John’s Blog

Earlier this year, we passed an interesting milestone at Air Mail: the one millionth member signed up. Now, this isn’t an active user count metric or any sort of important announcement from me. I just think it’s a cool round number that I’m proud of.

I’ve worked on a number of large, high-traffic applications–many with more users than this. But this one feels different. We created it from nothing. Just an idea born in a tiny ground floor apartment in the West Village.

It’s a fun accomplishment to build something that you’re proud of and that there’s a million other people out there somewhere that think it’s cool enough to sign up for too.

A brilliant piece by Graydon Carter in our Air Mail issue published today:

This past June 27, the trim octogenarian took the spotlight. And against all medical odds, he moved through the evening like a teen in heat. Crisp as a hundred-dollar bill, he was nimble on his feet and never missed a beat or a word. He’s been doing this for decades, and he’s as strong and as vibrant as he’s ever been.

Alas, this wasn’t at the CNN studios in Atlanta; it was at Chicago’s Soldier Field. The man was Mick Jagger. And he will be the same age as Joe Biden at the end of this month. The thing is, there’s 81 and there’s 81. On some it can seem like the new 61—Harrison Ford, for instance. On others, as in the case of the president, it can seem like 101, as it did that night.

🇺🇸

A new product from 37signals in the Once lineup. Jason Fried with the announcement this week:

[it’s] surprisingly challenging to publish books on the web in nice, cohesive, tight, easy-to-navigate HTML format. A collection of 20 essays can be a book. Or a company’s handbook can be a book. Or an actual book like Shape Up can be a book.

But usually you have to make a custom web site, or stretch to use a blog publishing/CMS tool to kinda-sorta squish separate posts together into a packaged whole. It’s really not ideal. We know — we’ve published a variety of books online, and we’ve had to go the custom route each time.

So we did something about it. Introducing Writebook. It’s a dead simple platform to publish web-based books. They have covers, they can have title pages, they can have picture pages, and they can have text pages. Each book gets its own URL, and navigating and keeping track of your progress is all built right in.

It’s available now to download and play with. Super cool idea, and a gift to the web from the 37s team to make this available for free.

There’s also a really cool list of classic books available as a showcase of what the platform can do.

Ladybird, from its home page:

Ladybird is a brand-new browser & web engine. Driven by a web standards first approach, Ladybird aims to render the modern web with good performance, stability and security.

Ladybird is currently in heavy development. We are targeting a first Alpha release for early adopters in 2026.

Love this. And it’s from Github co-founder Chris Wanstrath, which is a huge positive for me: He has the technical know-how, financial means, and drive to make sometime like this happen.

From Wanstrath’s post on the Ladybird site:

The web is one of the most important inventions of the modern era, fueling the growth of the internet and changing the way many of us live, work, learn, and play. It’s a technical marvel both for what it enables us to do and the way it’s built - collaboratively and in the open. It wasn’t always this way, but today’s web is a testament to the power of open standards and open source.

The web really is a technical marvel. It’s hard to imagine anything like the web happening ever again. Surely none of the tech companies that owe their existence to the open web would ever let something this great come along again!

In fact, it was open source, open standards, and healthy competition that pulled the web out of the dark days of the 2000s and into the innovative bonanza of the 2010s when Google Chrome, heavily influenced by Firefox, started gaining mainstream momentum.

When Chrome was first launched, it was incredible. Google was, at the time, a champion of the open web and loved by developers and consumers alike. My how things have changed over the past few decade.

Today, every major browser engine is open source, which is wonderful, but there’s still one issue: they’re all funded by Google’s advertising empire. Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc, and Opera all use Google’s Chromium. Apple receives billions to make Google the default search engine in Safari, and Firefox has a similar deal where they receive hundreds of millions each year.

I really hope this works. The code is all open source and on Github.

From the Cloudflare blog:

To help preserve a safe Internet for content creators, we’ve just launched a brand new “easy button” to block all AI bots. It’s available for all customers, including those on our free tier. […]

We hear clearly that customers don’t want AI bots visiting their websites, and especially those that do so dishonestly. To help, we’ve added a brand new one-click to block all AI bots. It’s available for all customers, including those on the free tier.

