Ilya Brown, Twitter’s Head of Product, Brand & Video Ads, writing on the Twitter Blog:
[…] in the time since we introduced Fleets to everyone, we haven’t seen an increase in the number of new people joining the conversation with Fleets like we hoped. Because of this, on August 3, Fleets will no longer be available on Twitter.
It’s so good to see Twitter rolling back something that clearly wasn’t working. Twitter has released some really interesting new features in the last year, and I hope they continue to do so.
You should read the whole article linked above where Ilya details their learnings.
Over the last 14 years, we have worked diligently to keep our costs low and pass our savings on to customers. We’ve invested in deduplication, compression, and other technologies to continually optimize our storage platform and drive our costs down—savings which we pass on to our customers in the form of storing more data for the same price.
However, the average backup size stored by Computer Backup customers has spiked 15% over just the last two years. Additionally, not only have component prices not fallen at traditional rates, but recently electronic components that we rely on to provide our services have actually increased in price.
The combination of these two trends, along with our desire to continue investing in providing a great service, is driving the need to modestly increase our prices.
Backblaze is a phenomenally good backup service and I’ve been a happy customer for several years now, with two active backup licenses for my Macs. I joined when their pricing was $5/month and only recently, they had raised their pricing to $6/month. Even at $7, Backblaze offers exceptional value — you’re literally getting unlimited backup. And for a couple of bucks more, they’ll keep your files for a whole year! I wrote down why I like the service so much the last time they raised prices.
However, their raising prices are making it incredibly difficult to recommend the service to most of my friends. The problem with their subscription is their all-or-nothing approach and the lack of localized pricing. Many of my friends have a few hundred GBs of important data that they want to back up. The Backblaze subscription is priced at almost ₹550 per month. How do you convince someone, who already doesn’t take backups seriously, to opt into a backup strategy that costs 3 times their cellular service?
I wish Backblaze B2 was the answer, which is something the company itself recommends for small quantity backups. But a subscription where your monthly expenses can vary depending on how much data you upload/download is even more difficult to recommend to friends.
If you’re convinced, here’s my affiliate link that’ll give you month free when you sign up, and a month free to me when you start paying for it.
We learned from customer feedback that some people would make a vault named Archive and move these items there, and others were storing those items in the Trash. While both solutions work, neither was ideal. That’s why we’re rolling out the new Archive feature in our latest updates.
For the longest time, I’ve had an ‘Archive’ vault in 1Password to hold old items that I no longer used, but still wanted to store in 1Password to reference. Items such as old server passwords, accounts from sites that are now dead or moved, random secure notes, etc. were all moved to this ‘Archive’ vault. I can finally delete that vault now that 1Password has native support for the Archive.
Steve Troughton-Smith has just released his new app ‘Pastel‘ on the App Store. Available for iPhone and iPad, with a Mac app coming later, Pastel lets you create your very own library of colors and color palettes. It’s a fantastic app for anyone working with colors and I highly recommend you try it out.
I have been relying on sites like Coolors and Color Hunt for inspiration, but having something native and handy is so much better.
Pastel is a modern iOS app, meaning it supports many of the new features of iOS. You can drag & drop any color from Pastel onto any iPad app that supports dropped colors, which makes it super easy to quickly use a particular color in your work.
All your colors in the library seamlessly sync over iCloud across all your devices, so your favorite colors are always handy.
Pastel is available for Free on the App Store and you can add up to 20 of your own colors. To unlock unlimited colors, there’s a simple $4.99 IAP.
Bron Gondwana, CEO of FastMail, explains on the company blog why “Now more than ever, it’s time for email.“
He says,
Through all the interruptions and turmoil in your life, email is a constant. Everyone has email, and every email system can email every other. It lets us stay connected, but doesn’t demand an immediate response. You can read it in your own time, and have the space to craft a thoughtful reply.
The beauty of Email is that you can use it in your own way. While it’s a great form of asynchronous communication, it’s also a fantastic tool for collaborating with your team and getting work done much faster. At Readdle, we have been working on some exceptional new things for Spark that we can’t wait to show you.
I have been using FastMail as my primary email service provider for several years now, and it is worth every $$. It’s great to see an email service so focused on privacy and core email experience. FastMail has been rock solid over the years and I urge you to consider it. If you sign up using this link, you’ll get 10% off.
How cool is this? Manton Reece, creator extraordinaire and the man behind the awesome microblogging service Micro.blog, has created an archive of all posts from the now defunct microblogging platform App.net
In the final week before App.net shut down, I whipped up a few scripts to download every post on the platform via the API. After that finished, I also attempted to download small versions of many of the photos, but ran out of time. This data has been sitting on one of my servers for the last 3 years.
Why did I bother? At a high level, see my post from 2012 called Permanence. I also hoped to build a tool that would let anyone export their personal archive, or even migrate it to a blogging platform like Micro.blog.
Backdrops has a massive collection of awesome wallpapers and it is very frequently updated with new content. You’ll find different kinds of wallpapers in the app, and you can browse by categories, browse by tags, or just browse the ones featured on the main screen. You’ll possibly never run out of new wallpapers in there.
Just like on Android, the iOS app is available for Free on the App Store. There’s an optional $3.99 upgrade to “Backdrops Pro” that enables an ad-free experience, unlocks exclusive collections and supports the developers.
We, at Readdle, have just shipped a massive update to PDF Expert for iOS that introduces Reading Mode — a feature that improves the experience of reading PDFs on iPhone. Reading Mode makes it easier to read the text from PDFs on the tiny iPhone screen. I’ve been playing around with this feature for a few weeks now as part of the marketing team, and have been terribly excited about its release. With Reading Mode, reading PDFs on iPhone is a delightful experience now.
Read PDFs on iPhone
PDFs are usually hard to read on the small screens of iPhones, especially the ones that are formatted in multiple columns. You have to constantly keep zooming in & out, panning in all four directions to make sense of the content. The Reading Mode reformats and adjusts the text and images in these PDF files and displays them on the screen in a single column, presented in a beautiful way. It’s like activating the Reader view in Safari or using Read Later apps like Pocket or Instapaper. Here’s what that looks like in practice.
You can change the theme from the default ‘Day‘ theme to ‘Sepia‘, ‘Night‘ or ‘Auto‘. You can also adjust the font-size and toggle the ‘Keep iPhone Awake‘ and ‘Crop Header and Footer‘ settings.
My dad loves to read, and spends several hours in the day reading e-papers, PDF books & magazines, blogs, etc. on his iPad. For many months now, he’s been asking me, complaining in fact, why he can’t enjoy reading PDFs on his Android phone. I think it’s time to switch him to an iPhone.
There are a lot more exciting features that we’re working on at Readdle, and I can’t wait to talk about our feature-packed upcoming releases. Stay tuned to our PDF Expert, Spark Email, and Readdle blogs in the coming weeks.
Now go grab the latest update of PDF Expert for iOS from the App Store to try out the Reading Mode on your iPhone. I’m happy to hear your feedback.
