Linked List: December 20, 2014

Saturday, 20 December 2014

The format for DF RSS feed sponsorships has remained unchanged since they debuted back in 2007. There are three fields: a title (usually the name of the product or service being promoted), a URL for the main link, and a description of 100 words or fewer. The sponsors write these entries, not me. (They are subject to my approval, though.) Then at the end of the week, I write the thank-you posts (such as the one you’re reading now) using a mix of my own words and thoughts, and the main talking points the sponsor is trying to hit.

The gang at Meh, who once again sponsored this week’s feed, have turned this into a sort of RSS-based form of performance art. Last week they made ASCII art of a table being overturned.

This week, they used a title of “…” (just an ellipsis, nothing else) and a URL of “about:blank”. For the body of their entry, they added at least some context:

In this week before Christmas we thought it’d be nice to take our Daring Fireball sponsorship and not pitch you on anything. Enjoy the holidays. Meh.

No link on the word “Meh”, either, so if you weren’t familiar with them, it might still be confusing. But it was confusing as hell in the @daringfireball Twitter stream, where these entries go in with just the title and URL. Here’s the resulting tweet, in its entirety:

[Sponsor] …: http://about:blank

This, in turn, led many readers to assume that there was either some sort of technical snafu on my end, or that the sponsorship had gone unsold. Not the case. I find Meh’s strategy with these spots utterly fascinating — so I thank them both for sponsoring the site and for injecting a big dose of creativity into a format where I had never even considered the possibility of such.

The Triumphant Rise of the Shitpic ★

Astute observation by Brian Feldman:

The Shitpic aesthetic has arisen from two separate though equally influential factors, both of which necessitate screencapping instead of direct downloading. The first is that Instagram, which has no built-in reposting function, doesn’t let users save images directly. This means that the quickest way to save an image on a phone is to screencap it, technically creating a new image.

The Police Are the People ★

I think Dave Winer is onto something big here:

This is a huge disconnect, and we let it happen. The problem isn’t with the NYPD, the problem is with the blanket total support we give our military when it fights in Afghanistan and Iraq. The price of placing zero value on the lives of the people of these countries is that our lives in turn become worthless. What goes around comes around. You reap what you sow. There are dozens of adages and fables that explain this phenomenon. The lives of the people of the foreign countries are worth exactly as much as ours. We overlooked the behavior of American soldiers in these countries. Now the cops want to know why we treat them differently.

And they’re right to ask. Why? If the army can arbitrarily kill thousands in Iraq, why can’t they kill a few people in Staten Island, Missouri, or Ohio? You “support the troops” why don’t you support us, they ask.

Bryan Irace: ‘We Need a “Safari View Controller” ’ ★

Great suggestion from Bryan Irace:

It’d be wonderful if Apple provided a “Safari view controller” that developers could present directly from within their applications. This controller would run out of process and work almost exactly like MFMailComposeViewController and MFMessageComposeViewController already do for composing emails and text messages respectively. The app would provide the controller with a URL (and optionally, a tint color), but otherwise what the user does in it would remain secure and isolated from any third-party code, yet fully integrated with Safari.app and Safari controllers presented by other applications.

iOS 8 share and action extensions are further proof that Apple thinks being able to display view controllers from one application inside of another strikes a great balance of security and user experience. Why not let us do the same with Safari as well?

Jason Snell on Mailbox ★

Jason Snell, writing for The Sweet Setup:

Because Apple makes it, Mail is for everybody. But it’s not for everybody. Apple designed it to serve the masses, and if you want more–or less–from your email client, Apple Mail may not suit you. Maybe its old-school approach to mail, lifted from classic mail clients like Eudora and NeXTMail, just doesn’t fit the modern emailer. Maybe you want deep links to productivity apps on your Mac that Mail just won’t provide. Or maybe you’re just tired of being in a dysfunctional relationship with Mail.

All told, we looked at nine different challengers to Mail, each of which brings its own clever spin on how to process or display email. The best of the bunch is Mailbox, which simplifies mail into a set of tasks, allows you to defer messages until a later time, makes filing messages simple, takes advantage of trackpad gestures, and works with an excellent iOS app counterpart.

I tried Mailbox when it first came out, but it didn’t stick. I’m thinking maybe I should give it another shot, now that there’s a Mac counterpart. As Snell points out, it’s one of those apps where you kind of have to go all-in with it.