But in an interview with the UK’s Evening Standard earlier this month, Apple senior vice president Eddy Cue—ostensibly there to talk about music—let drop this interesting tidbit:
[Cue] taps his phone and makes an offhand comment about “trying not to get roaming charges” while in London which, I note, proves how insanely expensive phone calls and data can be abroad. “It’s sad, it’s another problem,” says Cue. “We’re trying to fix it and we’re making a little bit of progress but you’ve got to convince a lot of people.”
I really hope this gets some traction.
Related: My wife and I spent a half hour on the phone with AT&T last night. They somehow decided to separate our combined account into two when we each purchased new iPhones last month. Our bill doubled. Surprise, surpise. Their error, they admitted. And they fixed it. But then we noticed that the upgrade charge was double what we were led to believe, and now that we are not on contract, isn’t the bill supposed to decrease, and…
Do cell phone companies actually wonder why everyone hates them?
Go to The Deck and see who is in their network. You have to sift the list a little but it shakes out to something like this today (I’ve left out the strictly commercial sites):
Gary Allen, author of the ifo Apple Store blog, traveled the world visiting Apple stores, a unique hobby for sure. I had never heard of him until I read this article about his passing. John Gruber at Daring Fireball wrote about this and the issue of what happens to someone’s online writing when that person dies.
How do we protect electronic works in a way that makes them truly durable? Even considering backups, a succession plan, choosing a platform without lock-in, not relying on sketchy cloud providers (geez, the list goes on and on…), this remains a big problem. The effort it takes to anticipate the things that can go wrong and follow a plan to preserve content is not trivial. No matter how far you take it, you can always come up with yet another scenario that can wreck your stuff.
Electronic things are ephemeral. The ease with which we can create something seems almost proportional to how easy it is to lose it.
The main reason I hesitate buying software, even when it’s a $2.99 app, is that it feels impermanent. It feels like you’re always on the verge of being screwed. I have, in fact, been screwed, and of course nobody likes that.
I’ve bought software that was abandoned by the developer and stopped working on future operating systems, or pulled from the App Store, or updated and then the update became a “new version” that required another payment, or the app was bought by another company and turned into subscription-ware.
I think developers can address this by offering some type of guarantee. Some already do this, and I buy software from them. For example, make it known that updates will always be free, or offered at a specific discount, or that you’ll open-source it if you ever give up on it. Yes, future efforts may not seem like they will be rewarded by current customers. But I think developers would make up for that by overcoming this hesitation and selling more copies today, and maybe even at a slightly higher price.
Both Jeff Atwood and Scott Hanselman have tweeted about 3D Touch on iOS being nothing more than right click (Atwood) or “long press” (Hanselman). I’m not sure why they don’t get what it actually is – it’s pressure sensitive touch. There is no separate button or gesture like right click, and it is not strictly measured by duration like a long press. It’s genuinely a pressure sensitive touch capability. You can press lightly, or a little harder, or with much more force, and those differences are measured by the hardware and the OS in a very granular way.
It is true, though, that the way it is implemented in many apps right now is crudely – it is typically used similarly to a simple right click. But you can see how the screen responds to pressure if you try the new peek gesture in the iOS Mail app. As you press to trigger the “peek” gesture, watch the subtle changes in the animation as you press and then as you let up a bit. There is nothing like this capability on competing platforms yet, and it is surely something that app makers and Apple will take advantage of. For example: press and then gradually apply more pressure to increment a value in a numeric spinner. Then release and do it again to decrement. Or the photo app – press on the screen harder to accelerate the brightness up, press and do it again to decrease brightness.
These are just quick and maybe poor examples off the top of my head. Game developers will probably find creative uses for this, too. It sure seems like current implementations are only the start. Guess we’ll see.
When I am in a checkout line, I have a little anxiety when I use Apple Pay. The last thing I want is to be the doofus holding up the line because I’m futzing with my snazzy gadget. Sliding a credit card through the reader is not time consuming, and rarely does it not work. Plus, the first couple times I tried Apple Pay, I had to look up what to press on my Apple Watch to trigger it. That may say more about me than any difficulty in using Apple Pay, but still, using my credit card requires memorizing nothing at all.
