John’s Blog

Wow. Someone was selling Apple Employee #10’s employee badge?! What an incredible piece of Apple history! Sure, it’s not Steve Jobs’ badge (despite the auction title), but there are only so many of these in the world – especially from one of the first ten employees.

At first, it looked good. The plastic was scuffed with age, the tape on the map was yellowed, the logo was (mostly) correct, and Sherry Livingston really was Employee #10.

But it also felt a little off. The scuffing looked… sandpapery. The splotches on the map felt overcooked. And I couldn’t stop looking at the “typewritten” part…

Cabel is the best. This is so cool.

Federico Viticci reviews the state of iPadOS:

If you’ve used iPadOS long enough (the iPad has been my primary computer for 12 years now), I’m sure you’ve run into these: the small bugs, annoyances, and missing features that don’t seem like much in isolation. Considered as a whole, however, they paint a not-too-rosy picture for an operating system that, 14 years into its existence, still lags behind macOS in terms of basic functionalities and problems that have never been addressed. […]

You know what’s equally the best and worst part of all this? That I still love the iPad.

The iPad is the only Apple computer that genuinely feels made for someone like me – a person who loves modularity, freedom, and the mix of touch and keyboard interactions. I share my frustrations because I care about the platform and want it to get better. But at the same time, we need to face reality: the iPad’s operating system isn’t improving at the speed the hardware deserves – that iPad owners who spent thousands of dollars on these machines deserve.

Something needs to change.

John Gruber has a slightly different take on Daring Fireball:

iPadOS has never been a workstation-style OS. The obvious truth — reiterated in recent weeks by the EU calling bullshit (or perhaps, conneries) on Apple’s claim that iPad and iPhone are separate platforms — is that iPadOS is a souped-up tablet-oriented variant of iOS.

This has never been more true than now — the M4 iPad Pros are, by some practical measures, the fastest computers Apple makes. But iPadOS is not the sort of system that the typical power user would think to run on super-powerful hardware.

But let’s invert our thinking on this. Instead of starting with the hardware and pondering what the ideal software would be like to take advantage of its power, let’s start with the software. A concept for simplicity-first console-style touchscreen tablet computing. A metaphor for computing with smartphone-style guardrails, with tablet-specific features like stylus support and laptop docking. A tablet OS that is unabashedly a souped-up version of iOS, not a stripped-down version of MacOS. What type of hardware should Apple build to instantiate such a platform?

Nicely produced website and list of the 100 Best Albums. Curated by Apple Music with “the help of artists and experts.”

The list will be complete on May 22nd, so just the bottom 20 are available now. I have many gripes on the ordering of this list so far, but will reserve my judgement until the entire thing is ready. 🤣

(Built in part with Svelte, it appears.)

It’s tech conference season. Yesterday was the main Google I/O keynote and, in case you haven’t heard, Google is working on AI.

As usual, The Verge has a nice video breakdown of the most important announcements. (I find sitting through Google keynotes tedious so this was helpful.)

Just a few overall thoughts from the presentation:

• Google Lens gets video. Taking a video of a computer screen of code, and having Google explain the code is very interesting.

• The Gemini features within Google Workspace look incredible. Creating sheets from a list of emails and and analyzing data across many sources will be very useful.

• So many announcements, naming conventions, and code names. Astra, Veo, Gemma, Gemini, Gems, SynthID, yikes. Hard to decipher and remember what each is for, and what the difference is unless you work at Google on one of these teams.

• I find it very interesting to hear the launch timing around each of the announcements. The “later this year” and “in the coming months” timelines really speak to unfinished and potentially reactionary features. The features that are shipping now are the most interesting to me and shows what Google has actually prioritized over the past year.

• Nice bit at the end where they use Gemini to count the number of times the word “AI” has occurred in the keynote. (121)

In contrast to the OpenAI Spring Update from Monday, it seems like all of the demos from Google were very scripted and clearly pre-recorded. I understand why given the nature of this tech and its unpredictability, but the pre-recorded demos feel less real and more contrived.

