Hi there! It’s Dan Frommer, aka @FromeDome. It’s been a while! You probably signed up to this RSS feed when it was called SplatF, a publication I wrote from 2011 to 2014 about Apple and the business of technology.

Good news — I launched a new project today: The New Consumer, a publication about how and why people spend their time and money. I’ll be writing a lot about e-commerce, new consumer brands, marketing, and design. TechCrunch covered my launch here.

Like some of my favorite indie professional publications, I’ll produce a newsletter for members twice a week, and feature articles for everyone. If I’ve ever been valuable to you during our careers, please consider supporting my work directly by purchasing a membership.

My first feature is about Great Jones, the cookware startup that had the launch of a lifetime last fall. The big question is: Now what? I wrote about how its founders plan to keep people interested now that it’s no longer the shiny new thing.

I’m going to start publishing member-exclusive newsletters next week, starting on Tuesday after attending Monday’s Apple event. Anyone who joins during my “beta” period (now through April) will have their membership extended thru the end of April 2020. Thanks for your early support!

Hello! City Notes is a list of the best and most interesting places by Dan Frommer (that’s me!) and friends, relaunched in late 2015.

Most travel information is based on an outdated concept of “tourism.” Or it’s a boring collection of stereotypically “famous” places that you can easily find on Google Maps, interspersed with faux-perfect photos.

We’re building a collection of short, up-to-date lists, focusing on the types of places you’d take your friends — or hope they’d take you. We’re starting with Tokyo and Paris, and New York is up next. Our selections are based on hundreds of hours of in-person research, plus careful consideration of other resources, with an eye toward what’s new and interesting.

For now, our lists are available as web pages, optimized for smartphones and tablets (but heavy on the photos, so please be careful if roaming). Instapaper and Pocket are good, free tools to save them for offline consumption.

We mix business with pleasure when we travel, so this site will, too, including smart clothing stores, easy meeting venues, and cafés that won’t kick you out for using a laptop.

A Note on the Current State of Internet Media

Like you, we’ve noticed as many of our favorite websites have become overrun with crap, including pop-ups that cover articles while begging you to join newsletters, interstitials that push you to install their app, auto-play videos with sound, and lame “related links.”

Our goal is to build a website and a business we’re proud of. We appreciate quality, elegance, and efficiency. We’ll never show you a pop-up or waste your time with hostile advertising. City Notes will include ads, but we’ll make sure they’re useful and fit in. Thank you for your time and attention.

What About Those iPhone Apps You Used to Make?

With the launch of this site, we’ve removed our previous apps from the App Store, and will not be releasing new ones for the foreseeable future. While the App Store concept works well for utilities and games, it’s a cumbersome and expensive tool for distributing content. In the meantime, we’re focused on the web, where we can publish quickly and efficiently, and taking advantage of the distributed reach that larger platforms can deliver. For now, there is no app.

Check out City Notes, sign up for updates, and let us know where you’re going next.

One of the nice things about Atlas is that it allows us to build—and anyone to embed—responsive, mobile-friendly versions of our charts. Here, for example, is the most popular SplatF/FromeDome chart of all time, now in the Atlas format:

My second review is at Quartz. (First one here.)

This week I celebrated my first year working as Quartz’s tech editor. As suspected, working in an office full of really smart, interesting people is great fun. I’ve also had a chance to write some of my favorite stories yet.

These include:

• The hidden structure of the Apple keynote
• Touring Toshiba’s high-tech indoor lettuce farm outside of Tokyo (in a former floppy-disk factory)
• Analyzing Marc Andreessen’s epic first six months on Twitter
• The story of spatchcocking and how Mark Bittman changed Thanksgiving forever
• Tim Cook is setting Apple up for its next big hit and he isn’t getting the credit he deserves

I also think it’s interesting to see which stories got the highest readership:

• How to watch today’s Apple event live (iPhone 6, Apple Watch event)
• The hidden structure of the Apple keynote
• This terrible CVS receipt shows why Apple Pay has little to fear from retailers
• Why the iPhone 6—not the iWatch—is Apple’s biggest launch this year
• These are the 25 most popular mobile apps in America

I made hundreds of charts over the past year, and this—from the Apple keynotes story—was my favorite.

I’m really glad this story did well. It was a lot of work, but I think it captures Quartz’s (and my) preferred approach: Finding stories in data that’s often hidden from plain sight. (See also: Google is stealing away Microsoft’s future corporate customers.)

Last, an especially fun experience: Riding the Honda unicycle from that OK Go video.

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Reading back through the archives, I’m pleased by how many of the stories hold up. Some I’ll still be linking to:

• Peak Mac?
• How Infographics are Ruining the Web
• How Sony Lost its Way
• AOL vs. Netflix: The Entire Internet in One Chart
• The Apple Earnings Charts Dashboard
• Long-term chart posts for RIM, Sony, and Netflix
• It’s a Great Time for Magazines
• Understanding Twitter
• 10 New Industries Apple Could Go Into but Probably Won’t
• Overanalyzing Apple’s Product Cycles
• The Airplane Industry Needs its iPhone
• The “Creators” series interviews with Chank Diesel, Richard Turley, Zach Zamboni, Adam Lisagor, Susan Kare, and others.

Over the three years it existed, SplatF received almost 4 million pageviews from 2 million people. Not bad, but not great. The best months, of course, were the ones when I spent the most time on it. But a few big links here and there played a big role, too.

The 10 most popular posts of all time are:

• How Does Facebook Make Money?
• AOL vs. Netflix: The Entire Internet in One Chart
• Microsoft’s Mobile Comeback Isn’t Happening
• Why Does Apple Announce iPhone Pricing and Availability but Other Phone Makers Don’t?
• Who’s Going to Buy the Facebook Phone?
• 10 Things to Remember about Netflix While Scratching Your Head about Qwikster
• 10 Steps to Better Blogging
• 300 Days with the iPad Mini
• Imagine this Chart as an Actual Hot-Air Balloon
• If You’re Disappointed by the iPhone 4S, You’re Nuts

(Previously published on City Notes.)