Posts in Linked

Drafts 4.3→

A great update to Drafts was released earlier this week, and it’s got some interesting changes for users who manage a lot of notes or save bits of text in the same notes on a regular basis.

The Drafts extension can now offer to append/prepend whatever it receives (some text, a URL, etc.) to existing notes – useful to keep a running list of items without ending with multiple notes or having to merge them manually every time. This is useful for me when I want to assemble lists of links I can use for MacStories or Relay.

The Drafts Share extension (used from the Share sheet in other apps) now supports appending and prepending to inbox drafts as well as capture of new drafts. To use these options in the share sheet, tap the “Append” or “Prepend” buttons at the bottom of the window and select the draft to add the text to.

You can also run an action on multiple notes at once now:

When using the “Select” and “Operations” options below the drafts list, there is now a “Select All” option to quickly select all drafts in the current tab, and a “Run Action” operation to apply an action to multiple drafts. “Select All” is particularly useful to quickly archive all drafts in the inbox, for example. The “Run Action” operation lets you quickly select multiple drafts and run an action on them. When selecting this operation, the action list will be shown to select the action to run. Some actions (such as ones that leave Drafts) are not supported for multiple selections and will be grayed out in the list.

The most impressive aspect of Drafts is how Greg Pierce manages to keep the app simple and powerful at the same time with features that are there but not in the way. That’s an exercise of restraint and good design that can’t be appreciated in other apps. Drafts is $9.99 on the App Store.

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WebKit Blog on Safari Content Blocking Extensions→

I’ve been curious to know more about the reasoning behind content blocking extensions coming to iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan. The general assumption is that Apple wants to enable users to activate ad blockers on the iPhone and iPad, but I wanted to hear Apple’s public stance and details on the implementation.

The WebKit blog answers my questions with an in-depth post on content blocking extensions. First off, Apple engineers were unhappy with the current state of content blockers:

The reason we are unhappy about the JavaScript-based content blocking extensions is they have significant performance drawbacks. The current model uses a lot of energy, reducing battery life, and increases page load time by adding latency for each resource. Certain kinds of extensions also reduce the runtime performance of webpages. Sometimes, they can allocate tremendous amounts of memory, which goes against our efforts to reduce WebKit’s memory footprint.

It is an area were we want to do better. We are working on new tools to enable content blocking at a fraction of the cost.

​As for Apple’s motivation, they never mention “ads” in the post, but the focus on disabling trackers and making webpages faster by removing external scripts is fairly clear:

We have been building these features with a focus on providing better control over privacy. We wanted to enable better privacy filters, and that is what has been driving the feature set that exists today.

There is a whole universe of features that can take advantage of the content blocker API, around privacy or better user experience. We would love to hear your feedback about what works well, what needs improvement, and what is missing.

​Unsurprisingly, Apple built these new extensions differently than most content blockers for desktop browsers. Content blocking extensions won’t see the URLs of pages or resources being blocked:

A major benefit of the declarative content blocking extension model is that the extension does not see the URLs of pages and resources the user browsed to or had a page request.

​And:

WebKit itself does not keep track of what rules have been executed on which URLs; we do not track you by design.

User privacy is at the center of content blocking for both webpages and extensions. It’ll be interesting to see how many apps that just focus on blocking ads in Safari will be approved on the App Store (and how much they’ll leverage freemium models if so).

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Apple News and the Open Web→

Daniel Jalkut perfectly encapsulates my thoughts on why I want MacStories to show up in Apple News and take advantage of connecting with more people:

Whether it’s music, apps, podcasts, or, coming very soon, syndicated blog content, you’d have to be a fool not to try to get your work into their customer-facing channels. In the case of podcasts, and as it seems with “News,” doing so means providing a feed that points to content you own and which you store on your server.

As long as I don’t have to relinquish control of my RSS feed and the words I write, I’m all for experimenting with aggregators that can bring our articles to different audiences. I’m intrigued by Apple News.

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Apple News to Have Human Editors, Curation→

Jordan Kahn, writing for 9to5Mac on a job listing that indicated Apple News is going to have human editors in addition to algorithms:

Apple’s job listing notes that News editors will be responsible for gathering “the best in breaking national, global, and local news.” They will also be working firsthand with publications to “drive relationships with some of the world’s leading newsrooms, ensuring that important breaking news stories are surfaced quickly, and enterprise journalism is rewarded with high visibility.” And Apple won’t just be curating stories from the big players. It also mentions a focus on surfacing original content from “the largest to the smallest” publishers. News editors will also track social media for breaking stories, according to the job listing, and “recognize and communicate key content trends to senior management.”

And here’s Dan Moren for Six Colors:

But what fascinates me here is the bigger message: that the most profitable and arguably most powerful technology company in the world firmly believes that technology alone simply isn’t good enough for these sorts of determinations. I don’t think it’s necessarily a view you’d hear espoused at the highest levels of Google, for example.

First thought I had: I’m curious to see how they will curate the Technology section in Apple News.