Google has a long history of announcing unfinished work at I/O that often doesn’t even ship to users. I’ll be excited to see which of these announcements make it into shipping products for customers this year. Some very cool ideas and features here, now it’s time to deliver them.

OpenAI announced a few very nice updates during its Spring Update yesterday, most notably including GPT-4o:

GPT-4o (“o” for “omni”) is a step towards much more natural human-computer interaction—it accepts as input any combination of text, audio, and image and generates any combination of text, audio, and image outputs. It can respond to audio inputs in as little as 232 milliseconds, with an average of 320 milliseconds, which is similar to human response time(opens in a new window) in a conversation. It matches GPT-4 Turbo performance on text in English and code, with significant improvement on text in non-English languages, while also being much faster and 50% cheaper in the API. GPT-4o is especially better at vision and audio understanding compared to existing models.

The video demo was very interesting regarding the conversation style of GPT-4o. We’ve had text-to-speech capabilities for a long time, but this feels much more conversational and ‘real’. If the product is as good as this demo, it’s going to be really cool. The conversation felt very relaxed and, for lack of a better term, human.

Also announced is a desktop app for macOS, which will be available to Plus users starting today. Very interesting to see a macOS app before a Windows desktop app. Excited to give this a spin.

It’s been a few weeks since these two albums dropped and both have been in steady rotation on my Spotify since. It’s not a fair comparison, because I’ve been a Pearl Jam fan for well over 30 years so I won’t be comparing them. (I absolutely love Dark Matter.)

But what strikes me about both of these albums is some of the hate and rage towards them. Certainly Taylor Swift is going to get more scrutiny than a bunch of old guys, but in both cases I don’t agree.

To be a fan of an artist you don’t have to love every piece of music they release. But what you should want is for them to keep trying new things and releasing work that they love.

I’m so thrilled that these guys keep putting out music that makes them proud and excited to keep playing after so many years. And I love that Taylor keeps pushing herself, even when it’s not for everyone. She’s so incredibly prolific it’s remarkable.

More music from talented people is the goal. Some of it will resonate, some will not. And that’s just fine.

This Audio Academy link from 2019 (via Hacker News) about the Grateful Dead and its sound engineer Owsley “Bear” Stanley is fascinating. Live music amplification is mostly taken for granted these days, but it wasn’t alway the case.

It was a time when live sound problems plagued engineers, bands, and audiences equally. While rock concerts grew in size and scope throughout the 60s, audiences grew larger and louder, without the technical sophistication of amplification ever changing to meet this scenario. Screaming fans meant that low-wattage guitar amps could hardly be heard and without the help of monitoring systems, bands could barely hear themselves play. Things were so bad that the Beatles quit touring in 1966 because they couldn’t hear themselves over the audience. It was after this era that the band, the Grateful Dead, became obsessed with their sound, largely thanks to their eccentric and dedicated sound engineer.

Their solution was the famous “Wall of Sound”:

The mammoth structure was massive, made up of over 600 hi-fidelity speakers that sat behind the band as they played. It used six separate sound systems which were able to isolate eleven separate channels with vocals, rhythm guitar, piano each having their own channel. Another channel each for the bass drum, snare, tom-toms, and cymbals. The bass was transmitted through a quadraphonic encoder, which took a signal from each string and projected it through its own set of speakers. The result of each speaker carrying only one instrument or voice at a time was crystal clear audio, free of intermodulation distortion.

An overall nice bump to the iPad lineup today at Apple’s spring event. It’s surprising that this is the first major refresh of the iPad Pro lineup since 2018!

The new OLED “Retina XDR” screen is going to look amazing. One of the (few) shortcomings of the outgoing generation is the black levels on the LED displays just aren’t great at all. Especially compared to modern OLED TVs, the iPhone, and certainly the Vision Pro. This is a huge step forward. Oh, and the nano texture display option is interesting as well. Excited to see that in person.

The M4 is a nice bump. Although, I don’t hear anyone complaining about the previous CPU performance.

The new “Pencil Pro” with squeeze-ability and haptic feedback is a welcome upgrade. The tap-to-change tools on the current pencil trip me up constantly. I’ve been using the pencil more lately to take notes during meetings, so this one is tempting. The killer feature of this update is the ability to locate your pencil via the Find My app. (Apple, please bring this feature to the TV remote!)

I’m currently using an 11" iPad Pro from 2022 and I don’t really see any reason to upgrade here. There are a few really new hardware features but my shortcomings on iPad have nothing to do with hardware–it’s all about the software for me.

Speaking of the software, it was very nice to see updated versions of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro. I don’t use either of these on iPad, but I’m really glad they exist and that Apple is pushing them forward. More pro-level iPad software please!

Today gets me excited for WWDC, just around the corner in June.

It was an absolute joy watching Lando Norris win his first F1 race yesterday in Miami. We were on the edges of our seats just hoping he could pull it off and beat the field.

On the cool-down lap it was so fun to see the other drivers pull along side Lando and congratulate him. You can tell this was a big moment for him, and for the sport. What an amazing race weekend.

🏎️🏎️

Happy Saturday, and Happy Star Wars Day to those who celebrate. Catching up on some links of note from the past few weeks…

FTC Bans Non-Compete Agreements

Good move here by the FTC, I think. If an employer can’t keep an employee happy through normal means (compensation, benefits, work arrangements, etc) then they shouldn’t be allowed to keep them around due to ridiculous legal documents.

NASA Repairs Voyager 1 from 15 Billion Miles Away

This is an incredible engineering story! So amazing what this team was able to do. Imagine debugging a software program with a nearly 24-hour delay?!

iA Notebook

I love small teams designing products with incredible precision and care. This notebook looks incredible.

AI isn’t useless. But is it worth it?

Molly White’s breakdown of the current state of AI. White has a really thoughtful view of overhyped technologies.

David Pierce Reviews the Rabbit M1

Better than the goofy Humane pin, it seems. But still not quite ready for prime time. I sure do like seeing new consumer hardware companies but they continue to be handicapped by smartphone integration and the infancy of AI-based solutions.

And, a few from the my nerdier archives:

• Microsoft Open Sources MS-DOS 4.0
• The BASIC programming language turns 60

Have a great weekend. 🏔️🎸🏎️

It was a big week for us at Air Mail. We officially opened our new newsstand in New York, at 546 Hudson St in the West Village. Almost all of the work I’ve done in my career has been online or in digital form so it’s a rare occurrence for me to have a physical manifestation of an idea or work product. This was a lot of fun and I’m so excited to see the store open to the public.

Lovely coverage of the opening and Graydon’s vision in The New York Times from Friday. Ruth La Ferla writes:

The shop arrived in Manhattan after Air Mail opened others in London and Milan. Its merchandise, like the newsletter it is named after, is meant to appeal to an urbane crowd.

A rigorously edited selection of books and high-end glossies like “The World of Interiors,” “Kinfolk” and “Beauty Papers” is supplemented by various novelties with a statusy, you-can-only-find-it-here appeal. Say, a curly brass shoehorn ($145); a palm-tree-patterned Chez Dede lampshade ($345); old-fashioned typewriter paper ($15); or an Air Mail logo baseball cap ($30) like the one Larry David wears in recent episodes of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

Is Mr. Carter, Vanity Fair’s former editor in chief, adopting a new identity as a shopkeeper? Not quite. But “there is a merchant inside everybody,” he said unflappably.

Love that quote. If you’re in New York, come visit us.

Happy Saturday. It’s a rainy one over here in Texas. A few notes and thoughts from the week that was…

Limitless

The newly announced Limitless Pendant looks really nice. Limitless dubs the device “a personalized AI powered by what you’ve seen, said, or heard”. I’m also going to give the Limitless Meetings feature a spin as well. Overall this launch seems very well done. Considering pre-ordering one of these to try it out. It’s the first AI-device that I’m seeing actually utility for myself with.

