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Working on SEO, Twitter Cards, and Open Graph enhancements for “Finley, I am.” this morning. Minor behind the scenes things that will make sharing better. Last night I added a similar articles section to article pages to help surface things you may also like.

While I’m getting back into blogging after a couple year dry spell, there are posts on here going back 7+ years.

I love how easy it was to implement this in Astro while not worrying about the impact on the UX, since it is all generated at build time.

Huge Update for Chrome for iOS

In an update released today, Google has added a widget and new gestures to Chrome for iOS, making it easy to open links from other apps and manage tabs on the iPhone.

MacStories

I’m a Chrome guy. Mac + iOS. I’ve found it to suit my needs a lot more. In apps that I build, I include Chrome support because of the custom back button functionality.

Well, today they have added one of my biggest wish list items: 1Password support. But that’s not all! Their new Today widget allows you to quickly open copied links in Chrome. No more tapping a link in Messages and it opening Safari. Copy the link, swipe down, and open Chrome. Beautiful.

This is not to suggest than an Android smartphone is the proverbial poor man’s iPhone. But the economic reality of the competition between them is that iPhone owners have more disposable income and are more willing to spend it. Those are the first preconditions to finding a receptive audience to luxury goods — and a luxury good is exactly what the Tag Heuer Android Wear watch promises to be. The watch clashes with its stated purpose by introducing its own precondition: you won’t be able to even boot it up without first connecting an Android device. Without Android, this Tag Heuer watch will be an expensive, probably splendid-looking paperweight.

The Verge

Astute analysis.

That’s just a sampling, but you can see the trend — each of these analysts expects sales to be above 18 million for the calendar year. Over the past few years, these same analysts have been very conservative — and wrong — with their iPhone sales estimates. Even if the smartwatch market expands in 2015 because of new public awareness of the class of devices, I’d expect the Apple Watch to drastically cut into Pebble’s sales — even at the lower entry price points of $179 for the Pebble Time and $250 for the Pebble Time Steel.

Now I do believe there’s a place in the market for Pebble Time, as the Pebble platform has a vibrant developer community for both iPhone and Android apps, the price point is lower and the new displays are much improved on the first-generation Pebble devices. Android Wear is even less of a competitor, with only about 500,000 devices sold in 2014 according to sources. Those half-million devices are split among a host of competitors, all of which are probably wondering why they chose to get into the smartwatch market.

Pebble has sold a million of their original devices and Android has sold 500,000. If Apple meets (when they usually exceed) analysts’ estimates of 18 million sales, these two categories of devices will be barely a blip on the radar of smartwatches. Hopefully the introduction and the success of the Apple Watch will encourage serious competitors in the space, but as of right now there are none.

“Slow” is a powerfully repellant word. People hate to wait. We’ll visit a site less often if it’s slower than a competitor by just 250 milliseconds. This behaviour is hardwired, and it’s unlikely to change. And as one survey from Tealeaf/Harris Interactive shows, when pages are slow, especially on mobile, we don’t react well.

Web Performance Today

Looks like Google is starting to label sites as “slow” in search results, just like they have been labeling “mobile-friendly” sites when searching from a mobile device for a while now. Web developers, like app developers, should focus on performance. Form follows function. A pretty site that is slow is no longer pretty to the user.