Linked List: June 19, 2015

Friday, 19 June 2015

Today Is National Martini Day 

Enjoy:

Apple Discontinues Original iPad Mini 

Jeremy Horwitz:

Apple’s discontinuation of the iPad mini leaves the remaining iPads as a completely 64-bit family, all using either A7 and A8X processors rather than the iPad mini’s aging A5. It also means that all remaining iPads have Retina displays and unified Wi-Fi + Cellular models.

‘A Papal Message That Spares No One’ 

Elizabeth Kolbert, writing for The New Yorker on Pope Francis’s new encyclical on climate change and the environment:

Whether the Pope’s message will have any influence — on the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, on the delegations currently trying to devise an international climate agreement, or on anyone else — remains to be seen. Up to now, the sowers of discord have done a good job blocking action on climate change, and, if the leak of the encyclical is any guide, they are still hard at work. Meanwhile, as @Pontifex tweeted to his 6.3 million followers Thursday, “The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.”

I enjoyed Kontra’s observation:

We’re living in a country where the Pope likely couldn’t be head of several Congressional committees because he’s not unscientific enough.

Accessibility Is a User-Attracting Feature 

Craig Hockenberry on the results of Apple featuring Twitterrific on their “Popular Apps Using VoiceOver” page on the App Store. Looks like a bigger spike than when the Apple Watch launched.

Ad Blocking Irony 

PC Magazine ran a piece by Eric Griffith headlined, “Apple iOS 9 Ad-Blocking Explained (And Why It’s a Bad Move)”.

Here is what it looks like on an iPhone. Here’s what it looks like on a Mac. Ridiculous.

I run a business almost entirely based on advertising. I am, thus, naturally disinclined to support ad-blocking. But from the outset, I’ve followed the advertising version of the golden rule: Present ads to readers (and podcast listeners) that you yourself would not be annoyed by. Advertisers and publishers who present user-hostile ads should not be surprised when the users fight back.

(For a detailed look at WebKit Content Blockers, see Benjamin Poulain’s introductory article at the Surfin’ Safari blog.)

The Rise of DuckDuckGo 

John Paul Titlow, writing for Fast Company:

The premise of DuckDuckGo is simple: It doesn’t track your searches or any other online activity. Whereas Google has built a $66 billion dollar-a-year business around knowing more and more about its users’ every click, tap, and scroll, DuckDuckGo prefers ignorance. It doesn’t have user logins, it doesn’t log your search history or IP address. Even if they wanted to hand over data about your search history, they couldn’t. That data just doesn’t exist.

Instead of profiting from heaps of user data, DuckDuckGo has opted for a simpler business model: Old-school search ads that pair the keywords in people’s queries with relevant ads placed by the highest bidder. Weinberg says the company also makes money from affiliate links to sites like Amazon and eBay.

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine in Safari for months now, and the results just keep getting better. I do have to switch to Google for some queries, but that’s happening less and less.

Apple and Accessibility 

Steven Aquino, writing for TechCrunch:

But it isn’t only Apple who’s doing good. Third-party developers have a responsibility to incorporate accessibility into their apps as well, and that’s where WWDC comes in. Apple provides numerous resources to developers during the conference that help he or she ensure that their app(s) are as accessible as possible.

The accessibility presence at WWDC is deep and far-reaching; Apple does much to raise awareness of and advocate for the accessibility community. Apple this week granted me behind-the-scenes access to sessions, labs, and developer interviews at Moscone so as to tell WWDC’s accessibility story.

Steven’s is a great roundup of the numerous ways accessibility was emphasized at WWDC last week. I’ll draw your attention to a few items though: