John’s Blog

Amy X. Wang for Rolling Stone:

In the first media visit Apple has ever allowed to its under-the-radar Music Apps studio, the team of engineers showed Rolling Stone how the creation process for Garageband's two types of sounds – synthetic and "real" – can span weeks or sometimes months per instrument, with new hurdles at every turn. Synthesized sounds (i.e. the type of obviously artificial notes often heard in EDM) are made from code and tweaked by code; "real" sounds have to be recorded in a drop-dead-silent studio setting, dozens of times, then pieced together like patchwork to form single perfect notes, one by one.

Some instruments are extra excruciating. In the digital reproduction of an American upright bass, a player in the studio plucks a string, holds his breath for seven seconds to ensure there's no extra noise on the recording whatsoever as the note shivers into the air (engineers have custom-coded an app to time the duration precisely), and repeats the endeavor at different finger positions, volumes and pressures, day in and day out. After wheeling each of the cavalcade of instruments out of the studio, the team pores over the hundreds of recordings to pick out the best. When adding a suite of East Asian instruments in a recent product update, the engineers consulted with designers across the world to pick out the specific color of wood and font of a poem that would make a Chinese guzheng appear the most authentic. Engineers also constantly browse music-making forums for complaints, suggestions and thoughts on what to tweak next.

It's truly amazing that Apple spends so much time and effort on a free app.

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Warren Buffett's annual letter to shareholders (PDF) of Berkshire Hathaway was published this weekend. It's always a great read and a fascinating look at one of the world's most successful companies. More importantly it gives some insight into how the company thinks and how the leadership views the larger financial world.

Here are some of my favorite lines:

Berkshire will forever remain a financial fortress. In managing, I will make expensive mistakes of commission and will also miss many opportunities, some of which should have been obvious to me. At times, our stock will tumble as investors flee from equities. But I will never risk getting caught short of cash.

On debt (emphasis mine):

We use debt sparingly. Many managers, it should be noted, will disagree with this policy, arguing that significant debt juices the returns for equity owners. And these more venturesome CEOs will be right most of the time.

At rare and unpredictable intervals, however, credit vanishes and debt becomes financially fatal. A Russian- roulette equation – usually win, occasionally die – may make financial sense for someone who gets a piece of a company's upside but does not share in its downside. But that strategy would be madness for Berkshire. Rational people don't risk what they have and need for what they don't have and don't need.

Sounds like some great personal advice as well.

On long-term optimism and belief in the American economy and prosperity:

Our country's almost unbelievable prosperity has been gained in a bipartisan manner. Since 1942, we have had seven Republican presidents and seven Democrats. In the years they served, the country contended at various times with a long period of viral inflation, a 21% prime rate, several controversial and costly wars, the resignation of a president, a pervasive collapse in home values, a paralyzing financial panic and a host of other problems. All engendered scary headlines; all are now history.

There are also many other countries around the world that have bright futures. About that, we should rejoice: Americans will be both more prosperous and safer if all nations thrive. At Berkshire, we hope to invest significant sums across borders.

All of the annual letters starting from 1977 are available online as well.

I’m thrilled to announce a new venture I have been working on for a good part of the past year: It’s called Air Mail. Air Mail is a weekly publication covering the world of politics, business, arts, travel, and much more. Each Saturday we’ll be sending out an email newsletter at precisely 6am Eastern Time with highlights of the week’s stories. Behind the newsletter is a website containing the full complement of articles and shorter pieces for the week.

We’ve published a few beta issues internally thus far and the goal is to launch to the public starting this summer. The writing and editorial work that is going into this is phenomenal. My friends Graydon Carter and Alessandra Stanley are two of the most wonderful people you will ever meet and their work is second to none.

Air Mail’s branding and style pays homage to a bygone era of postal service design with strong reds, blues, and imagery from when air travel was considered new and thrilling.

On the technology side we have created a publishing platform that is designed for the modern web and the world of mobile devices. This technology will allow our small team to manage everything that goes into publishing a weekly issue including copy editing, photo rights management, editorial approvals, and the layout of the issue itself. We’ll also begin taking subscriptions later this year so a full suite of billing features is also in place. I’ll go into some more detail in future posts about this platform. I’m very excited about it.