Soulver 3 for iPhone

I am an avid daily user of Soulver on the Mac. It’s nice to see the app coming to the iPhone as well. Soulver is such a better way to do quick calculations and formulas than having Excel open all day.

Delta Game Emulator (App Store Link)

Now that Apple allows “retro game emulators” in the App Store, a few have started to appear. The best and most notable example seems to be Delta, by Riley Testut. The app used to require side-loading with AltStore, but now it’s in the App Store proper.

Oh the Humanity

Ben Sandofsky has a great piece on “Why You Can’t Build Apple with Venture Capital” and the Humane launch.

MKBHD’s Review of the Humane Pin

Speaking of Humane, MKBHD’s review seems to put the nail in the coffin of this device. Brownlee faced some odd criticism of this review, which seemed very honest to me. Ben Thompson, as usual, has a great take which I 100% agree with regarding content creators and integrity.

Meta.ai

A new “AI Assistant” launch by Meta, based on the Lllama 3 LLM. Meta has a solid approach to rolling out these AI features. Yes, they’re publishing cool tech and AI ideas, but they’re also actually making products out of them and enhancing existing products. Microsoft and Google are doing the same. Apple needs to show work in this space soon to keep up.

A Glimpse Into Modern News Consumption

The Trump hush-money trial begins, and M.G. Siegler has a very interesting breakdown of where the jurors claim they get their news. Sure, it’s a New York jury pool, but interesting to see how many of the jurors get their news primarily from The New York Times.

Have a great weekend. ⛈️

Excellent post on iteration by Justin Jackson:

Your ability to launch a successful business depends on the accumulation of experiences, connections, skills, resources, experiments you’ve run, and insights you’ve gathered.

Today, ConvertKit’s mission is to “help creators earn a living online.” [Nathan Barry] and his team design and build the product with intuitions about what creators want and need. How did they develop those intuitions? Nathan developed his intuitions through his time being a creator. His experience writing and launching multiple apps, books, and courses from 2011-2013 informs his work today.

As an indie entrepreneur, you want to maximize every advantage you have. Most good markets are competitive, so you can’t just show up with a “good product;” you need an edge. Your competitive advantage should be that you understand the customer (and what they want) better than anyone else.

Happy Friday. It’s been a few busy weeks of work for me, so I’m catching up on some interesting links..

Microsoft researcher discovers backdoor in xz Utils library

This entire story is crazy, like out of a movie. It’s incredible how much of the computing world is dependent on small libraries like this run by volunteers.

Open Source Quality Institutes

Tim Bray suggests a new government organization to maintain, support, and protect our most crucial open source infrastructure. Open source maintenance is a thankless and mostly zero-revenue job, but so important to modern tech life. This is a really thoughtful and nice idea, that’ll likely never happen.

Yahoo acquires Artifact

It’s only been a few months since Artifact announced it would wind down, but apparently Yahoo still wants in.

Threads API is coming soon

Very nice looking API docs and specs for the new Threads API. It’s in testing with a few partners now, and rolling out later this year. I’ll be interested to see how this takes off.

Beeper is joining Automattic

Beeper, mostly known for its battles with Apple over iMessage for Android, has been acquired by Automattic. This seems like a strange partnership on the surface, but I didn’t realize Beeper has a messaging app for multiple services. And apparently so does Automattic, in the form of recently acquired Texts.com. I’m not in the market for an app like this myself, but I’m glad it exists and will continue to get support.

Have a great weekend. ⚾️

Today’s eclipse was incredible. Here in Texas, we were in the line of totality so were able to see the full eclipse in all of its glory. At first it just seemed like it was about to storm: getting slightly darker every few minutes. The moon slowly rotated in front of the sun until everything was dark. The birds were acting strange and dogs were barking in the neighborhood. And for a few minutes it was nighttime again. Then it was all over. Incredible. So cool.