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iOS 9 Picture in Picture→

Benjamin Mayo has a great summary of the benefits of Picture in Picture for iOS 9 on the iPad as compared to the Mac:

The thing about the iPad picture-in-picture implementation is that its actually better than how one would handle such a task on a Mac. On a Mac, trying to play a video in the corner whilst getting on with your work is difficult. Let’s take a video on YouTube playing in Safari. To play this in a corner of the screen on a Mac, you have to pull the window out into its own tab. Then, you have to manually drag the corners of the window to resize it and do your best to clip out all the unnecessary surrounding UI by hand. No doubt the window has a toolbar so you’ll probably have to do some awkward keyboard shortcut or hidden menu command to hide that as well.

Then you have to actually manage the window as you go on with your work. What do I mean by this? Well, with every other task you open you also have to make sure it doesn’t occlude the video playback window by dragging it out the way. The video can’t stay foremost so it’s actually really easy to lose the video amongst your other windows.

If you ever want to move the video from one corner to another, not only do you have to position the video on the screen, you also have to move all your other windows back over to the other side.

This mirrors my initial thoughts exactly. When I talk about the inherent complexities of desktop OSes, this is the type of issues I refer to. With an implementation built on years of distilling the experience to the simplest, iPad multitasking will make these differences even more obvious.

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Twitter Removing the 140 Character Limit from Direct Messages→

With a post on the Twitter Developers forum yesterday, Product Manager for Direct Messages Sachin Agarwal has announced that Twitter will be removing the limit of 140 characters from DMs this summer:

We’ve done a lot to improve Direct Messages over the past year and have much more exciting work on the horizon. One change coming in July that we want to make you aware of now (and first!) is the removal of the 140 character limit in Direct Messages. In order to make this change as seamless as possible for you we’ve included some recommendations below to ensure all your applications and services can handle these longer format messages before we flip the switch.

When I first read this, I felt skeptical. Much of Twitter’s appeal to me lies in the streamlined approach to short messages that fly by in the timeline. But, some of my most important conversations over the years have started from Twitter DMs. From this standpoint, it’s surprising that Twitter hasn’t put more thought in the DM product as a messaging platform, alienating users who were looking for a direct, nimble communication system – and pushing them to other services.

The strength of Twitter DMs is, for me, the existing graph between users (people I’m interested in), speed, and the lack of baggage from email. Lately, I’ve come to like the ability to easily share links and pictures in DMs as well. I don’t know if raising the character limit to 10k characters will by itself improve DMs, but Twitter is wasting an opportunity with DMs, so maybe their new CEO could use this as a starting point.

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Julie Adenuga, Apple’s New DJ→

I’m fascinated by Apple’s choice to pick Julie Adenuga as the DJ for Beats 1 in London. I wasn’t familiar with her work before, but she seems exactly like the type of music expert and entertainer that could make Beats 1 an important part of Apple Music. The Fader profile on her contains a lot of interesting details:

Adenuga’s radio career began at Rinse FM in 2010, shortly before the UK pirate station got its official FM status. Along with her BFF Sian Anderson—now a BBC Radio 1Xtra DJ—she took a gamble on asking the station managers for a show, despite having zero experience. “We didn’t have a clue what we were doing,” Adenuga remembered in her official Rinse bio a couple of years ago. The pair went in to record their first show armed with nothing but great taste in music and a willingness to chat for hours. A producer showed them how to operate a CDJ on the fly, because they couldn’t mix; “we’d just stop and start tunes. We had no DJ experience, but we just played the music and were talking rubbish. It worked. Luckily.” Bringing the rare combination of fire music selections and a banging sense of humour to the station, Adenuga and Anderson hosted a show called Mewzik Box from 2010 - 2011, taking a weekly 11am - 1pm slot.

Noisey has also a good article on Adenuga’s career.

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Connected: We Should Start a Bank Rumours Website→

(Mostly) live from San Francisco, the guys talk about all things WWDC 2015, including new versions of OS X and iOS, improvements to the iPad and the introduction of Apple Music.

In this week’s Connected, I talk about the potential for Search in iOS 9, discuss the implications of iPad multitasking, and share my thoughts on the Apple Music introduction. It’s a good one. You can listen here.

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iOS 9 Content Blockers→

Benjamin Mayo, writing for 9to5Mac:

Ad blocking extensions have been possible on Safari for Mac for a long time, but plugin architecture for Safari on iOS is much more limited. With iOS 9, Apple has added a special case of extension for ad blockers. Apps can now include ‘content blocker’ extensions that define resources (like images and scripts) for Safari to not load. For the first time, this architecture makes ad blockers a real possibility for iOS developers to make and iOS customers to install and use.

This has been, for me, the most puzzling new feature in iOS 9. Why is Apple doing this? Is the demand for ad blockers on iOS so high to justify the creation of a new extension point in Safari (and tons of questionable ad blockers coming to the App Store)? Could this be related to shady ad networks still finding ways to automatically redirect web views to the App Store?

The most plausible explanation I’m coming up with is that Apple wants to make it easier to develop third-party content filters (not necessarily ad blockers, like curbi) for parental and educational purposes without workarounds (like MDM and VPN certificates), but I’m not sure.

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