Linked List: September 4, 2018

Tuesday, 4 September 2018

Rene Ritchie returns to the show for a deep dive into what was revealed (and what wasn’t) by Guilherme Rambo’s release last week of product marketing images of the apparently-named iPhone XS and Series 4 Apple Watch.

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‘Haters to the Side’ Indeed ★

[Whoops: Fixed the missing main URL link. Sorry about that.]

Speaking of Josh Topolsky-helmed publications and controversial designs, it hasn’t taken long for this 2015 piece at Wired to age poorly (headline: “Haters to the Side: Bloomberg’s Loud Redesign Heralds the Future of Web News”):

Not everyone loves the new Bloomberg Business site. On Twitter, pundits have pilloried it, saying it looks like “Instagram filters on acid,” and, more simply, “I don’t like it.” Marc Andreessen knocked it, and Venturebeat says it “pulls you in as much as it spits in your eye.”

Josh Topolsky, editor of Bloomberg Digital and the man who spearheaded this new look and strategy, is undeterred. He has a bigger vision for what the future of news design can be. “If you look at most news sites you see a basic formatting, that’s really based on traditional newspaper design,” he says. Or, readers get their news from feeds like Twitter and Facebook, where it’s “presented in rapid fire in headline after headline.”

Since leaving The Verge this past July to join Bloomberg, Topolsky and design agency Code and Theory have been working on a kaleidoscopic, modular web design for the news organization that corrals all of Bloomberg’s media properties — Bloomberg News, Bloomberg Businessweek, Bloomberg TV, and Bloomberg Graphics — under one roof, and relies neither on a gridded layout nor a feed. “What drives me insane in modern web design is grids,” Topolsky says. “What’s important is a page that moves.”

Virtually nothing from that redesign remains at Bloomberg, which now sports very readable article pages and a grid-based homepage.

More Layoffs at The Outline, Months After $5M Funding Round ★

John Bonazzo, reporting for The Observer:

A source told Observer that the cuts included two staff writers, two front-end developers, an executive assistant and a revenue associate.

The laid-off staffers were notified in a series of early morning meetings that were scheduled last night. The remaining revenue staff is also taking pay cuts.

The source also noted that The Outline plans to slash its freelance budget despite the dearth of staff writers. The site will likely move from its current Lower East Side office to an undisclosed WeWork location.

Needless to say, fewer staff writers and a reduced freelancer budget are a bad combination. There’s been some great work at The Outline, and I’m always disheartened to hear of good publications struggling financially. But I can’t help but wonder whether The Outline would be doing better if its design weren’t so reader-hostile. Their regular articles still use those squiggly animated horizontal and vertical rules. They feel like some sort of eye test or challenge — “Can you read this text next to an animated squiggle?”

And they have irregular articles that are just bizarrely designed. Casey Johnston — she of the MacBook Pro keyboard saga fame — is my favorite writer on The Outline staff. She recently wrote a story about two friends who were in a pool when it was struck by lightning. I found the story incredibly annoying to read — so much scrolling, so many blocks of all-caps text. Because it’s all done with shitty JavaScript, it doesn’t let you use the space bar to scroll. Think about that: the layout forces you to scroll frequently, but their implementation doesn’t let you scroll the easiest way. The only reason I stuck with the article was Johnston’s byline. If it had been a byline I didn’t recognize and admire I’d have closed the tab after 15 seconds or so.

Do I really think bad design is at the heart of The Outline’s financial struggles? No, I guess not. But good design surely wouldn’t hurt.

Evernote Lost Its CTO, CFO, CPO, and HR Head in the Last Month as It Eyes Another Fundraising Round ★

Ingrid Lunden, reporting for TechCrunch:

Evernote, the productivity app with 225 million users that lets people take notes and organise other files from their working and non-work life, has been on a mission to reset its image as the go-to service for those seeking tools to help themselves be more efficient, years after losing its place as one of the most popular apps in the app store. But those changes have not come without their own challenges.

TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that in the last month, Evernote lost several of its most senior executives, including its CTO Anirban Kundu, CFO Vincent Toolan, CPO Erik Wrobel and head of HR Michelle Wagner beyond the usual attrition of engineers and designers.

The departures are coming at a key time: we have also heard that Evernote is fundraising, potentially in a down-round from its most recent (but now several years-old) valuation of $1.2 billion.

