Linked List: February 12, 2015

Thursday, 12 February 2015

New from BusyMac:

BusyContacts brings to contact management the same power, flexibility, and sharing capabilities that BusyCal users have enjoyed with their calendars. What’s more, BusyContacts integrates seamlessly with BusyCal forming a flexible, easy to use CRM solution that works the way you do.

Sold.

Brian Williams’s and Jon Stewart’s Common Ground ★

Good column from David Carr on Brian Williams and Jon Stewart:

Both men spent more than a decade on top of their businesses for good reasons. Mr. Stewart had a remarkable eye for hypocrisy, found amazing writers and executed their work and his own with savage grace, no small feat. Mr. Williams managed to convey gravitas and self-awareness at the same time while sitting atop one of the best television news operations in the business. They were kings of their respective crafts.

But now they are both done, at least for the time being.

You won’t find a better written sentence today than this one, regarding Williams:

Perhaps he sensed that he was king of an entropic kingdom imprisoned by incontinence and cholesterol ads.

The New ESPN App ★

Chris Welch, writing for The Verge:

ESPN really wants to be on your phone’s homescreen. And today, it’s taking a pretty big step to get there. The company is relaunching its core apps for iOS and Android through an update coming to the App Store and Google Play. ESPN has spent months working on a cleaner, faster experience for the millions of sports fans who’ve made opening SportsCenter part of their daily routine. But no one’s going to be doing that anymore, because the “SportsCenter” app name is being retired. It’s getting pushed out the door in favor of a simpler approach that ESPN probably should’ve taken from the beginning: the app is now named after the company itself. Not ScoreCenter. Not SportsCenter. Just plain old ESPN.

They have a website redesign scheduled to debut April 1, but as it stands today, ESPN’s app makes their website look like a joke.

The App Store and Pinterest, Sitting in a Tree ★

Pinterest:

Now if you’re on your iPhone or iPad, you’ll see another kind of Pin: app Pins. Let’s say you’re Pinning workout inspiration to your Marathon Training board. If you see a fitness app that helps you reach your goals, you can download it right from Pinterest.

When you come across an app Pin, tap Install to download the app right to your iPhone or iPad without ever leaving Pinterest (you’ll only see app Pins when you’re using the Pinterest app on your iPhone or iPad).

Check out the App Store’s new profile for a collection of the latest and greatest app Pins. You can also save your favorite apps right from the App Store itself.

Interesting expansion into social media by Apple; interesting that it’s iOS-only on Pinterest’s part.

Update: Jim Lipsey tweets:

Seems like Apple is offloading app discovery to Pinterest, like they did enterprise sales and support to IBM. No more pingsperiments.

Slack Hits 500,000 Daily Active Users in First Year ★

Alice Truong, writing for Quartz:

Slack turns one year old today. In its short but fascinating history, the startup has managed the remarkable feat of actually getting people excited about enterprise communication software. The company has more than 500,000 daily active users, and it’s adding tens of thousands more every each week.

“That’s our primary metric,” founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield tells Quartz. “If you’re not using Slack every single day, you’re not really using it.”

Tremendous growth.

Wishful Thinking ★

Jamie Ware Billett:

So he laid out his expectations which were largely not met, but he doesn’t want to give up on those expectation yet, so he’s hoping for another big reveal closer to the time of sale. Is Apple going to have another event for Apple Watch, where they will invite all the press back and say, “Ah ha, this watch is actually a million times more incredible than we pretended back in September. Let us show you all the amazing things it can actually do.” That seems unlikely to me.

I do expect another press event before they release Apple Watch. I do not expect anything new that will be “a million times more incredible than we pretended in September”. I just expect to learn more details. More little things. More nuance. I’m far from convinced that I’m going to find Apple Watch useful. I’m convinced more by Apple’s public and private confidence in it than by what they’ve revealed so far.

Jackass of the Week: Business Insider’s Jim Edwards ★

Headline: “Apple Is an Existential Threat to Android”. Every bit as jacktastic as Henry Blodget’s “iPhone Dead in the Water” was back in 2011.

Barvd: 2014 in Review ★

Hard to believe Favrd died an early death and Barvd lives on, but that’s the world we live in.

How The New York Times Works ★

Fantastic behind-the-scenes piece by Reeves Wiedeman for Popular Mechanics:

Dicke meets his first deadline — barely — but 9 p.m. is only the beginning. Deadline for the first local edition is 10:45, followed by another at midnight, and a final call half an hour later. When Dicke finally packs up to leave just after 12:30 a.m., Lillie Dremeaux is still plotting out the next morning’s home page and preparing to hand overnight duties to an editor in Hong Kong. In a previous era, after the last page was sent to the printer, an editor would ring a bell, walk toward the door, and holler “Good night!” to mostly no one, because there was no one left to yell at. Dicke looks around at colleagues midshift, their eyes pinned to computer screens.

“We no longer do that,” he says.

Being Green ★

Paul Ford:

A few months ago my friend Edd Dumbill shared a discovery. He pointed out that if you search Twitter for the words “green bubbles” you’ll find very consistent results. People hate green bubbles.

It’s a little thing, so very little, but it matters. One small factor among many that allow the iPhone to sustain higher prices and margins.

Also, and unsaid by Ford, this phenomenon speaks to the success of iMessage as a platform.

Update: Yours truly on Twitter, back in July 2013:

Shouldn’t the Message app icon be blue? Green = SMS (gross), blue = iMessage (cool).

‘An Injury Makes You Invisible’ ★

Mets pitcher Matt Harvey on his “gap” year, recovering from Tommy John surgery. Really digging the quality of writing on The Players Tribune.