John’s Blog

Federico Viticci has dropped his amazing annual review of the new version of iOS, out this week.

Never have I been in the position to witness the company finding itself unable to ignore a major industry shift. That’s exactly what is happening with AI. As we saw back in June, Apple announced a roadmap of AI features that will be gradually doled out to users and developers over the iOS 18 cycle. Most of them won’t even be launching this year: I wouldn’t be surprised if we see them just in time before the debut of iOS 19 at WWDC 2025.

What’s even more fascinating is realizing just how much of a priority Apple Intelligence must have been for the iOS, iPadOS, and macOS teams. Let’s face it: if it weren’t for the handful of additions to iOS, which are also cross-compatible with iPadOS, I wouldn’t have much to cover today without Apple Intelligence.

Viticci’s reviews are the best. I’ve been using the betas of iOS 18 for months and I still learned a few things from this review.

M.G. Siegler, writing on his Spyglass blog:

Close your eyes for a moment. Imagine the year is 2034. Apple has just held their event to unveil the iPhone 26 and the iPhone 26 Pro and the iPhone 26 Pro Max. They are powered by the A28 and A28 Pro chips. Perhaps an A28 Turbo Bionic for the iPhone 26 Pro Max Ultra. That chip is similar to the M14, but different. All of these devices run iOS 26 featuring Apple Intelligence X. Also new this year: the AirPods 14 and the AirPods Pro 11 and the AirPods Max 7. Most of these have the H8 chip, which can run Apple Intelligence 7, but some have H7 which runs Apple Intelligence 6. And we have the Apple Watch Series 20. And the Apple Watch SE (6th generation). And the Apple Watch Max 8. These all either run on the S20 or S19 or S18 chips. And they run run watchOS 21, which features Apple Intelligence 8.

This is a joke but it also feels pretty likely to be true! And it’s illustrative of my point. It’s great that Apple has hit a groove with such wonderful products. But hit that groove enough times and it wears down and out. I’m not saying Steve Jobs would have killed the iPhone 16, I’m just saying he would have figured out a better way to package it and market it and present it.

At some point, Apple needs to stop focusing on pushing out iterative updates at marquee events that people will tire of – some already are. At the very least, they need to stop focusing on too-slick video presentations and focus on the energy of live events again. There’s a reason the Steve Jobs movie was built around three separate live events, not video demos.

M.G. is killing it on Spyglass. It’s one of my favorite daily reads. What a great take.

Monday was the annual release keynote for new iPhones by Apple. The new camera button is a great idea and looks nice.

Nilay Patel and Allison Johnson, writing about the button for The Verge:

Let’s start with Camera Control, which is a physical button — it depresses into the case ever so slightly, with additional haptic feedback from Apple’s Taptic Engine to make it feel like a chunkier click. It’s not just a shutter button, although you can use it like one and click away to fire off photos from the 48MP main camera with zero shutter lag.

The reason it’s not just a shutter button is that it’s also a multifunctional capacitive control surface. The physical button itself is ultrasensitive, so pressing it ever so lightly brings up swipe-to-zoom controls, and double-pressing it lightly brings up additional controls you can swipe between, like lens selection, exposure, and the new photo styles available on the Pro. It took me a second to determine how hard to press, but it wasn’t hard to figure out. Apple says that as part of a software update later this year, the button will get a two-stage shutter function that will allow you to lock focus and exposure.

Sounds pretty cool. Unfortunately, the trend in recent keynotes continues where the most interesting feature isn’t even launching until “later this year”.

On the presentation itself, M.G. Siegler describes the event perfectly:

It was just under 1 hour and 40 minutes – just about 100 minutes. It should have been 50 minutes. Just under one hour.

I know they could have made this happen because I watched all 100 minutes. Pretty much every single segment was too long.3 But the real soul sucker was what I called the “Previously, on WWDC” segment. Essentially, Apple went over every Apple Intelligence feature already announced – and still not ready yet, by the way – at WWDC a few months ago. Apple often reiterates what was announced at an earlier event, but not like this. Again, for features that are still weeks, if not months away. It felt like it was too geared towards Wall Street. Or perhaps would-be Google Pixel or Samsung Galaxy buyers – “don’t worry, we have AI too!”

Earlier this month Google announced, among other things, its Pixel 9 phones lineup. One of the new AI features is the ability to “reimagine” your photos with AI. Super interesting and kind of creepy. (Sounds like a Google product launch to me.)

Chris Welch, posting on Threads, has a fascinating look at some of the output of this feature:

The “Reimagine” feature on Google’s new Pixel 9 lineup is incredible. It’s so impressive that testing it has left me feeling uneasy on multiple occasions.

With a simple prompt, you can add things to photos that were never there. And the company’s Gemini AI makes it look astonishingly realistic. This all happens right from the phone’s default photo editor app. In about five seconds.

