John’s Blog

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)

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)