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The Automated-Platform Edition Thursday, January 14, 2016

Apple Steps Back From Its iAd Advertising Business, by John Paczkowski, BuzzFeed

Multiple sources familiar with the company’s plans tell BuzzFeed News that Apple is getting out of the advertising-sales business and shifting to a more automated platform.

While iAd itself isn’t going anywhere, Apple’s direct involvement in the selling and creation of iAd units is ending. “It’s just not something we’re good at,” one source told BuzzFeed News. And so Apple is leaving the creation, selling, and management of iAds to the folks who do it best: the publishers.

Execs Tell Us The Writing Had Been On The Wall For Apple’s Big Advertising Experiment iAd For Some Time, by Lara O'Reilly, Business Insider

The managing director of one digital ad agency told Business Insider: “Advertising sales is a brash, loud, in-your-face type activity. Pretty much the antithesis of Apple. No wonder if they’ve struggled with it.”

A director-level exec at a global media agency who asked not to be named shared the story told to him a former member of the iAd sales team: “[They] said the writing has been on the wall for some time. Paranoia is sort of part of their overall culture, but for the iAd team, it was heightened.”

Why Apple Is Killing Off Its Advertising Business, by Kia Kokalitcheva, Fortune

Despite its early potential and buzz, iAd never really took off for Apple, largely because of the company’s tight controls over ad creatives, high prices (it eventually slashed minimum asking price and upped developers’ cuts, but alas), and refusal to share data with partners.

Gesture Me This

iOS Gestures You May Not Have Known, by Jason Snell, Six Colors

There are some amazing multitouch gestures out there that are non-obvious, and the only way they spread is by word of mouth. I’ve mentioned a few on Upgrade lately and am not especially surprised when I hear from people that they were complete surprises. So I thought I’d share a few of the ones I’ve discovered with you here—and I asked people on Twitter to chime in, as well, which they did.

Stuff

Why Ulysses Is My App For Notes And Writing, by Ben Brooks, The Brooks Review

But I do love Ulysses, and because of that I tend to use it whenever I can use it. And I am happier with the setup, even if it isn’t ideal, because I get to use a tool I love.

So far, this consolidation to Ulysses, Procreate, and Notability for all my note taking needs has worked out wonderfully. I still use paper most of the time for notes, but when it comes to needing digital notes, I now know right where everything is.

Millie Marotta's Adult Colouring Books Are Now An iPad App, by Mimi Launder, Digital Arts

Users can buy packs of drawings on top of the five free illustrations included, allowing them to amass a personal image collection - rather than having to stick to a pre-selection as they would with Millie’s physical books.

Millie tells us that another possibility offered by the app is the ability to colour-in images multiple times in differing ways.

Interact: A Powerful Contact Group Manager, by Jake Underwood, MacStories

With these tools, Interact makes it very easy to send a document out to a group of people or share an image with family members. There are other ways to do this, but for sending information to a group, Interact is a fast and effective solution.

Outlook For iPhone And iPad Adds Skype Integration, by John Callaham, iMore

How To Remove Temporary Items & Bloated /Private/var/folders/ In Mac OS X The Safe Way, by OS X Daily

Develop

The Past, Present And Future Of Sketch, by Geoff Teehan, Medium

I think there are many things that we want to do with our product. Maybe in the last year, progress hasn’t been as fast as I would have hoped. But, as we discussed, that is inevitable when you’re bringing new people on and truly taking the time to get them integrated and up to speed. There are also certain parts of the application that were written by me many years ago that need tweaking because what we’re building now is much larger in scope than what we had originally designed. It takes time to clean up that legacy and I think we’ve been good in the past year about cleaning some of that up, but there’s still more to do and of course that takes time and focus. I’m more focused on that internal issue than the external competition.

Living Room Engagement, by Daniel Jalkut, Bitsplitting

Although I didn’t come away from the tech talks with a clear inspiration for a “killer app,” I did think a bit about the high-level classes of app that are likely to be successful on Apple TV.

When To Join A Startup, by Tom Blomfield

Notes

Nvidia Blames Apple For Bug That Exposes Porn Browsing In Chrome’s Incognito Mode, by Emil Protalinski, VentureBeat

“This issue is related to memory management in the Apple OS, not NVIDIA graphics drivers,” a Nvidia spokesperson told VentureBeat. “The NVIDIA driver adheres to policies set by the operating system and our driver is working as expected. We have not seen this issue on Windows, where all application-specific data is cleared before memory is released to other applications.”

This Is What I'm Still Using My Apple Watch For, by Serenity Caldwell, iMore

Apple Takes A Step Toward Officially Allowing Users To Hide Stock Apps, by Brent Dirks, AppAdvice

It requires using Apple Configurator 2.2 beta. If you don’t know, that software is only available to the business and education markets for mass configuration of iOS devices.

Bottom of the Page

I'm not sure why many people are predicting the next Apple Watch will have a camera.

But this simple addition of a camera will turn the nerdy product entirely into a creepy product. If wearing a camera on your face is already such a big social problem, now imagine a camera on your wrist that you can twist and turn and aim towards all sorts of directions.

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Thanks for reading.