just no need. You know what’s a good name: ‘hand bag’.

Kashmir Hill on the experience:

I’ve just traded one huge corporation seeking to monetize my searches for another, less competent one.

I think that’s astute and something most people miss when they try to cut out too many of the big companies. It’s fair to say that you should cut out Google and Facebook as much as you can. Amazon seems like it will protect your data better than Kroger, and Apple better than any startup. That said, Hill’s series on all of this is worth the read.

Some good deals on select items from GORUCK in their Spring Cleaning Sale. The Kid Ruck is down to $125, which makes it a good buy again. Even better is the GR2, which is back down to its old price of $395 — so if you want the best large sized travel backpack, I’d jump on that one.

Zack Whittaker:

Apple is telling app developers to remove or properly disclose their use of analytics code that allows them to record how a user interacts with their iPhone apps — or face removal from the app store, TechCrunch can confirm.

Michael Grothaus:

Using Glassbox’s session reply technology, app makers can see every tap and swipe you make. Keystrokes are also recorded and any text you write is captured as well, though text inputs are usually masked so as to hide sensitive information like credit card or passport numbers. However, TechCrunch found that not all apps that are using Glassbox’s tech are masking data fields properly, leaving sensitive information exposed in the screen recordings. And since all screen recordings go back to the app developer through Glassbox’s servers, anyone at the company with access to those servers could potentially see a user’s unmasked personal data.

Ban them, and it’s not just Glassbox. In fact, apps should have to disclose the analytics packages they use in the app description.

Matthew Hughes:

That figure sounds like a lot, but it’s absolutely astronomical when spread across an entire year. It equates to more than 100 days of online time every year for every Internet user. That’s more than 27 percent of every year.

Nicole Karlis, reporting on the new study:

As the researchers state: “We find little evidence to support the hypothesis suggested by prior work that Facebook might be more beneficial for ‘active’ users—for example, users who regularly comment on pictures and posts from friends and family instead of just scrolling through their news feeds.”

The whole report is basically: you’re better off without it.

Josh Constine:

We asked Guardian Mobile Firewall’s security expert Will Strafach to dig into the Facebook Research app, and he told us that “If Facebook makes full use of the level of access they are given by asking users to install the Certificate, they will have the ability to continuously collect the following types of data: private messages in social media apps, chats from in instant messaging apps – including photos/videos sent to others, emails, web searches, web browsing activity, and even ongoing location information by tapping into the feeds of any location tracking apps you may have installed.” It’s unclear exactly what data Facebook is concerned with, but it gets nearly limitless access to a user’s device once they install the app.

Why do people keep going to work at this company? Kudos to Apple though for swiftly shutting this down.

(BTW, Google is doing it too.)

Love it. Want it. So very Westworld. Goodness I hope someone makes this a reality. One device for everything. That’s the dream, shit, we had that in the 90s. Well, not that you could take those everywhere, mostly just that you could only afford to have one.

On one hand, this is a clever way for them to go about finding these vulnerabilities. On the other: no thanks.

Good synopsis.

Only surprising part is that it took this long, I guess.