I never took a liking to Evernote. Its origins as a Windows desktop app were always apparent. It had some interesting and powerful features (particularly OCR for signage in photographs — you can search for text in images) but a terrible interface. If you’re still using it, you should look into your export options.

Medium Deprecates Custom Domains Service ★

Medium:

Medium is no longer offering new custom domains as a feature. Instead, you can create a publication on Medium that will live on a medium.com/publication-name URL.

I don’t understand why any publication, even a personal blog, would use Medium without a custom domain name. It’s not just about branding now, but about long-term sustainability. If you have your own domain name, you can keep old URLs working in perpetuity. I know many people love Medium’s editing interface, but I just can’t believe that so many writers and publications have turned toward a single centralized commercial entity as a proposed solution to what ails the publishing industry. There is tremendous strength in independence and decentralization.

Firefox to Start Blocking Bad Trackers by Default ★

Nick Nguyen, writing for Mozilla’s company blog:

Tracking slows down the web. In a study by Ghostery, 55.4% of the total time required to load an average website was spent loading third party trackers. For users on slower networks the effect can be even worse.

Long page load times are detrimental to every user’s experience on the web. For that reason, we’ve added a new feature in Firefox Nightly that blocks trackers that slow down page loads. We will be testing this feature using a shield study in September. If we find that our approach performs well, we will start blocking slow-loading trackers by default in Firefox 63. […]

In the physical world, users wouldn’t expect hundreds of vendors to follow them from store to store, spying on the products they look at or purchase. Users have the same expectations of privacy on the web, and yet in reality, they are tracked wherever they go. Most web browsers fail to help users get the level of privacy they expect and deserve.

In order to help give users the private web browsing experience they expect and deserve, Firefox will strip cookies and block storage access from third-party tracking content. We’ve already made this available for our Firefox Nightly users to try out, and will be running a shield study to test the experience with some of our beta users in September. We aim to bring this protection to all users in Firefox 65, and will continue to refine our approach to provide the strongest possible protection while preserving a smooth user experience.

Outstanding news. Back in the early 2000s, every web browser other than IE turned toward web standards. It painted IE as the bad player, and drove IE users to switch to Firefox and other standard-based browsers. I think the same thing is happening now with ad tracking, with Safari and Firefox leading the way. But this time it’s Chrome that is being painted as the bad guy. I hope Microsoft joins Apple and Mozilla in this trend.

I’d love to see Google join too, but I’m not holding my breath — they’re working in the opposite direction, bringing web-style tracking to physical retail.

Nike Re-Signs Colin Kaepernick to Endorsement Deal ★

The AP:

Kaepernick already had a deal with Nike that was set to expire, but it was renegotiated into a multiyear deal to make him one of the faces of Nike’s 30th anniversary “Just Do It” campaign, according to a person familiar with the contract. The person spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because Nike hasn’t officially announced the contract.

The person said Nike will feature Kaepernick on several platforms, including billboards, television commercials and online ads. Nike also will create an apparel line for Kaepernick and contribute to his Know Your Rights charity, the person said. The deal puts Kaepernick in the top bracket of NFL players with Nike.

The NFL painted itself into the wrong corner on this issue.

Lenovo’s ARM-Based Yoga C630 Laptop ★

Cherlynn Low, writing for Engadget:

The Yoga C630 is supposed to last about 25 hours of continuous local video playback, which should be enough to last through an entire day of running around attending business meetings. That endurance is thanks in large part to the Snapdragon 850, which promises not only 25 percent longer battery life than the 835 but also 30 percent faster performance. When I opened a slew of apps like Excel, PowerPoint, Maps and Edge on the Yoga C630’s desktop environment, I barely encountered any delay. Any interruptions I saw were related to WiFi troubles rather than actual performance.

I do not expect to see any ARM-based MacBooks from Apple this year. I think we might see them by the end of next year, and I’d be surprised if we don’t see them by the end of 2020. The battery life advantages are simply overwhelming, and the performance is as good or better than Intel’s offerings at the low-power end of the market. The only unknown is whether Apple’s chip team can compete with Intel at the high-performance end — can Apple make an ARM chip to power MacBook Pros and pro Mac desktops? I wouldn’t bet against them.