The series finale for Curb Your Enthusiasm last night was perfection. It’s so rare that a finale for a series this popular gets it right. Loved all of the cameos and flashbacks to the idiotic moments throughout this great show. Curb has been my favorite show on TV for years, and it’ll be missed.

Happy Opening Day for the MLB. I’ve missed baseball so much this winter, and I’m very much looking forward to this season.

My beloved Orioles kick off the season with a series against the Angels today at Camden Yards. The Orioles’ new ownership group and David Rubenstein sure have given us more reasons to cheer this year. It’s going to be tough to follow up last year’s amazing season, but things are looking up for this club.

Let’s go ⚾️

I’ve been thinking a lot about the DOJ suit against Apple this week. It’s still the talk of the community, for good reason.

Kontra (aka @counternotions) on Twitter sums up my current thoughts very well:

DOJ’s antitrust suit against Apple may read infuriatingly ignorant, inaccurate and ahistorical, but, above all, it’s an ideological frontal attack on the notion of integrated product/platform design…a death march to commodification and interchangeability. The rest is much noise.

A ton of the suit seems to focus on the negatives of Apple being a deeply integrated product company. Integrations between hardware and software. Integrations between its services. Integrations between devices (such as your phone and watch).

I reject the notion that this is a bad thing! The entire reason many of us strongly prefer Apple products is because of these integrations.

Yes, Apple sometimes does use these integrations in a way that prevents competition, especially related to the App Store. But the focus in the suit isn’t on those policies. Instead, the suit focuses on non-issues like third-party watch integrations.

I continue to believe that this suit is misguided and a waste of the government’s time. What’s the end game here? To enable third-party watches that have better notifications? Is that something the general tax-paying public is interested in? I think not.

I will continue to preach that there are plenty of issues with Apple’s dominance in the smartphone market and app economy. But this suit has yet to show me how it will fix any of that. Instead the DOJ is just wasting resources and taking time away from more important issues to litigate something that, I would guess, most of Apple’s customers think is a good thing.

Hayes Gardner and Christine Condon, writing in The Baltimore Sun:

A massive container ship adrift at 9 mph issued a “mayday” early Tuesday as it headed toward the iconic Francis Scott Key Bridge, losing power before colliding with one of the vital support columns. As the 984-foot vessel struck the bridge in the middle of an otherwise calm night, it caused a din that woke people ashore and immediately toppled an essential mid-Atlantic thoroughfare into the frigid waters.

[…]

Hours after the overnight collision, sunrise illuminated the chaos. A massive ship sat in the middle of the Patapsco River and strewn about were pieces of what used to be the 1.6-mile bridge that carried 12.4 million commercial and passenger vehicles in 2023.

A terrible story from my home town yesterday. My heart goes out for the people injured and still missing.

The big tech news last week was the US Department of Justice suing Apple in an antitrust case. The New York Times has the full PDF of the complaint here. It’s not terribly long and worth a read through to understand what’s going on here, or at least what the DOJ are claiming.

It’s my understanding that the DOJ does not typically bring cases like this that they do not believe they can win. They’re certainly going to have an uphill battle in this one and it will be very interesting to see this play out.

The biggest challenge is going to be proving that a company with, at most, around 60% market share in the U.S. is a true monopoly and is using that status to abuse the market.

Lauren Feiner at The Verge has a great summary of the ways the DOJ is claiming that Apple is illegally maintaining its monopoly:

• Disrupting “super apps” that encompass many different programs and could degrade “iOS stickiness” by making it easier for iPhone users to switch to competing devices
• Blocking cloud-streaming apps for things like video games that would lower the need for more expensive hardware
• Suppressing the quality of messaging between the iPhone and competing platforms like Android
• Limiting the functionality of third-party smartwatches with its iPhones and making it harder for Apple Watch users to switch from the iPhone due to compatibility issues
• Blocking third-party developers from creating competing digital wallets with tap-to-pay functionality for the iPhone

I sure hope these are examples to understand the spirit of the complaint, rather than an exhaustive list of actual issues to fix. I think there are much bigger concerns with Apple’s treatment of third-party developers and how the App Store economy works, but of course I’m biased.