Air Mail was officially announced in The New York Times a few weeks ago and we’ve started taking signups on our website. There is a lot to be done before we’re ready to start publishing, but we’re well on our way. I’m looking forward to sharing more about the work soon, but for now, it’s just a ‘coming soon’ announcement. If you’re interested, you can sign up to receive the first few issues for free once they are ready for the world to see.

Craig Mod, with an excellent piece about email newsletters:

Newsletters and newsletter startups these days are like mushrooms in an open field after a good spring rain. I don’t know a single writer who isn’t newslettering or newsletter-curious, and for many, the newsletter is where they’re doing their finest public work.

His new newsletter is called Ridgeline and it’s wonderful.

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Benjamin Mullin, Lukas I. Alpert and Tripp Mickle, for The Wall Street Journal:

In its pitch to some news organizations, the Cupertino, Calif., company has said it would keep about half of the subscription revenue from the service, the people said. The service, described by industry executives as a "Netflix for news," would allow users to read an unlimited amount of content from participating publishers for a monthly fee. It is expected to launch later this year as a paid tier of the Apple News app, the people said.

The rest of the revenue would go into a pool that would be divided among publishers according to the amount of time users spend engaged with their articles, the people said. Representatives from Apple have told publishers that the subscription service could be priced at about $10 a month, similar to Apple's streaming music service, but the final price could change, some of the people said.

I’ve been spending a lot of my time lately working in and around the publishing industry. As a whole the industry's concerns are almost always tied to declining revenue, legacy high-costs, and therefore reduced or non-existent profits. I find it difficult to believe that any publisher is willing to take a 50% cut on revenue. Apple would need to deliver a massive upswing in subscribers for this to even be a conversation.

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Frank Bruni, with a nice piece about Tony Romo ahead of tonight's Super Bowl:

Romo, 38, previously spent more than a decade as a quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys. He was great but he wasn't great, and with him as its leader, the team never went all the way. In a twist that's testament to second acts in American lives, he's doing something as a star for CBS that he never did as a star for the Cowboys: going to the Super Bowl. I suppose that's fitting, because he's more than great in his current gig. He's peerless. And he's a sensation.

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Speaking of Jack Dorsey, it looks like he is making the PR rounds this week. He’s also featured in a nice piece at Rolling Stone.

I liked this bit where he responds to Seth Rogen’s concern that racists were being verified on Twitter:

That was heartbreaking. I DM’d him, and we got on the phone together. He said to me, “I’m surprised at myself for not hanging up…But I think you have the right intent. But you all are terrible communicators.” I agree, we have been bad at communication, we haven’t been as forthright as we need to, we certainly haven’t been as transparent. We do care deeply. But we need to do it in scalable ways. This work doesn’t happen overnight.

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I really enjoyed this interview with Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, by Bill Simmons. Twitter is still a fascinating company to me despite its problems. Bill Simmons pulls no punches asking tough questions about harassment, Twitter’s role in politics, Trump, and controversial features like editing tweets.

There’s also a nice trip down memory lane with discussion of Twitter’s early days and how it came to be. (I remember vividly using the text message version of Twitter at SXSW in 2007. A simpler time.)

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Slack:

Today we’re launching a new logo, as we start to refresh our look in general. We loved our old logo, and look, and know many felt the same. And yet, here we are to explain why we decided to evolve it.

The design work was done by Pentagram.

Change is hard, and I’ve been so used to seeing the familiar Slack icon for years that this will take some getting used to. The logo itself doesn’t bother me near as much as the awful dark purple background behind it.

Related:

• Pentagram’s ‘Range of Possibilities’ for Slack by John Gruber

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Great new update to the app I spend more time using than anything else.

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It has been an interesting couple of months in the open source software licensing world. A few weeks ago, there was some controversy over Facebook’s use of a BSD + Patents license on its open source contributions. While this patent grant was not new, it has gained some publicity over its use as applied to React.

Adam Wolff at Facebook tried to clarify the issue a few weeks ago:

As our business has become successful, we’ve become a larger target for meritless patent litigation. This type of litigation can be extremely costly in terms of both resources and attention. It would have been easy for us to stop contributing to open source, or to do what some other large companies do and only release software that isn’t used in our most successful products, but we decided to take a different approach. We decided to add a clear patent grant when we release software under the 3-clause BSD license, creating what has come to be known as the BSD + Patents license. The patent grant says that if you’re going to use the software we’ve released under it, you lose the patent license from us if you sue us for patent infringement. We believe that if this license were widely adopted, it could actually reduce meritless litigation for all adopters, and we want to work with others to explore this possibility.

