John’s Blog

Ben Southwood, writing in the new Works in Progress magazine:

Once, small firms centred on inventors were responsible for most of our innovation. Larger firms might buy or exploit these steps forwards, but they did not typically make them. And then for a brief period, this changed: many of the best new products, tools, and ideas came from research labs within large corporations. This brief period also happened to be the era when scientific, technological, and economic productivity sped forward at its fastest ever clip. Yet almost as soon as it arrived, the fruitful period was over and we returned to a situation where small companies and small-business-like teams at universities developed innovations outside of large companies and sold them in a market for ideas. Though we might enjoy the innovation created by small flexible firms, we should not dismiss the contributions made by large corporate labs.

Jacob Kastrenakes, reporting for The Verge:

Mozilla is laying off 250 people, about a quarter of its workforce, and plans to refocus some teams on projects designed to make money. The company will have roughly 750 employees going forward, a spokesperson confirmed.

[..] Mozilla makes most of its money from companies paying to make their search engine the default in Firefox. This includes deals with Baidu in China, Yandex in Russia, and most notably, Google in the US and most of the rest of the world. The company also makes money from royalties, subscriptions, and advertising, but those search deals still represent the “majority” of its revenue.

Tough news for Mozilla. They really do incredible work for the web community. It seems like the MDN, Firefox DevTools, and many other services will have little or no staffing to support the offerings.

The community has put together a few nice resources and tributes to the Mozilla team:

• Mozilla Lifeboat
• Thank You MDN

Here’s hoping that Mozilla gets its act together, and can be a long-term player on the web like they’ve always been. 🙏

Nathan J. Robinson, Editor in Chief of Current Affairs:

Paywalls are justified, even though they are annoying. It costs money to produce good writing, to run a website, to license photographs. A lot of money, if you want quality. Asking people for a fee to access content is therefore very reasonable. You don't expect to get a print subscription to the newspaper gratis, why would a website be different? I try not to grumble about having to pay for online content, because I run a magazine and I know how difficult it is to pay writers what they deserve.

But let us also notice something: the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New Republic, New York, Harper's, the New York Review of Books, the Financial Times, and the London Times all have paywalls. Breitbart, Fox News, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, the Washington Examiner, InfoWars: free! You want "Portland Protesters Burn Bibles, American Flags In The Streets," "The Moral Case Against Mask Mandates And Other COVID Restrictions," or an article suggesting the National Institutes of Health has admitted 5G phones cause coronavirus—they're yours. You want the detailed Times reports on neo-Nazis infiltrating German institutions, the reasons contact tracing is failing in U.S. states, or the Trump administration's undercutting of the USPS's effectiveness–well, if you've clicked around the website a bit you'll run straight into the paywall. This doesn't mean the paywall shouldn't be there. But it does mean that it costs time and money to access a lot of true and important information, while a lot of bullshit is completely free.

Excellent piece.

Via Kottke & Daring Fireball

Yesterday’s Twitter hack was pretty incredible. Nick Statt, with the high-level at The Verge:

The Twitter accounts of major companies and individuals have been compromised in one of the most widespread and confounding hacks the platform has ever seen, all in service of promoting a bitcoin scam that appears to be earning its creators quite a bit of money.

We don’t know how the hack happened or even to what extent Twitter’s own systems may have been compromised — but following the unprecedented hacks of accounts including President Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Kanye West, Michael Bloomberg, and Apple, Twitter has confirmed it took the drastic step of blocking new tweets from every verified user, compromised or no, as well as locking all compromised accounts.

According to @TwitterSupport:

We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools.

We know they used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweet on their behalf. We’re looking into what other malicious activity they may have conducted or information they may have accessed and will share more here as we have it.

If you’re going to pull off a hack of this magnitude, why waste it on a bogus scheme to make some Bitcoin? Let’s be thankful this wasn’t some crazy election night attack that resulted in a real problem. It looks like the hackers made off with around $116k. Compared to the number of very influential people that were hacked, this hardly seems worth the effort. Let’s hope Twitter has this buttoned up quickly and it can’t be done again.

Gov. Greg Abbott issued a statewide mask mandate Thursday as Texas scrambles to get its coronavirus surge under control.

The order requires Texans living in counties more than 20 coronavirus cases to wear a face covering over the nose and mouth while in a business or other building open to the public, as well as outdoor public spaces, whenever social distancing is not possible. But it provides several exceptions, including for children who are younger than 10 years old, people who have a medical condition that prevents them from wearing a mask, people who are eating or drinking, and people who are exercising outdoors.

