Last night, I saw this tweet from Federico Viticci:

Two months after the launch of iOS 9, there are no Content Blockers in the Top 150 Paid charts for iPhone (US App Store).

I dug into the paid and free lists on the app store and, sure enough, I couldn’t find an ad blocker in the top paid or top free list. So I dug a bit further.

Searching the top Utilities list, the first paid ad blocker I encountered was Crystal at #36 and, remarkably, no ad blockers breaking the top 100 on the free list.

Searching the Productivity category, the only paid ad blocker I could find was Purify (#10) and, again, no free ad blockers in the top 100.

Why is this? What happened here?

One possible factor is that ad blockers are reasonably easy to create. It’s possible that so many were created, they diluted the market, making it difficult for one to grab enough market share to crack the top 100 overall.

Another (perhaps obvious) factor could be the drop in attention, fewer bloggers writing about ad blockers. While iPhones are still selling like hotcakes, it could be that new buyers are not aware of ad blockers and the difference they make to the browsing experience.

It’d be interesting to see a survey showing the percentage of iOS 9 users with ad blockers installed. I suspect it’s a relatively small percentage. Just like two factor authentication, something that has obvious value does not always guarantee wide adoption.

Sagar Malviya & Writankar Mukherjee, writing for The Economic Times:

Apple crossed the $1-billion sales mark in Indian operations for the first time in the year ended March, according to results filed with the Registrar of Companies (RoC) on Wednesday.

That’s a 43.8% growth in sales and a 203% growth in net profit.

Analysts attributed this to the surge in demand for iPhones with sales growing upwards of 35 per cent quarter-on-quarter in the last two years.

Huge growth.

Neil Hughes, writing for Apple Insider:

IBM Watson Trend is a free download from the iOS App Store, designed for both iPhone and iPad. It uses IBM’s supercomputer technology to read and interpret millions of reviews, expert blogs and social media conversations to determine what gifts people are talking about.

By far the most popular device on the list is the Apple Watch, which has maintained a “trend score” above 90 (out of 100) since mid-August. With a perfect score of 100 as of Wednesday, the Apple Watch has a score nearly double that of the next closest product: Samsung TVs.

Of course, the Watson algorithm simply says that users are talking about the Apple Watch, not necessarily buying it. Apple’s actual hottest selling product is the iPhone lineup, which observers expect to sell nearly 80 million units in this quarter alone.

It’ll be interesting to see if talking about buying an Apple Watch actually translates into sales.

Amazon:

Amazon’s Two-Step Verification adds an additional layer of security to your account. Instead of simply entering your password, Two-Step Verification requires you to enter a unique security code in addition to your password during sign in.

You’ll enter your sign in information like you normally would, but then you’ll be prompted to enter a security code. You can receive this security code in a variety of ways depending on the option you select during sign up, including text message, voice call, or authenticator app.

Some folks will think this kind of security is inconvenient. But any time I give a company my credit card info and I want that info stored on their site, I feel more comfortable if the site offers this additional level of security.

Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. and Google Inc. face renewed calls to create a workaround for smartphone encryption in the wake of the Paris attacks as Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. proposed a compromise that seeks to mollify privacy advocates.

Vance and FBI Director James Comey echoed recent comments by CIA and Justice Department officials who cite the need for access to stay a step ahead of terrorists who may use encryption to hide planned attacks. Underlining their point, French authorities said predawn raids in a Paris suburb were triggered by information gleaned from a discarded mobile phone.

“The line to protect the public should not be drawn by two companies who make smartphones,” Vance said Wednesday at a cybersecurity conference in New York where he unveiled a 42-page white paper on the issue. His plan would require companies to download data for investigators with a warrant, rather than providing the government with a “backdoor.”

Let’s hope these companies continue to push back against the government’s desire to use our devices against us.

You know how when you turn your face up into the bright sunlight, even on the coldest winter day, it can totally lift your mood? Well, that’s what our latest limited-edition, seasonal release is all about.

I love Field Notes. I’ve had them with me for years for jotting notes and doing interviews.

Dan and Jim talk about the Australian Apple Store incident, a converged iPad/Mac, the iPad Pro, setting up an iMac for guitar jams, and more.

Brought to you by:

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Longreads:

The job of pilots like Royal is to fly directly at monstrous thunderstorms—something most pilots diligently avoid, given that the turbulent airflow in these storms occasionally brings down commercial jetliners—and discharge chemicals into a particular part of the cloud, a technique called “cloud seeding” intended to suppress the storm’s ability to produce hail.

But on this late June day, the storm racing across the prairie is outmaneuvering the 22-year-old Texan pilot. “I started approaching from the east, which is the front of the storm and should have been kind of calm,” says Royal, “but it was so turbulent that my seatbelt wouldn’t even stay fastened.”

I’m not a good flyer at the best of times. There’s not enough money in the world to get me to get into one of those little planes on a good day, let alone to fly deliberately into a thunderstorm.

