Linked List: September 3, 2024

Tuesday, 3 September 2024

Apple Sports, Updated for Football Season, Will Soon Support Live Activities 

Apple Newsroom:

With iOS 18 and watchOS 11, the Apple Sports app will offer Live Activities for all teams and leagues available in the app for the first time ever, delivering live scores and play-by-play at a quick glance to a user’s iPhone and Apple Watch Lock Screens.

Coming in an app update later this year, Apple Sports will also introduce a new drop-down navigation for the main scorecard views, making it even faster to switch between My Leagues, My Teams, and users’ feeds for favorited leagues. A new enhanced search makes it easier to view matches for leagues fans do not currently follow.

Does anyone understand why it requires iOS 18 for Live Activities? Perhaps it’s just a subtle nudge to get people to upgrade their device OS?

Also: Interesting but unsurprising to me that Apple Sports will support Live Activities on WatchOS, but won’t offer a WatchOS app. I think this is the way most — or at least many — apps should support WatchOS going forward. It’s just never been a great platform for “apps”. It’s a great platform for glanceable information, though.

Update: Via email, DF reader Deep Desai explains the iOS 18 requirement:

This is definitely because broadcast push notifications require iOS 18 — this lets you create a channel on APNS which devices can subscribe to. It’s pub/sub instead of collecting individual push tokens from devices and sending them each a notification.

Departure Mono 

“Departure Mono is a monospaced pixel font inspired by the constraints of early command-line and graphical user interfaces, the tiny pixel fonts of the late 90s/early 00s, and sci-fi concepts from film and television.”

Both the font (by Helena Zhang) and website (by Tobias Fried) are fantastic. Freely available, too.

Brazil’s X Ban Is Sending Lots of People to Bluesky 

Jay Peters, The Verge:

X is currently banned in Brazil following an order from a Supreme Court justice, and Brazilian users seem to be turning to Bluesky, an alternate social network, in droves.

“Brazil, you’re setting new all-time-highs for activity on Bluesky!” the official Bluesky account said in a post.

“There will almost certainly be some outages and performance issues,” Bluesky developer Paul Frazee said. “We’ve never seen traffic like this. Hang with us!”

Back in May 2023, I made a bold prediction that hasn’t panned out:

Bluesky is going to skyrocket to mainstream popularity and actually replace Twitter, and Mastodon cannot, because Bluesky is being designed to be simple, fun, and — most importantly — easy to understand.

That prediction might have proven wrong anyway, but the event I didn’t foresee at the time was Meta’s Threads (which launched last July). Threads is thriving, and by some measures, for some communities, has overtaken X as the preeminent Twitter-like social network. But, for better (in some ways) and worse (in others), Threads is quite different from the Twitter of yore.

What’s great about Bluesky is that of today’s four major Twitter-like platforms — X, Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky — it’s the one that’s closest in spirit to old Twitter. Yet, personally, it gets the least of my attention of the four. Still rooting for Bluesky, though, and I’m not surprised at all that, faced with a sudden shutdown of X, Bluesky is seeing a jolt of Brazilian signups.

‘Founder Mode’ 

Paul Graham:

The theme of Brian’s talk was that the conventional wisdom about how to run larger companies is mistaken. As Airbnb grew, well-meaning people advised him that he had to run the company in a certain way for it to scale. Their advice could be optimistically summarized as “hire good people and give them room to do their jobs.” He followed this advice and the results were disastrous. So he had to figure out a better way on his own, which he did partly by studying how Steve Jobs ran Apple. So far it seems to be working. Airbnb’s free cash flow margin is now among the best in Silicon Valley.

The audience at this event included a lot of the most successful founders we’ve funded, and one after another said that the same thing had happened to them. They’d been given the same advice about how to run their companies as they grew, but instead of helping their companies, it had damaged them.

Why was everyone telling these founders the wrong thing? That was the big mystery to me. And after mulling it over for a bit I figured out the answer: what they were being told was how to run a company you hadn’t founded — how to run a company if you’re merely a professional manager. But this m.o. is so much less effective that to founders it feels broken. There are things founders can do that managers can’t, and not doing them feels wrong to founders, because it is.

More on the Clooney-Pitt Movie ‘Wolfs’ 

Apple Original Films had originally promised writer-director Jon Watts and co-stars George Clooney and Brad Pitt a wide theatrical release for their upcoming (and seemingly well-reviewed) movie Wolfs. But, pretty much at the last minute, Apple canceled those plans, and instead will screen it in limited theaters for one week before streaming it on Apple TV+ at the end of this month.

David Canfield interviewed Watts for Vanity Fair, where Watts said he only found out about the change in plans a few days before it was announced:

Canfield: As somebody who’s worked in indies, who’s worked in the MCU, and has now made a standalone studio movie, how do you see the state of theatrical versus streaming, especially given the pivot with this movie? Does it concern you at all?

Watts: You want the movie to be seen, and if you maximize the way that people are able to actually see a movie, I think that is good — I watched so many movies that really influenced me on VHS because I grew up in a small town in Colorado, so we just didn’t have those movies in the theaters. But for me, the theatrical experience is still the number one. It’s up to the people that are able to make those decisions to put them in theaters for people to see, and just have the confidence that people will go see them. People want to go to the movies. People love the movies.

Canfield: If you had known then what you know now about the way this movie will be released, would you have gone in another direction, given that you were talking to a lot of studios?

Watts: [Laughs] I try to not think about hypothetical situations like that.

It doesn’t sound like Apple’s change of plans has resulted in bad blood, per se — merely disappointment. Watts has already agreed to write, produce, and direct a sequel. But it feels like Apple is still in the early stages of navigating its role as a Hollywood studio. I think there’s still a sense that Apple is a creator-friendly partner for big-budget movies, but a move like this, contradicting the obvious wishes of both the director and two of the biggest stars in the business, works against that reputation.

Also, a week-ago report in The New York Times by Nicole Sperling reported that Clooney and Pitt were paid “more than $35 million each”. But speaking at the Venice Film Festival premiere of Wolfs yesterday, Clooney said that number was bullshit:

“[It was] an interesting article and whatever her source was for our salary, it is millions and millions and millions of dollars less than what was reported. And I am only saying that because I think it’s bad for our industry if that’s what people think is the standard bearer for salaries,” Clooney said. “I think that’s terrible, it’ll make it impossible to make films.”