Finally.

Let’s hope this gets things going in the right direction here in Texas.

Nice recap video from Apple, narrated by Serenity Caldwell:

I think the first day of virtual WWDC went very well yesterday. The keynote was jam packed with great new things and the format was well done, considering the circumstances. The introduction section with Tim Cook, addressing the concerns of the world in 2020, was nicely done as well.

Speaking of WWDC, it starts in just over an hour. I’m sad I won’t be there this year — but neither will anyone else! Hopefully by next year we’ll be back to a normal conference schedule.

Last year John Sundell published a fantastic and comprehensive site full of goodies about WWDC, and he’s doing it again this year. It’s a great resource to follow along throughout and after the week’s events.

Just in time before the start of WWDC today, it looks like there is a nice resolution between Basecamp and Apple.

Jason Fried:

So we got down to it, and worked the weekend to get an update on Apple's desk Monday morning. Our team did a great job implementing the product changes that Schiller asked for, and first thing this morning, right after we shipped 1.0.2 to our customers, we submitted 1.0.3 to the App Store for approval.

This new version introduces a new free option for the iOS app. Now users can sign up directly in-app for a free, temporary, randomized @hey.com email address that works for 14 days. Think of it like a temporary SIM card you buy when traveling. Or for when you don't want to give out your real email address, like a short term "for sale" listing, like Craigslist does it.

We've also accelerated our multi-user HEY for Work offering where the company pays but the employees don't. This brings HEY in line with Basecamp, and dozens of other high profile multi-platform enterprise offerings that have been permitted in the App Store for a decade.

I suspect this isn't the last we'll hear of this issue, but it's great to see a peaceful resolution between my two favorite companies. ❤️

This response by Jason Fried to Apple on why they don't want to use In App Purchase is pure gold. He's 100% spot on, and anyone that has run a subscription business knows these truths well.

When Apple forces companies to offer In App Purchases in order to be on their platform, they also dictate the limits to which you can help your customer. This has a detrimental impact on the customer experience, and your relationship with your customer. It can flat out ruin an interaction, damage your reputation, and it can literally cost you customers. It prevents us from providing exceptional customer service when someone who uses our product needs help.

[…]

For example, at Basecamp we help people for all sorts of reasons. We apply credit to accounts for all sorts of reasons. We provide hardship exceptions for all sorts of reasons. We discount our software for teachers. We provide free versions for first responders. We extend trials for those who need more time. We extend payment terms occasionally for those who can't make ends meet this month. We make exceptions because people are exceptional. We take enormous pride in helping people out. And we're damn good at it.

If we had to push our customers through Apple's system, we couldn't do any of that. Apple's rules prevent us from servicing our customers, yet Apple gives us no choice but to submit to those onerous rules or not be represented on their platform. That's flat out hostile - to us, to our customers, and to the community.

The whole piece is wonderful.

There's a mess brewing between Apple and third-party developers again. I sure hope that this issue doesn't overshadow the launch of Hey, about which I'm very excited, but it's hard to not focus on it today.

Yesterday, on Twitter, David Heinemeier Hansson posted this note:

Wow. I'm literally stunned. Apple just doubled down on their rejection of HEY's ability to provide bug fixes and new features, unless we submit to their outrageous demand of 15-30% of our revenue. Even worse: We're told that unless we comply, they'll REMOVE THE APP.

This is a really bad look for Apple. The Hey app is free in the store, and does not mention how to sign up or offer any other option to sign up for the service. It's just an app for existing members to use. Just like Slack, Gmail, Basecamp itself, and countless others.

Reporting at Protocol, David Pierce has the full story:

On Tuesday afternoon, Apple sent Basecamp a slightly softer written notice. "We noticed that your app allows customers to access content, subscriptions, or features they have purchased elsewhere, but those items were not available as in-app purchases within the app," it said. Because Hey didn't qualify as a "Reader" app, Apple said that existing subscribers could log in as normal but Hey needed to make all subscriptions available to new users as in-app purchases.

Apple told me that its actual mistake was approving the app in the first place, when it didn't conform to its guidelines. Apple allows these kinds of client apps — where you can't sign up, only sign in — for business services but not consumer products. That's why Basecamp, which companies typically pay for, is allowed on the App Store when Hey, which users pay for, isn't. Anyone who purchased Hey from elsewhere could access it on iOS as usual, the company said, but the app must have a way for users to sign up and pay through Apple's infrastructure. That's how Apple supports and pays for its work on the platform.