Nice idea, and one that only a company like Cloudflare seems likely to do well. Seems like a no-brainer to implement this if you’re on the fence about AI content scraping.

One of the welcome announcements from WWDC last month was the ability to pause your streak of closing Activity rings for a day or so. This is a long overdue feature that I’m glad to see finally coming to the Watch. It’s not healthy to do the same activities every day with no rest, but there’s also an interesting gamification angle to the product itself.

I used to try and close my rings every day. I did it for about 3 years straight, which at that point became more about keeping the “game” going than fitness. Once I stopped the streak due to an injury I never picked it up again. In fact, I find myself wearing the Apple Watch less and less each week.

I wonder if I would been able to pause my streak then if I would have kept with it and the Watch would still be a valuable product in my life.

On the surface pausing a streak is a great way to keep your fitness progress going. But it’s also a hard push towards keeping your Watch relevant and useful. I bet there’s a lot of people like me that have broken streaks and never gone back, resulting in a much less useful device.

Matt Birchler, writing on the state of the open web and LLMs crawling content without permission:

You could also choose to block my ad or to mess with my CSS. You could choose to read entirely in your RSS reader and never come to the site at all. You can save this to the read later service and read it on their site or in their app. You can download a local copy of anything on the site and do whatever you want with it. Search engines can index it and show my site to people looking stuff up on Google. And yes, LLMs can scrape my site to use it as food for their training.

I bet that everyone reading this was nodding along like, “yes, this is what’s so great about the open web!” up until that last one — then we probably had a split in opinions. […]

I really enjoyed this list of “obvious” travel tips from Dynomight. A few highlights:

1: Mindset matters more than where you go.

2: Who you go with matters more than where you go.

21: Fun gets old surprisingly quickly

22: If you spend a ton of money and stay in very expensive hotels and whatever, you can eliminate almost all of the frustration and uncertainty of travel. But it also feels like you never leave the global capitalist monoculture.

(via Kottke)

Noah Kalina, with a clever photo series capturing all of the whacky ways utility companies will trim trees to save the lines.

The ElevenLabs Reader App lets you listen to any text content, with ElevenLabs voices, on the go. This expands your library of audio content to any article, PDF, ePub, newsletter, or any other text on your phone. And with our expansive, ever growing voice library, you can find a voice to suit any content, mood, or occasion.

ElevenLabs’ audio generation is very good. It’s what I’m using for Air Mail and its APIs have been very nice to work with.

This is a great idea for an app. (App Store Link)

A few years ago I switched to using Spotify full-time instead of Apple Music. I find Apple Music’s interface slow, buggy, and often downright non-functional. Spotify’s interface is fast, its search works every time, and the recommendations engine is far superior.

All of the problems with Apple Music remain, but I’m switching back.

Spotify seems like a mess as a company and it keeps pushing its agenda into my listening. I don’t want to listen to audiobooks, yet I continue to have to pay for them (until this week it looks like). I don’t care for its podcasting efforts, and strongly dislike its decisions around who to give truckloads of money to. I don’t like how Spotify treats or views artists. The list sort of goes on…

From everything that I can find online, Apple Music seems to pay artists better than Spotify. It’s hard to know the specifics of these deals but most reports show Apple Music at almost double the royalty of Spotify. This is great, and likely due to Apple not needing quite as much cash since they have a nice side business. Oh and Spotify’s plan prices are increasing again, for the second time in a year, without any indication that increased revenue will go artists.

So anyways, back to Apple Music.

Interesting news from HBO and NFL Films for this upcoming season. Nick Shook writing at NFL.com:

Hard Knocks is entering new territory in 2024 with plans to document an entire division’s regular-season journey.