CBC:

A recent report by the non-profit group MediaSmarts says nearly a quarter of Canadian children in Grade 4 — some as young as eight years old — own their own cellphone.

That number jumps to more than 50 per cent for students in Grade 7.

Interestingly (or frighteningly for some parents), of those Grade 4s with phones, the report says about one-fifth are on social networks, even though Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat (and others) all have policies that require users to be at least 13 years old.

Not having kids of my own, I’m always interested in how parents with young ones deal with this. At what age did/will you give your kid a cell phone? Do iOS and Android have “enough” parental controls to make you comfortable that your child can use the phone the way you want them to?

The Verge:

On the surface (and even under the hood), these top living room contenders share a lot of the same features, with the exception of 4K video support. Which means the best experience really comes down to the interface, the app ecosystem, and available content.

It was a tough call this year, but one new streaming-video device nudged its way past the others.

The answer will likely not surprise you but, what was interesting to me was how close the three runner-ups came in the scoring.

Outside:

Ian McIntosh was maybe five turns into a first descent of a jagged Alaskan peak when things went wrong. The 34-year-old Canadian pro skier was filming a segment for Teton Gravity Research and carving down a face the film crew dubbed “Daybreak Spines.” The light was playing tricks on him, and early-morning shadows made a long spine look easy to cross over. It wasn’t. McIntosh hit it hard and dropped five feet into a trough he didn’t know existed. Then he started rolling.

McIntosh says he was immediately certain of one thing: “I knew I was going to the bottom,” he says. “I knew I was going for a ride.” Then all he could think was, Am I going to get traumatically injured by tomahawking down this mountain? and Please be over.

The video of this is almost painful to watch. The audio makes it even more so.

Vox:

Jessica Jones is a terrible superhero by superhero industry standards. Her name is forgettable; she sounds like a girl from your third-grade class. She’s just another brick — a term assigned to the plethora of superhumans with super strength as their primary power. It’s easy to see why she isn’t popular or why many people, even some comic book fans, were puzzled by Marvel and Netflix’s decision to give the character her own TV show.

But even though Jessica Jones is a terrible superhero — something she would be the first to admit — that doesn’t mean she’s unworthy of her own show or that her story stinks.

Jones’s origin story is actually one of the more daring arcs Marvel has published in the past decade.

I know nothing about this Marvel character so I don’t know if Vox’s description is accurate but I assume it is. Regardless, the trailers I’ve seen make me really interesting in this series. All episodes are set to premiere November 20, 2015, on Netflix

IFLScience:

Perception is a fickle thing. As good as our senses are at keeping us alive, they can often mislead and deceive us. Here’s a great example of that which you can try at home, featured in the new BBC Four series, Colour: The Spectrum of Science.

Check out the video below, follow the instructions and see a black and white image turn into a full-color image of a landscape.

This is really cool. It illustrates an idea I teach in my photography classes about perception and being able to “force” the viewer into seeing what you want them to see.

MIC:

The Oxford Dictionary’s 2015 word of the year was awarded to something that isn’t necessarily a word, though it definitely paints a picture worth, perhaps, a thousand or so of them. The “tears of joy” emoji face — featured, among other places, in a keyboard on Apple’s iOS platform — is just one of the many cartoon facial reactions used since the late 1990’s being honored with this year’s distinction.

The emoji beat out several words and phrases, including “refugee,” “lumbersexual,” “on fleek,” “Dark Web” and “sharing economy.”

But it’s not a word.

About a week ago, the Mac App Store came a bit off its rails, at least for some apps.

Yesterday, Apple sent out a letter of explanation and apology to developers whose apps were affected. Bottom line, this was a caching issue:

Unfortunately, a caching issue with the Mac App Store meant that some users had to restart their systems and re-authenticate with the Mac App Store to clear a system cache of some outdated certificate information. We are addressing this caching issue in an upcoming OS X update.

Also, some apps are running receipt validation code using very old versions of OpenSSL that don’t support SHA-2. We addressed this by replacing the new SHA-2 certificate with a new SHA-1 certificate last Thursday night.

Presumably, by now, the new caches are propagated, everyone has their apps back. Good to know that Apple knows the cause and that steps are in place to prevent this from happening again, at least in the same way.

Christian Zibreg, writing for iDownloadBlog, talks you through the process of clearing caches and other methods of eliminating cruft from your iOS device. Scan through it, take what’s useful, pass it along.

Jason Cipriani, writing for CNET, talks you through the process of enabling iOS 9’s battery widget:

When enabled, the battery widget will display the current battery percentage of your iPad Pro, plus any Bluetooth devices connected to it. With the Apple Pencil using Bluetooth to communicate with the tablet, it naturally shows up in the widget.