But if this is true…
The switch to chip-based cards from magnetic-stripe cards in the U.S. may also accelerate Apple Pay’s adoption. Because the EMV chip cards must stay inserted in in-store payment terminals for the duration of each transaction, instead of being swiped, checkout times may be longer and the process more cumbersome.
If you are an advertiser, or if you run a website and use ad networks, then you don’t need to read beyond this paragraph. Just know this: if you embed scripts, cookies, Flash, auto-launch videos or images used to track metrics about my browsing or to show me advertising, and especially if those assets impair the speed or experience I realize while consuming your content, then stop it. I own my device, so I determine what gets downloaded to it. And now that I can do this on every device I own, it might be time for you to listen.
If you’re still reading, you are probably aware of the debate since Apple released iOS 9 and the new feature that allows “content blockers” to be run in Safari. These blockers can prevent scripts, videos, images and similar junk from being run or even downloaded to your device when you visit a website. Some people argue that blocking this content is unethical, or that it may force websites out of business, or require them to find new ways to generate revenue since many rely on ad networks for that. The problem is that many websites turn over control of how tracking and advertising is done on their own websites to these networks, and the advertisers do virtually whatever they want to monitor your browsing habits and display ads when you visit these websites. Sometimes this impairs a website so badly that it’s unusable. You’ve no doubt seen popups appear on sites that require you to dismiss them before you can read an article. You’ve probably also encountered websites that seem to take forever to load before you can read an article. These are symptoms of this problem.
What To Do
For users, the answer is simple: on a computer, run a browser plug-in such as Ghostery, and configure it to block advertising and tracking assets that you don’t want to run. On iOS, go to the App Store and download one of the many content blockers and follow the instructions to set it up and run it.
For websites and advertisers, you have even more options and all are better than what you’re doing now.
Make Better Ads and Don’t Pollute Your Site With Crap
This is the main reason people even noticed tracking and advertising – the crappy user experience…
There are sites I can’t even load on my previous iPhone or my first generation iPad Mini. One example is CNN, a site that rarely loads a page completely before crashing. On my computer I can use the developer tools Chrome or Safari to see what is going on, and it’s ugly. CNN loads so many third party tracking assets:
Tracking Junk Loaded on CNN's Website
This is a page with a news article. It might have 100kb of content aside from the sidebar, stuff, some images, and… the AUTO-PLAYING VIDEO. The stats above include all that. When I run the Ghostery plugin, it cuts the payload down by half. CNN still manages to load a bunch of additional junk, however, and this points out that ad blocking is not 100% effective. I’m sure over time more sites and ad networks will figure out tricks to keep pumping as much stuff as possible down to your browser, but right now, this is a good start.
In contrast to the “typical” ad networks, there are ad networks such as The Deck. Their ads are very unobtrusive, and – even better for advertisers – I actually notice them and find they often have things I’m interested in. And isn’t that the key objective of advertising?
Rely On Your Server to Track Traffic
The use of the resources I provide when I browse the web, such as bandwidth, memory and storage, are not for websites to piggyback on to serve ads. You have your own server. Why don’t YOU do the tracking and serve ads from YOUR server instead of forcing my device to download all this crap and run this stuff for you? YOU should not make me incur the implicit costs in terms of bandwidth and load times. If it’s valuable for you to have these trackers, you should have no trouble justifying payment for a beefed up server and resources on YOUR end.
Sign Users Up
If your site is of value, which you probably know by the traffic you get, then encourage people to sign up and provide some information about themselves – an email address or what their interests are are good places to start. After all, YOU and your advertisers already try to surreptitiously gain access to this information. Why not just come right out and ask for it as a condition of using your site?
Where This Goes From Here
This is anyone’s guess right now. I do think ad networks like The Deck have a huge advantage, and over the long term, websites that take this kind of lightweight approach while featuring their content and the user experience over all else will win. This is especially true now that we the users have the tools to enforce what we want.
I don’t think getting to this point with content blocking would have ever happened if advertisers hadn’t abused how they track and server ads. We’ll see what they come up with next. Hopefully they won’t crawl back into the slimy muck.