For the first time ever, HBO and NFL Films will follow all four teams in the AFC North for their annual Hard Knocks: In Season, aiming to chronicle the inner workings of the rough-and-tumble quartet of squads. The new episodes will feature the Baltimore Ravens, Cincinnati Bengals, Cleveland Browns and Pittsburgh Steelers, members of the first division to finish with nothing but winning records, achieved in 2023.

This is a neat idea. The in-season version of Hard Knocks hasn’t been as appealing to me as the original pre-season version. Here’s hoping for a fun division race in December so this concept works out. 🏈

The brilliant folks at Sandwich have debuted their new app for immersive video on the Vision Pro: Theater (App Store link). It’s so cool.

What was cooler this week was Sandwich live streaming The Talk Show from WWDC in spatial video. I tuned in for the first half of the show, and it was a stunning experience. I can’t wait to see more of this type of thing in the future.

This is a really nice addition to Apple Pay coming in iOS 18: users will be able to pay with Apple Pay on Windows, and in Chrome browsers. Very nice implementation. Excited to implement this for Air Mail later this year.

A thorough and beautiful post from Louie Mantia about the new “dark mode” icons available in iOS 18.

Some (seemingly) good news after the surprise announcement last week that Alamo was closing its doors here in Dallas. Alamo is such a great place, and I really hope it survives.

Casey Newton, writing at Platformer:

It was a moment that has seemed inevitable since November 2022, when ChatGPT launched and catalyzed global interest in how AI can enhance products. In the 18 months since, impatient investors have worried that Apple might be letting the moment pass it by. Savvier observers have noted that this is how Apple has worked for decades now: approaching new technologies deliberately, and on its own time; developing its distinctive take on the product; and releasing it only when polished to the company’s quality standards.

Judging from the preview, Apple Intelligence was created in just this way. The company took time to develop principles around what AI should do on its devices. It landed on a suite of AI features for the operating system, designed to make its devices more valuable by leveraging the massive amount of personalized data on your devices. (Sensitive to the implications of such an invasive technology, Apple also took pains to develop a more private approach to data processing for AI apps as well.)

The privacy-based approach to AI is such a breath of fresh air in the industry.

The headlining feature of Monday’s WWDC Keynote was clearly the introduction of “Apple Intelligence”, Apple’s newly minted name for all-things-AI at the company.

The first mention of “Artificial Intelligence” by Apple was over an hour into the keynote, when Tim Cook called the company’s initiatives “personal intelligence” and “the next big step for Apple.”

I love the framing of a “personal intelligence system”. It strikes a bold contrast between other AI tools that “use world knowledge” versus something that understands you.

Apple didn’t just roll out a bunch of models and developer jargon– they showed real features that use AI to enhance what you can do by yourself with these devices.

A few of the highlights for me were:

• Rewriting emails in Mail looks really nice. It’s very clever how you can choose from different tones when writing. (Not holding out hope here for a “passive aggressive coworker” tone. 🤣)
• Summarizing of emails in the messages list, instead of just showing the generic subject and pre-header for a mail messages is fantastic.
• “Genmoji” to create your own “emoji”-style images for messages is super cool. This is going to get a ton of usage.
• “Clean up” removes background details and people from photos. A year or so later than Google here, but a welcome addition for Photos.
• The whole concept of Private Cloud Compute is very interesting and perfect for Apple’s brand.
• The ChatGPT integration in Siri is a welcome addition, and will certainly be useful. I love how Apple is very clear before sending any data to OpenAI.

As mentioned in the keynote, I really dig how Apple Intelligence is being framed as an AI assistant that “context and meets you where you are.”

WWDC begins today and the annual keynote featuring new software updates for Apple platforms will inevitably bring a ton of new AI features. I’m sure those will be interesting, but my desires for the platforms are focused elsewhere.

Here are a few other items I’d love to see this year. First a few developer-oriented updates:

An Apple Sports API

Credit to Cihat Gündüz for this idea, but it’s a brilliant one. With Apple’s introduction of a very nice sports app earlier this year it seems that this one is within the realm of possibility. Maybe not this year, but eventually would be amazing. I’d still love to build a purpose-built sports scores app with support for a few niche features for folks like me that constantly are watching games in delay after my kids go to bed. ⚾️

System API for AI Models

Developers should not need to ship their own AI models and optimizations to use them on Apple platforms. Let’s get some first-party support for various AI models for different purposes that can be used with a simple abstracted API.