It seems reasonable when explained this way, but that didn’t stop many organizations from removing React from their future product development roadmaps.

Matt Mullenweg wrote about how the Wordpress team would no longer use React for its new ventures:

We had a many-thousand word announcement talking about how great React is and how we’re officially adopting it for WordPress, and encouraging plugins to do the same. I’ve been sitting on that post, hoping that the patent issue would be resolved in a way we were comfortable passing down to our users.

That post won’t be published, and instead I’m here to say that the Gutenberg team is going to take a step back and rewrite Gutenberg using a different library. It will likely delay Gutenberg at least a few weeks, and may push the release into next year.

Then, last week Facebook released another update changing the license for React and other projects to the MIT license starting this week:

Next week, we are going to relicense our open source projects React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js under the MIT license. We’re relicensing these projects because React is the foundation of a broad ecosystem of open source software for the web, and we don’t want to hold back forward progress for nontechnical reasons.

This is great news. I think the entire community was very surprised to see this change. This is a credit to the way the open source community should work, and it’s wonderful to see that Facebook is willing to be open minded and participate in what’s best for the community.

I spend a lot of time working on React-based projects for startups and larger companies so I’m happy to see that this should no longer be an issue.

Dan Frommer of Recode took some photos from the first keynote at Apple Park this week. Beautiful.

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After yesterday’s announcement of the new iPhone X, Apple posted some new Fall “WWDC” videos about how to design and build apps for the new phone.

The Human Interface Guidelines have also been updated:

Avoid explicitly placing interactive controls at the very bottom of the screen and in corners. People use swipe gestures at the bottom edge of the display to access the Home screen and app switcher, and these gestures may cancel custom gestures you implement in this area. The far corners of the screen can be difficult areas for people to reach comfortably.

Don’t mask or call special attention to key display features. Don’t attempt to hide the device’s rounded corners, sensor housing, or indicator for accessing the Home screen by placing black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. Don’t use visual adornments like brackets, bezels, shapes, or instructional text to call special attention to these areas either.

Allow auto-hiding of the indicator for accessing the Home screen sparingly. When auto-hiding is enabled, the indicator fades out if the user hasn’t touched the screen for a few seconds. It reappears when the user touches the screen again. This behavior should be enabled only for passive viewing experiences like playing videos or photo slideshows.

The UI Design Resources have also been updated to include a Sketch file (or Photoshop if that’s your thing) with all of the new UI components for iPhone X.

Michael Tsai:

Assuming that any app could use subscriptions without restrictions, what would that mean? Subscriptions are definitely controversial. Customers generally don’t like them, though they may end up being the least bad option. One issue is the loss of control. It feels better to look at what’s in a new version and decide whether it’s worth it, rather than keep paying just to keep using what you already have. However, the trend is clearly toward everyone running the latest version, rather than supporting old versions. Simply maintaining an app takes work, and it makes sense for payments to reflect that. The other main issue is the overall cost. Subscriptions can really add up, and people will need to think more carefully about budgeting and saving in order to maintain access to key apps if their circumstances change.

I agree with his point about customers not liking to pay for what they already have. Paul Haddad, of Tapbots, makes a great point:

I’d probably be fine with a subscription model, if they degraded nicely. Stop paying, app still works but no more upgrades. That seems fair.

Glenn Fleishman, in Macworld regarding the use of this new system for free trials:

Does this change allow apps to offer a free trial?

Sort of. Apple lets developers optionally offer a free trial for in-app purchase subscriptions, which range from 7 days for a one-month recurring subscription to one month for a one-year term. If an app requires a subscription to use at all, then a free trial of the subscription effectively translates to a free trial of the app. An app that has some features and sells the rest with subscription can also offer a free trial just of those added options.

However, most apps will remain free or sold for a fee with or without IAPs, and work under the old rules, which don’t allow trials and demo versions.

