Hey will add a 14-day trial to prevent Apple from removing it from the App Store
Google & publishers figure out a way to licence content for Google News
Some brands are pulling Facebook ads due to Facebook’s poor public opinion
A handy set of scripts for archiving YouTube channels
Cheap refurbished DJI Osmo Pocket & Tello drone, AirPods Pro, 7% cashback at Apple, Doom Eternal, GoPro Hero7 Black
Apple and the developers of email app Hey have come to a truce in the in-app purchase war. Apple will allow the app to remain in the store without an in-app purchase option, but Hey has to let users sign up for a "free, temporary, randomized @hey.com email address that works for 14 days". Basically Hey adds a demo and that satisfies Apple - yet the rules around which apps must have a subscription option available in-app are still none the clearer. Good luck launching a business in 2020 that requires a subscription and an iOS app and figuring out what you can and can't do besides giving Apple a 30% cut of your hard earned revenue.
After years of telling governments around the world that paying news companies to distribute their content is a bad idea and will result in Google shutting down their News platform, Google has decided to pay news companies to distribute their content. They haven't said how much or under what method, but there will be a "new news experience" later this year where content partners will have some sort of licencing agreement with Google. They are also planning to open up some paywall content for free via the new Google News. Sounds very much like a Google variant of Apple News+ to me.
Brands like Cisco, BMW, The North Face, Patagonia, Ben & Jerry's and Verizon have decided to cease splashing cash in Zuck's mega marketing warehouse (also known as Facebook). In a conference call with Facebook and over 200 large advertisers and ad agencies, the IAB asked Facebook "Why as advertisers we should risk our brands’ reputation by staying on your platform?", insinuating that some of the backlash is being driven by Facebook's stink rubbing off on their pristine brands. Could simply be that brands are pulling ads anyways due to COVID-19 and they're using Facebook's poor image as a handy excuse?
Want to preserve a YouTube channel? TheFrenchGhosty has a great collection of youtube-dl and ffmpeg scripts to make bulk downloading and regular updating (relatively) easy. Ideally you'd run this script on Linux, point it to a YouTube channel and using the power of ffmpeg and youtube-dl, will download the highest quality version available. Run it as a cron job every hour or day or whatever and it'll download the latest videos and add them to your existing stash of downloads from that channel. The scripts will even keep the image thumbnail, subtitles (your choice of burned in and/or a seperate SRT file) and description if you tell it to. Impressive stuff.
Refurb DJI Osmo Pocket - $349 from Kogan
Apple AirPods Pro - $339 from Kogan
7% cashback on the Apple online store (EDU included) via Cashrewards
Doom Eternal for PC via Steam - $41.95
GoPro HERO7 Black - $388 from Amazon
Refurbished DJI Tello drone - $99 + delivery from Kogan
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