Are we ready to go down this path? Now that the embargo has lifted, let me show you some examples. Buckle up

Fun baseball story happening today. Lauren Merola, for The Athletic:

Danny Jansen will become the first player in MLB history to play for both teams in the same game when the Boston Red Sox and Toronto Blue Jays resume a June 26 game on Monday afternoon.

Back in June, Jansen was playing for the Blue Jays. When the rain delay was called, Jansen was at the plate with one out and one on in the top of the second. After a near two-hour delay, the Red Sox and Blue Jays said the game would resume in a doubleheader on Aug. 26.

For the last two months, the box score of that game said Jansen is still batting.

With the game scheduled to resume post-trade deadline, Jansen was traded for the first time in his career — to the team the Blue Jays were playing that June 26 night.

The prompts used to handle Apple Intelligence features in the current betas for iOS were found by a clever redditor and transcribed by MacRumors:

You are an assistant which helps the user respond to their mails. Given a mail, a draft response is initially provided based on a short reply snippet. In order to make the draft response nicer and complete, a set of question and its answer are provided. Please write a concise and natural reply by modifying the draft response to incorporate the given questions and their answers. Please limit the reply within 50 words. Do not hallucinate. Do not make up factual information.

These are so funny and an insight into how modern AI software works. (Emphasis above is mine.) The LLMs used for Apple Intelligence don’t take inputs like normal software, instead they just want to chit chat. And they need to be told to not make stuff up.

I’ve been a daily reader of the Reliable Sources newsletter, started by Brian Stelter and until recently written by Oliver Darcy, for many years now. It was a great daily overview of the happenings in media, culture, and politics.

Darcy has left CNN and is starting his own subscription service, called Status. It picks up right where Darcy left off with Reliable Sources. Well sourced, brilliantly edited, and thoughtfully designed.

Signed up. I love seeing writers and journalists owning their content and building their own platforms.

Happy Saturday. It’s entirely too hot here in Texas. The kids are back in school. I’ve rounded third base and I’m approaching the launch of a major new app build that’s taking all of my time and energy! More on that another time, but it’s been a busy week elsewhere. Here’s a roundup of a few links from the week…

Google’s Pixel 9 Phones

Nice updates and announcements from Google this week on its Pixel lineup. The Gemini Live AI assistant looks really cool. Will anyone buy the foldable phone? Probably not.

Neuecast

A delightful and thoughtfully designed new podcast app. I don’t mind the new Overcast update as much as some people do, so it’s still my default. But love seeing new entrants into the podcast player market. Especially with this nice of a design.

Unread for Mac

Speaking of new apps, Unread for the Mac is here and it’s lovely. I’m giving it a spin this week. I still love my NetNewsWire, but the design and typography of Unread are so well done.

Structured Outputs in OpenAI API

This is a very welcome update. We’ve been twisting ourselves into knots sometimes to format JSON output from the ChatGPT API into a specific format for consumption by our apps.

Making the case for Apple to buy WBD

M.G. Siegler, continuing to make his case that Apple should and could buy Warner Bros. Discovery. Apple TV+ has become my goto streaming service lately. Its hit-to-miss ratio is very high and is reminiscent of the great Richard Plepler era of HBO. Apple has proven themselves a worthy producer of video content, I’m all for this.

A Roundup of My Favorite Bartender Alternatives

This link is from earlier in the summer, but I missed the news that Bartender was silently acquired in a less than trustworthy way. Nice roundup by Niléane for Macstories of a bunch of worth alternatives. I’m trying out Hidden Bar and it seems like a simple and worthy replacement. And it’s completely open source.

☀️🎸

Major new launch for the Campsite team yesterday.

Brian Lovin, CEO and co-founder, of Campsite posted some updates on Product Hunt:

We started Campsite in 2022 to help designers share work in progress, but along the way, we ended up building an entirely new (and better!) way for teams to collaborate. This year, we went heads-down to build everything we needed to simplify our entire communication stack (we no longer use Slack, Notion, and Zoom).

Campsite combines posts, calls, docs, and chat into one app so your team can move faster and stay focused. It’s a refreshingly new way to work, where all of your team communication happens in one place and is easy to share or find later.

We’ve been giving Campsite a spin on a new venture, and it’s incredibly well done. I’ve been watching this app for a while and wasn’t quite right for what I needed, but giving it a second look now. I love the idea of being able to streamline tools into one. Ambitious and very well designed. Brilliant work.

David McCabe, reporting for the New York Times:

Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in online search, a federal judge ruled on Monday, a landmark decision that strikes at the power of tech giants in the modern internet era and that may fundamentally alter the way they do business.

Judge Amit P. Mehta of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said in a 277-page ruling that Google had abused a monopoly over the search business. The Justice Department and states had sued Google, accusing it of illegally cementing its dominance, in part, by paying other companies, like Apple and Samsung, billions of dollars a year to have Google automatically handle search queries on their smartphones and web browsers.

“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Judge Mehta said in his ruling.

John Gruber writes at Daring Fireball why this is happening:

It’s worth a reminder that under U.S. antitrust law, having a monopoly is not in and of itself illegal. It’s just that monopolies must operate under different rules, and Mehta has ruled that Google broke (and continues now to break) those rules.

Back to McCabe, noting how Google’s legal team is going to appeal, but was somehow proud that the judge acknowledged that Google search is the best product on the market:

Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, said the company would appeal the ruling.

“This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available,” he said. “As this process continues, we will remain focused on making products that people find helpful and easy to use.”

What happens when a monopoly is actually the best product on the market? Surely most consumers would actively choose Google when given a choice over other competitors. There are more quality search competitors now than in decades, among them DuckDuckGo, Kagi, and of course potential offerings from OpenAI as well. But how many people in the general internet-using public are even aware of these?

It will be very interesting to see where this ends up once the remedies are outlined. If nothing else, I do hope that Apple will relax its stance on allowing for custom search engines within Safari.

Kevin Roose, for the New York Times:

A month ago, if you had asked me which tech platforms would play a major role in the 2024 presidential campaign, I might have said TikTok or Facebook. I might have said YouTube. I may have even theorized that X would still play a role despite its hard-right turn under Elon Musk’s ownership.

What I wouldn’t have guessed is that this year’s breakout campaign tech would be Zoom — the unassuming videoconferencing app made famous during the pandemic and kept aloft since then by legions of remote workers dialing into meetings.

I’ve seen a number of these stories over the past week, here’s another from Bloomberg. The Zoom rally phenomenon is fascinating to me how easily it is catching on, much like Zoom-ing in the early days of Covid. I imagine there’s a large segment of the voting population that would never consider going to an in-person political rally, count me among them. But joining a quick session via Zoom, like we all do at work dozens of times as week? Not as far fetched.

The engineers at Zoom must be having fun with this one too:

Some of these rallies have been so popular that they strained Zoom’s technical limits. One meeting, “White Women: Answer the Call 2024,” ground to a halt when more than 100,000 people logged on, exceeding the cap for even the largest corporate Zoom accounts.

Speaking of animations, this post by Benji Taylor about the Family app is so great. The app is super fluid and friendly, and it’s fun to see how it all was imagined.

Emil Kowalski, with a lovely post on animations on the web and elsewhere in design:

Great animations are hard, as there are many aspects to consider. From easing and timing to accessibility and performance. This post is a collection of principles that, in my opinion, make animations great.

I love Emil’s work, and am excited to check out his upcoming Animations on the Web course.

It’s been a tough stretch for the Orioles lately, but Jackson Holliday is back in the show and making an impact this time:

MLB Pipeline’s No. 1 overall prospect announced his return to the Majors with a Statcast-projected 439-foot slam in the fifth inning of Baltimore’s 10-4 win in the series finale vs. Toronto at Camden Yards. Holliday belted an 0-2 slider from Blue Jays right-hander Yerry Rodríguez, with the ball leaving the bat at 109.2 mph.

Happy Saturday. It’s been an eventful few weeks in the world, and in my life. Traveling back from the Air Mail HQ in NYC this morning and catching up on some interesting links of note…

Fortnite Coming to AltStore

It is super interesting that Fortnite, one of the biggest and highest profile games in the world today, is not in the App Store, but is soon going to be in an independent app store run by a team of two indie developers. Wild.

Runway Ripped Off YouTube Creators

The source material for AI models continues to be problematic. And the ability of these AI CEOs to avoid telling the truth about what they are doing is astonishing. Big props to Samantha Cole and 404 Media for this piece.

OpenAI announces SearchGPT

In other AI news, OpenAI is coming for you Google. The rapid pace of new products and ideas coming out of OpenAI is impressive. (Alas, we don’t have full transparency on its training data either.)

Google Is the Only Search Engine That Works with Reddit

Another interesting wrinkle in the future of search: exclusive indexing deals? This is a strange one. I do not like the precedent of sites inking deals with search engines to index their content. It completely contradicts decades of history of how the web works.

Zuck: Open Source AI Is the Path Forward

Last but not least, Mark Zuckerberg argues in favor of an “open” source approach to AI models. I put “open” in quotes, because this is not an open-sourced code structure. The model weights are open, but the training set and inputs are not. (I like how Ben Thompson calls this an “open weights” model.) Still, I like this approach and find myself agreeing more and more with Zuckerberg lately.

A very nice and snappy new update for Overcast, out today, on the 10th anniversary of the app’s launch.

Marco Arment, writing about the updates:

Most of Overcast’s core code was 10 years old, which made it cumbersome or impossible to easily move with the times, adopt new iOS functionality, or add new features, especially as one person. […]

For Overcast to have a future, it needed a modern foundation for its second decade. I’ve spent the past 18 months rebuilding most of the app with Swift, SwiftUI, Blackbird, and modern Swift concurrency.

Such a great app. Glad it’s ready for the next decade.

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)