David Sparks posts a great argument against the ubiquity of subscription-based software models from the customer perspective:

I understand why developers want to move in this direction. However, in order for this to work there has to be participation from consumers. Frankly, I’m not so convinced that will happen.

I think, in general, it’s easier to pay $12 once then the thought of paying one dollar every month going forward. Now multiply that times the 20 or 30 apps that you really love and things just get crazy. I’ve already received several emails from readers and Mac Power Users listeners complaining about the idea of subscriptions for all of their favorite apps. Put simply, I’m not sure consumers will cooperate with this new model. I would like to be proven wrong but developers may find that subscribers are a lot harder to come by than they think.

The updates to the App Store have definitely touched a nerve. I still think the changes are overwhelmingly positive, and mean very good things for app developers. I’m excited to see things begin to evolve this fall and hopeful for where this takes us.

Yesterday, a few days before its annual WWDC keynote and conference, Apple released the welcome news of some very interesting updates to the App Store.

App Subscriptions

From Daring Fireball:

Until now, subscription pricing was reserved for apps that served media content: streaming audio and video, news, etc. Apple is now opening it to apps from any category, which effectively solves the problems of recurring revenue and free trials. Even better, Apple is changing the revenue split for all subscriptions: for the first year of any subscription, the revenue split remains 70/30; after the first year, the revenue split changes to 85/15.

These subscription changes are great news. One of the main struggles with the App Store has been the ability for very well-crafted apps and services to be sustainable in the long term. The “purchase once, free updates forever” model of the App Store isn’t conducive to most small businesses. The additional option of recurring revenue via subscriptions should open up some new opportunities.

The revenue split after year one is also a nice nod to developers. Although, waiting a year for more revenue after an initial customer purchase probably isn’t going to fix any developer’s revenue issues in the short-term. Still, it is great to see some flexibility in the 70/30 revenue split that has been in place since day one of the store.

Unsurprisingly, it also sounds like Apple is trying to do things properly when it comes to the customer’s perspective of subscriptions too. From Jim Dalrymple at The Loop:

Developers will be able to choose one of over 200 subscription price points, and they can create territory specific prices, making subscriptions even more flexible. If a developer chooses to increase the subscription price, customers will be notified and they will have to authorize that increase. No customer will ever be charged a higher rate without first authorizing it, explained [Apple’s Senior VP of Worldwide Marketing, Phil] Schiller.

Customers will also be able to upgrade, downgrade or even side grade subscriptions, if those options are available to them. Developers can also keep current subscriptions at one price, but charge new subscribers a different price.

The options for the new subscription model seem very well thought out.

Paid Search Ads

The current state of App Store search isn’t great. Even if your app title is the exact words that someone searches for, often times your app isn’t the first result. Or worse, a competitor has stuffed their keywords with your app’s name to rank higher than you. This has mostly been solved in traditional web search, but for some reason the App Store hasn’t caught up.

Apple is now introducing the ability to bid on placements at the top of search results to promote their apps for relevant search terms. Back to The Loop:

There will only be one ad on the search results page and it will be clearly marked as an ad, according to Schiller. What’s more, the content of the ad will be exactly the same as the content of the app on the App Store. In other words, no spammy ads. Apple will only accept ads from developers in the App Store—they won’t have any third-party product ads in the store.

Schiller said the ads are done through an auction system for the developers. There are no minimums, and there will be no exclusives, so small developers can get in on the action as well. The ad system will roll out as a beta this summer and Apple will be watching to make sure the system is fair for all developers.

In keeping with its focus on privacy, Apple will not track users and will not share data about users ad clicks with developers. Developers will get reports, but no user data. Apple will also not serve ads to people 13 years old or under, if it can determine that from the device.

Developers will be able to sign-up for the search ad beta and there will be no charge to them during the beta period. When it does go live, after the beta period, it will launch in the U.S. first.

Sounds on the surface like a great addition to the store.

Faster Review Times

Lastly, but most importantly for those of us submitting app updates often, the time it takes for Apple to review an app has been dramatically reduced from over a week average review time to now less than 2 days. This has been happening over the past few months, and it is great to hear from Apple that it is not an accident.

If these great updates were the ones that didn’t make the cut for the WWDC keynote next week, I’m looking forward to it even more now.

Related:

• The Verge’s coverage
• Daring Fireball follow-up on some additional questions raised by the announcements