Linked List: July 2, 2020

Thursday, 2 July 2020

Apple Card Now Has a Website and It Is Excellent ★

It’s quintessentially Apple-y that Apple Card didn’t have a website until now — but this is a very good website.

Update: I mean seriously this is an outstanding website. The more I think about it and click around, the more amazed I am. There’s no bullshit. Anything you want to do is easy and obvious to do: Payments, Statements, Settings, Support. That’s it and that’s all there should be. It’s so minimal that one might be tempted to think not much work went into it, but making something this simple and clear takes a ton of work.

Retrobatch 1.4 and JavaScript Expressions ★

Gus Mueller, writing back in March about the then-new Retrobatch 1.4:

There’s a couple of interesting new features in this update I’d like to call out. First up is JavaScript expressions in Retrobatch Pro. Various nodes in Retrobatch which allow you to set the size or length of a value (such as the Crop, Border, Gradient, Adjust Margin nodes) now have an option of running a little snippet of JavaScript code to figure out the value. This is a super powerful feature, which you can read about in our JavaScript Expressions documentation.

First, Retrobatch is super cool. It’s a batch image processor for the Mac — think of it as something like Automator or Shortcuts but just for image processing, with almost all the power of Acorn. It’s a really useful way to effectively write your own custom image processing workflows, which run really fast — but rather than using a scripting language, you do it graphically using nodes. It’s powerful but the experience of creating and tweaking your own workflows is largely self-explanatory.

But sometimes what you really want to do when you’re automating a task is just write a little bit of actual code — the process you want to define is best expressed (or can only be expressed) in code. Being able to just write a JavaScript expression is just what the doctor ordered. I feel like iOS Shortcuts could learn something from this.

Also new, and personally quite useful to me:

And finally for my short list, you can now make a droplet which doesn’t take any files. Why is this useful? Well, imagine you have a workflow that reads an image from the clipboard, resizes it to a specific width, and then writes it back to the clipboard. Now you can make a little droplet to do just this. Just a double click from the Finder (or a single click from the Dock) and your workflow is run.

Facebook Admits Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire Has Engaged in Pay-for-Engagement Scam ★

Judd Legum, reporting for Popular Information:

Facebook has concluded there is an undisclosed financial relationship between The Daily Wire, the website founded by right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro, and Mad World News, a notorious outlet that exploits fear and bigotry for profit. This relationship, Facebook acknowledges, violates its rules.

Last week, Popular Information exposed how The Daily Wire has gained unprecedented distribution on Facebook through its relationship with Mad World News. Five large Facebook pages controlled by Mad World News expanded The Daily Wire’s audience by millions through the coordinated posting of dozens of links from The Daily Wire each day. […]

“After further investigation, we’ve found that these Pages violate our policies against undisclosed paid relationships between publishers. Our enforcement typically focuses on the Page distributing the cross-promoted content, which is why we are temporarily demoting Mad World News. We are also warning Daily Wire and will demote them if we see this behavior continue,” a Facebook spokesperson said.

Put aside the politics and it’s clear that Facebook “engagement” is a game riddled with grifters. Kind of hard to put aside the politics though:

The disparate treatment between Mad World News and The Daily Wire raises questions. Why are the sites being treated differently when they conspired together to violate the same Facebook rule? What was the influence of Shapiro’s personal relationship with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg?