John’s Blog

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.

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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. 🌧️

Today is the start of the 2024 Formula 1 season. My football posting around here is going to quickly turn into racing discussion. (And, soon enough, baseball.) Like many Americans, I found a love for F1 during the early days of Covid through Drive to Survive. I never would have predicted this, but it’s surpassed the NFL as my favorite thing to watch.

F1 has no shortage of drama and story lines. The personalities are huge. The competition is fierce and often cut-throat. But there’s a class and charm to it that I  find missing in the American sports leagues.

Plus, I’m a nerd at heart and I absolutely love the engineering side of the sport. Unlike most other motorsports, F1 teams must design and build their own cars from scratch. There’s so much involved in designing a car from the floor to the wings to the engine itself. These are custom built rocket ships on wheels.

If you haven’t given Formula 1 a chance, it’s worth your time. Lights out, and away we go! 🏎️

Peter King is retiring and has posted his final column on NBC Sports. King is a legend in this business and he’ll be sorely missed. I’ve read his column every Monday morning for as long as I can remember.¹ He’s one of my favorite writers and thinkers in any industry, and top of the list in sports coverage. A complete class act all the way around.

King even linked to Air Mail once in his column in 2021 to a piece we published about The Office. Pretty cool, even though he complained about too many ads (I don’t disagree, Peter.) ↩

Apple has released a new app, simply called Apple Sports. This is a really interesting one to me. I have started building this exact app more than a few times but I always run into the insane cost of sports data feeds, especially for anything close to real time.

Displaying the sports data is certainly simpler than sourcing all of the content. A five-figure (per league, per season) fee for sports data is nothing to Apple, but very cost prohibitive for an indie developer.

I’ve always wanted a very simple app to quickly check game times and scores. ESPN and others have become so bloated with features, ads, videos, and other junk that they have become significantly less useful for me.

I love the simplicity of this app, and now I don’t need to build it myself. 😆

Sora is OpenAI’s new prototype for generating video. In simplistic terms, it is DALL·E for video. But clearly so much more. The research write-up is fascinating.

The video demos in here are astounding, especially for what seems like an early prototype of the idea.

Manton Reece, with a new feature for Micro.blog:

Today we’re launching a major new feature for Micro.blog Premium subscribers. Micro.blog notes are a new way to save content in Micro.blog when you don’t want to use a blog post or draft. Notes are private by default, end-to-end encrypted across all platforms, with a special companion app named Strata for iOS.

This is interesting for a few reasons. First, I just love how the Micro.blog platform is continuously improved and extended in ways I wouldn’t have predicted. I’m not a heavy user of the platform, but I really do love that it exists and seems to be growing well. Manton and crew are a breath of fresh air in a VC dominated software world.

Second, the end-to-end encryption feature is very cool. I was poking around in the source and they are just using standard encryption features built into the browser. The notes never leave your browser without being encrypted.

I was working on a similar feature a few years ago and we gave up at the time due some browser restrictions, so it’s nice to see those resolved and this is a viable solution.

The Vision Pro is insanely ambitious. Yes, it’s heavy, and the glass is fragile, and that tethered battery might get annoying. But Apple has managed to pack the power of a Mac, plus the performance of a new dedicated AR chip, into a computer that you can wear on your face.

The amount of tech and engineering packed into this device is incredible.