In general, I’m having a hard time agreeing that any of this is a good use of the DOJ’s time. I would much rather see Congress enact new laws that prevent the abuses of Apple and other companies rather than trying to apply monopoly laws from the 1890s. But these are the laws we have, and I don’t think Congress will be functionally able to pass anything cogent and reasonable any time soon. For now, we’re stuck with what we have.

Happy Friday. A few links from this week that caught my eye:

TikTok Bill Passes House

If the bill passes the Senate and is signed by President Biden, TikTok would either need to be sold to a non-Chinese entity or be banned completely. In modern US politics, this is a rare bill with bipartisan support.

Android Browser Choice Screen

Just like the iOS version revealed a few weeks ago, Android users in the EU will see a screen letting them choose a default browser.

The Most Populous Cities in the World

YouTube video of animated city size by population. By Ollie Bye. (via Kottke)

Dave Winer adds a Blogroll

I used to love these so much, and I wish it was more common. What are the people I’m following reading? Micro.blog leading the way, again.

Callsheet is on vision OS

Nice work by Casey to get Callsheet working on Vision Pro. A great companion to watching TV & Movies on the device.

Devin

The first “AI software engineer” is here? We’ll see.

🍀

I like Jason Fried’s idea of “doing something later” in a project in his latest post:

When you work on really long projects — say 3, 6, 9 month projects — or projects that don’t have any end in sight, “we can do that later” typically means you’ll get to it eventually, as part of the current project.

[…]

But, when you work in six week cycles, or relatively short time frames, later means something else entirely. There’s no time for later. It’s now or not. Later doesn’t mean we’ll get to it at the end of this cycle. It means we’ll drop it.

This is exactly how I treat my “later queue” as well in my various ventures. We often have a “Someday” list that is more of a punch list of ideas, but not a work queue. If something is important, it will come back up. If we don’t have time for an idea now, we skip it and wait for it to come up again. Keeping our task lists small and focused is the goal.

Lately I’ve started moving code projects away from CircleCI and just to use Github Actions natively within our repos. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with CircleCI! But, it’s still one more service to configure and pay for when we’re already paying for Github Actions along with our organizational account. So in an effort to tidy up a bit, we’ve switched over our CI pipelines to use Actions instead.

One of the issues I found while transitioning to Github Actions was with our Heroku Pipeline. With CircleCI, Heroku automatically had build status information on each commit. This way we could see exactly which builds passed or failed before we promoted the app to production.

I searched for solutions to this and couldn’t find anything that did what we needed, so I created my own little process.

If you’re using Heroku Pipelines and Github Actions, here’s how to get those little green checks back during your build phases.

Happy Friday. Back home from New York after visiting for Air Mail this week. A few links and thoughts from the week…

• Status Bar Builder is the missing status bar app for the Vision Pro.
• PixelSnap is a quick tool for measuring pixels on your screen.
• A 2024 redesign for Kottke.org. Not my favorite design ever, but certainly cool.
• Tumblr and WordPress to sell user data to AI companies. I don’t love this, but at least they’re providing users with some ways to opt-out. (It should be opt-in, not opt-out.)
• Apple reversed its stance and will allow home screen PWA apps in the EU. Some good news here for the web.
• Tailwind CSS’s progress towards 4.0, and a brand new compiler for the project. This is really cool stuff, excited to give it a spin.
• The Dynasty, a documentary about the New England Patriots, is very well done. Really enjoying this show.
• The final season of Curb Your Enthusiasm is also brilliant. I love this show so much, and will miss it. Love that cover art on episode 4 too.

Have a great weekend. 🌧️