And some end-user features:

Modernize Mail’s Features

Mail.app is an amazing app, but its features still seem very dated. How about Snoozing, Sending Later, a Screener, and “better” handling of newsletters.

Instant AirDrop

AirDrop is great, when it works. Which is a rare thing for me. And even when it does work it’s incredibly slow, even for devices that are within inches of each other. I’d love to see AirDrop capable of sending a link or photo between devices within seconds, not minutes.

Working Screen Time

As noted last week, let’s focus on a Screen Time feature that actually does what it says. Or at a minimum, doesn’t allow kids to easily bypass.

Messages++

“Messages” is a great app, but compared to its modern competitors (WhatsApp, et al) it’s too simplistic. More filters, better support for SMS and green-bubble group chats would be welcome additions. How about a way to filter all of the 2FA and confirmation codes out of the conversations flow? Group chats that can be summarized by AI. Delayed sending of messages, so I don’t bother people in other time zones late at night. Drafts syncing. Typing indicators for group chats. Expiring “secure” thread. Lots of opportunity here.

Oh Siri

Siri needs a complete reboot, if not a complete rebrand too. It’s so bad, I almost never use it. And when I do and hope for the best, it rarely succeeds. Siri needs a new (likely AI/LLM-based) engine. It’s time.

Vision Pro Next Steps

I’m not sure where to go with the Vision Pro, but I’m hoping for a very nice 2.0 on visionOS.

→ See also, Michael Tsai’s excellent roundup of WWDC wish lists. I agree with all of Ryan Jones’ ideas for control center:

Hopes for a better Control Center:

1. Big clear single tap audio output
2. Pick home controls
3. Any shortcut
4. Hide less in long presses
5. Rotation lock except video
6. All buttons are customizable
7. No double button in Focus Modes
8. Mini TV Remote at first level

Looking forward to watching the keynote later today. I’ve avoided the spoilers and I’m just looking forward to enjoying the presentation.

Speaking of cool new devices, the Daylight DC-1 looks very cool as well.

Nice new app from Leica (App Store Link) with lens simulation styles. A few that are free, and a few more for an upgrade.

Transform your Apple Watch into a playful, functional handheld device that provides connectivity without distraction, encouraging you to leave your phone at home.

I don’t quite get it, but I love it. More cool hardware devices coming soon..

Joanna Stern, with another excellent piece for the Wall Street Journal. (Apple News+) This time about Apple’s Screen Time, which I’ve been trying to use successfully for years. Glad I’m not alone in this thinking.

Stern’s tweet:

Apple’s Screen Time parental controls are broken, and it feels like an afterthought for the company.

The latest example? Two security researchers have been reporting a bug to Apple since 2021 that lets kids visit blocked sites.

Only after I called did Apple say it would be fixed in the next software update.

These seem like more substantial bugs that can be easily fixed in the “next software update.”

Nick Heer summarizes the problem perfectly:

One could reasonably argue nobody should entirely depend on software to determine how devices are used by themselves or their children, but I do not think many people realistically do. It is part of a combination of factors. Screen Time should at perform the baseline functions it promises. It sucks how common problems are basically ignored until Stern writes about them.

Sean Hollister, writing at The Verge:

Before he brought VR headsets out of the dark ages with Oculus, before he got fired by Facebook following his confusing and controversial political donations, before he went on to found a defense contractor named Anduril that builds lethal drones (!), Palmer Luckey was a Nintendo Game Boy modder.

It’s true. There’s photo evidence — and today, he’s revealing his own take on the ultimate cartridge-playing Nintendo Game Boy, one that you can actually buy for $199.

This thing looks really cool. $199, and shipping by Christmas. I love the resurgence of niche and creative hardware products.