John Gruber chimes in with an excellent response:

[H]ow could such a distinction be made in writing? There are some apps that are definitely "business services" and some that are definitely "consumer products" (games for example), but to say that the area in between encompasses many shades of gray is an understatement. The entire mobile era of computing — an era which Apple itself has inarguably largely defined — is about the obliteration of distinct lines between business and consumer products.

Let's hope Apple fixes this quickly. It's a ridiculous decision that's only going to cause further problems down the road. If they wanted to instate a new policy, they picked the wrong independent company to bully around. I'm sure DHH won't go down quietly.

This week is the official launch of Hey.com, the new e-mail service from the folks at Basecamp. I haven’t been this excited about e-mail since Gmail launched over 15 years ago. (Remember how cool it was that they offered 1GB of storage, and didn’t force you to put things in folders?) The thinking behind Hey is nothing less than you’d expect from the Basecamp team. They didn’t just create a new e-mail client. They rethought everything about how e-mail works and what it should be in 2020. Some of the highlights from the tour on Hey.com:

1. Screening of e-mails and senders, just like incoming phone calls.
2. Renaming subject lines and grouping related threads together to keep things organized.
3. Surfacing all files that have been received and sent in one simple file browser. Hallelujah.
4. No push notifications, unless you opt-in.
5. A first-party way to reply to something later. Perfectly suited towards organizing and prioritizing your replies.
6. A “paper trail” section to keep all receipts. Brilliant.
7. A single page readable view for newsletters.
8. A way to add notes and reminders for yourself inline with your e-mails.
9. Safe image loading through a proxy on Hey’s servers, and automatic spy pixel blocking.

On the interface design front, there are some very nice patterns  here too. Everything is super fast. There are keyboard shortcuts for (nearly?) everything you see. The interface is clearly designed to be useful and get out of your way. It looks lovely. Hey is a very opinionated product. It’s not going to be for everyone. That’s by design, and the product is better for it. Last but not least, I love the video tour that’s posted on Basecamp’s YouTube page. It’s just Jason Fried walking you through the features of Hey while sharing his screen. No frills, no super polished animations or faceless voiceovers. Just the creator of the product telling you about how it works and why they made the decisions they did. Everything about this product is completely refreshing.

Today’s episode of “The Daily” was a great update on the virus featuring Donald G. McNeil Jr. In short: states that were initially hit hard with the virus are seeing improvements, where states that didn’t have as many cases early on are now surging. Especially in areas like Florida and Texas.

Anecdotally, here in Texas, people seem to have forgotten that there ever was a virus and are pretending like it no longer exists. I was talking with someone yesterday who scoffed at the word COVID. “Oh that’s over”, he said.

Nice interview here by Dan Buettner with Dr. Michael Osterholm:

In short, Dr. Osterholm is arguably one of the most dependable, non-political sources for straight answers on what COVID-19 means to us and our world in the immediate future. In his 2017 book, Deadliest Enemy, he correctly foretells a global pandemic and offers the best strategy for fighting it now and avoiding it in the future. Here are the highlights of our conversation. But if you really want to understand this disease, read the whole interview.  This disease may be the biggest event of our lifetimes.

This thing isn’t over, and it’s only getting worse. A good reminder to keep vigilant.

Great message from Marques, aka MKBHD, on YouTube.

...I want to try to be something to look up to for kids like the 15 year old me. To kids that want to be able to look at a high level of something and see someone that looks like them, making the right choices, and finding success.

He also links to Neil deGrasse Tyson’s post of the same name.

There’s exceptionally hard work ahead. I recognize this work has been happening for years, often ignored or unappreciated by many people, including me. How frustrating it must be to work so hard, and see such little progress, on something so elemental. Change will require a massive, sustained effort by millions over many years. A change in perspective, mindset, and approach. And that work will certainly be met with future setbacks, which is why change requires optimism, too (which is in short supply in moments like these). I hope we can find it, and support those who need it. I’ll be working to educate myself, and break my own patterns of ignorance. This sense of urgency is, embarrassingly, new to me, so I have a lot to learn – which organizations to support, what books to read, what history to absorb, and who to listen to. I’m starting on that today. If you’re like me, I hope you’ll do the same.