Linked List: September 3, 2019

Tuesday, 3 September 2019

Basecamp Didn’t Want to Run This Ad 

Jason Fried:

When Google puts 4 paid ads ahead of the first organic result for your own brand name, you’re forced to pay up if you want to be found. It’s a shakedown. It’s ransom. But at least we can have fun with it. Search for Basecamp and you may see this attached ad.

And of course, Google doesn’t let you target any of their own trademarks this way, and won’t even let you mention “Google” in your ad text. And Google no longer visually styles paid results distinctively from actual search results — just the little “Ad” icon before the result URL.

Daring Fireball Weekly Sponsorship Openings 

The whole month of September is usually the busiest of the year, for the obvious reason that it’s when Apple holds its biggest product announcements of the year. I’ve still got a few openings for weekly sponsors this month, including this current week and next week.

Get in touch if you have a product or service to promote to DF’s audience. And remember that weekly sponsorships now include the graphic ad in the sidebar of every page of the site.

Thirty Years of Fetch 

Jim Matthews:

Fetch’s longevity has been a continual surprise to me. Most application software has the life expectancy of a field mouse. Of the thousands of other Mac apps on the market on September 1, 1989 I can only think of four (Panorama, Word, Excel, and Photoshop) that are still sold today. Fetch 1.0 was released into a world with leaded gasoline and a Berlin Wall; DVD players and Windows 95 were still in the future. The Fetch icon is a dog with a floppy disc in its mouth; at this point it might as well be a stone tablet.

I can think of at least one other Mac app from 1989 still around today: Illustrator (remember Illustrator 88?). But it is without question a very short list.

Update: A few more:

And if we count apps from Apple included with the system, there’s the Finder and Calculator. If anyone thinks of any more, I’ll update this list.

This Macworld article by Glenn Fleishman pegs the debuts of BBEdit, PCalc, and Graphic Converter in 1992 — all in active development today, but none quite old enough for this list. And speaking of Macworld, the December 1988 edition cited in several instances above was so chockablock with ads that it ran 324 pages.

Regex Crossword 

If you ever needed proof that I have unusual taste in games and a preternatural knack for regular expressions, look no further than the fact that I love this site.