John’s Blog

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)

A few years ago I switched to using Spotify full-time instead of Apple Music. I find Apple Music’s interface slow, buggy, and often downright non-functional. Spotify’s interface is fast, its search works every time, and the recommendations engine is far superior.

All of the problems with Apple Music remain, but I’m switching back.

Spotify seems like a mess as a company and it keeps pushing its agenda into my listening. I don’t want to listen to audiobooks, yet I continue to have to pay for them (until this week it looks like). I don’t care for its podcasting efforts, and strongly dislike its decisions around who to give truckloads of money to. I don’t like how Spotify treats or views artists. The list sort of goes on…

From everything that I can find online, Apple Music seems to pay artists better than Spotify. It’s hard to know the specifics of these deals but most reports show Apple Music at almost double the royalty of Spotify. This is great, and likely due to Apple not needing quite as much cash since they have a nice side business. Oh and Spotify’s plan prices are increasing again, for the second time in a year, without any indication that increased revenue will go artists.

So anyways, back to Apple Music.

Interesting news from HBO and NFL Films for this upcoming season. Nick Shook writing at NFL.com:

Hard Knocks is entering new territory in 2024 with plans to document an entire division’s regular-season journey.

For the first time ever, HBO and NFL Films will follow all four teams in the AFC North for their annual Hard Knocks: In Season, aiming to chronicle the inner workings of the rough-and-tumble quartet of squads. The new episodes will feature the Baltimore Ravens, Cincinnati Bengals, Cleveland Browns and Pittsburgh Steelers, members of the first division to finish with nothing but winning records, achieved in 2023.

This is a neat idea. The in-season version of Hard Knocks hasn’t been as appealing to me as the original pre-season version. Here’s hoping for a fun division race in December so this concept works out. 🏈

The brilliant folks at Sandwich have debuted their new app for immersive video on the Vision Pro: Theater (App Store link). It’s so cool.

What was cooler this week was Sandwich live streaming The Talk Show from WWDC in spatial video. I tuned in for the first half of the show, and it was a stunning experience. I can’t wait to see more of this type of thing in the future.

This is a really nice addition to Apple Pay coming in iOS 18: users will be able to pay with Apple Pay on Windows, and in Chrome browsers. Very nice implementation. Excited to implement this for Air Mail later this year.

A thorough and beautiful post from Louie Mantia about the new “dark mode” icons available in iOS 18.