Linked List: August 20, 2019

Tuesday, 20 August 2019

Good title, I say, and the brief black-and-white teaser hearkens back to the opening of Casino Royale, before Bond earned 00 status. The most exciting thing about the movie remains the fact that it’s directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga — so much potential with his talent.

As the years pass, Sam Mendes’s Skyfall and (especially) Spectre age worse and worse. Neither film’s story makes a lick of sense. My feeling remains that Daniel Craig has had a very good run as Bond, but that’s held up almost entirely by how spectacularly good Casino Royale was.

Interesting tidbit from the BBC:

007 fans may be aware that famed Bond producer Cubby Broccoli was also behind a 1958 prisoner of war film called No Time To Die (which was also known as Tank Force). That film was directed by Terence Young, who also worked on the Bond movies Dr No, From Russia With Love, and Thunderball.

If You Get an Apple Card, Opt Out of Arbitration ★

John Moltz:

If you get an Apple Card today, remember to reject arbitration! It’s crazy easy. Go to the card in Wallet, tap the ellipsis and then Message. Then just text that you want to reject arbitration and they’ll connect you with the poor sap at Goldman Sachs who’s doing all these.

See also: Barbara Krasnoff at The Verge: “You Should Opt Out of the Apple Card’s Arbitration Clause — Here’s How”.

Apple Card Account Information Is Only Accessible Via iOS Wallet App ★

Nicole Nguyen, writing for Buzzfeed News:

Apple Card is a new cash-rewards credit card that — Apple purports — is designed to be simple and transparent. But it’s also aimed at keeping you locked into your iPhone.

There are no paper statements with the digital-first Apple Card. Unlike a traditional credit card, everything is accessed through the Wallet app on the iPhone, including transaction histories, total balances, previous statements, and payments. There’s no website to view the latest transactions made on the card or make a payment if you lose access to that Wallet app.

I don’t think the reason for this is to keep you locked to your iPhone, although that’s certainly a side effect. I think this simply reflects Apple’s internal culture. Apple’s culture is to make native apps for everything as a first priority, with web interfaces as a much lower priority. And in recent years, that’s shifted from native apps for iOS and Mac to just native apps for iOS. (E.g. the craptacular Catalyst apps for Stocks, News, Voice Memos, and most especially Home.) It feels ridiculous that you can’t access your Apple Card account from a Mac, whether from a native Mac app or from a website.

In some ways making the iOS Wallet app the primary interface to your Apple Card probably makes for a great experience. (I haven’t signed up for one — yet? — so I can’t say firsthand.) But not having access from a desktop computer is severely limiting in ways. Nguyen focuses on the scenario of what happens if you only have access to one iOS device and lose it (or it breaks). That’s a legitimate scenario. But what about being able to, say, export your monthly and annual statements? Or being able to search?

My hope is that Apple Card is only accessible via the iOS Wallet app for now, and that wallet.apple.com will eventually be a full-featured interface to your card account.

Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg on What’s Next for Tumblr ★

Great interview by Nilay Patel and Julia Alexander from The Verge with Matt Mullenweg, on Automattic’s acquisition of Tumblr from Verizon.

A lot of people are making hay over the price — Yahoo paid $1.1 billion for Tumblr six years ago, and Verizon apparently sold it to Automattic (best known as the parent company of WordPress) for just $3 million. But it seems clear that Verizon wasn’t looking for the best price — they were looking for the best home. Might be hard to believe because we’re talking about Verizon here, but there’s no other explanation than that they wanted to do what was best for Tumblr — both its employees and its users. Admirable.

Mullenweg’s remarks on the influence of app stores — and I think it’s pretty clear he was largely talking about Apple’s, and that he talked about them in the general lowercase sense so as not to come across as impolitic — was rather eye-opening. Automattic pretty much embodies the ideal of a for-profit company that fully embraces the open web. Their core product, WordPress, is and always has been fully open source. But apps are so important today — and so important for Tumblr users, apparently — that app store policies have significant influence on Automattic’s decisions on content policies.