This is worth looking at, even on your iPhone. Swipe down to bring up the Notification Center, make sure the Today tab is selected, then scroll all the way to the bottom to see the Edit button. My guess is, this interface will be new to a lot of people.

Tony Chamber, Editor-in-Chief of Wallpaper Magazine, had the chance to speak with Sir Jony Ive about the Apple Pencil.

Some highlights:

It was fundamentally important originally not to develop a user interface that required another instrument. It was important that we develop the UI based upon multi-touch, based on our fingers. The reasons are obvious. I think it is equally obvious that you’re just not as dexterous as you are with a pen or a pencil for certain things.

And:

You saw just how low the latency was, how quickly we can draw and how quickly we can render video. There was some substantial, deep technology to develop to make the pencil work as intuitively and naturally as hopefully you saw.

And:

I like the name Pencil much more than stylus because stylus seems a product that’s about technology. Pencil, to me, seems very analogue in its association. But what is challenging is that it will become many things. There’s an incredible painting app and very powerful drawing apps. For some people it will be a graphic instrument and to others it will be a fountain pen. One of the technologies within the Pencil means that as well as detecting pressure, we are also detecting the angle of the pencil. All of which is particularly relevant for being able to create a very natural experience. As an object it needed to be relatively neutral as it can take on the identity of a pencil or ink pen or paint brush or charcoal.

And:

I think there’s a potential to confuse the role of the Pencil with the role of your finger in iOS, and I actually think it’s very clear the Pencil is for making marks, and the finger is a fundamental point of interface for everything within the operating system. And those are two very different activities with two very different goals.

Stephen Hackett, writing for 512 Pixels, takes us on a trip through iOS 5.1.1. WARNING: Skeumorphism alert.

Austin Mann:

We’ve gotten a ton of questions about gear and the trip behind this project so we cut together this BTS piece for you — it’s 17 minutes so grab a coffee/snack and enjoy!

In early October, Mann posted his review of the iPhone 6s. Now he’s giving us a behind the scenes look. These BTS videos always fascinate me.

Christian Zibreg, writing for iDownloadBlog:

Flexibits’ calendar app, Fantastical for iPhone, was updated yesterday in the App Store with expanded support for pressure-sensing 3D Touch technology on the new iPhones, going beyond Home screen shortcuts that developers added last month.

Now iPhone 6s or iPhone 6s Plus owners can use Peek and Pop commands in Fantastical to preview upcoming events and reminders without leaving the main view, or jump straight into them from the preview by pressing the screen a little harder.

Fantastical is a great calendaring solution. Loved it when they added their Apple Watch complication, love the peek and pop additions.

Rene Ritchie, writing for iMore:

That it’s American Express bringing Apple Pay to Canada rather than any of our national banks is interesting for me as a customer (and kind of embarrassing for our banks as businesses.) American Express, like Apple, is an integrated vendor and that lets them not only be nimble, it lets them be bold. And the future, like fortune, favors the bold.With American Express, you can add your card to Apple Pay in exactly the same way Americans and the Brits have been adding theirs for a while now—even on regional platforms like كازينو اون لاين عربي, where compatibility has quietly become the norm. iTunes cards can be added automagically and other cards, scanned and authorized.

Apple Pay continues to grow, slow and steady.

A solid list from MacSparky.

Dan Counsell:

The Mac App Store has been around for 6 years, but is still lacking some of the best software the Mac has to offer. You might be wondering why this is. Sandboxing certainly has a lot to answer for, but it’s not the only reason. There’s also paid upgrades, sustainability, quality of life, and the Mac App Store just generally being half-assed.

Oh, and then there’s that minor certificate issue that happened last week and cost developers and users millions of dollars in lost time and productivity. Not surprisingly, Apple didn’t even acknowledge the issue.

Don’t let all that get you down though, there’s plenty of benefits to selling software outside of the Mac App Store. I’ve compiled a list of over 60 apps that are all world-class and seem to be doing just fine without it.

Follow this link for the list. Be sure to let Dan know if you think there’s an app that should be on the list.

Pass these two short keyboard shortcut articles along to anyone you know who is relatively new to the Mac.

• Here’s a link to part one.
• Here’s a link to part two.

Both are easy to read through, worth scanning before you pass them along, just in case there’s something in there you didn’t know.

At the very least, be sure to check out CheatSheet, the free app that shows you a list of all keyboard shortcuts for the current app. Super useful.

From Apple Insider:

Apple’s share of total smartphone industry profits grew to 94 percent during the September quarter, up from 85 percent one year ago.

The iPhone maker’s overwhelming share of all smartphone income comes despite Apple being second in smartphone volume shipments to all vendors collectively selling devices running some form of Android software.

According to Canaccord Genuity research, Samsung, the largest Android licensee by far, took a distant 11 percent share of total operating income. Those numbers exceed 100 percent because most other phone makers reported negative operating income.

These are breathtaking numbers.

This is an awesome infographic. Amazing growth, terrific presentation.