About a week ago, the popular mail app for iOS and Mac, Airmail, switching from being a paid upfront app to one based around a subscription. Understandably, this brought a lot of conversation online (mainly on Twitter), about the ethics of it, the App Store rules that may be broken by the switch, and general complaining. I’m obviously “late to the party” on this one, but I would like to think of this being about an app moving to subscription in general, rather than solely Airmail. Although, it has a few specific mentions.

The major issue that I’ve seen around the Internet about Airmail’s business model switch, is that it has been to a degree, forced upon users that have already purchased the app. Because when they purchased the app, it was a paid upfront app, with no notice about needing to pay for a subscription in the future. So they’ve essentially had their purchase taken back, and been told to pay a monthly ransom to keep using it.

There’s certainly the argument that if developers are constantly updating and providing support to apps, that they should be able to charge for it. But when you purchase an app, you’re more than likely not thinking about a scenario where features will suddenly be put behind another paywall. This is not to say that it’s the developers fault for providing quality updates, but instead, maybe a fault of the way app updates are handled. For example, there still isn’t a proper way to do upgrade pricing. And I think that alone would provide a better experience for everyone. Developers could have a more clearly defined line between major updates, and it would give users a real chance to evaluate an update, and even say no to them. Especially if they feel like they’d rather not get any more updates if it means not paying a subscription for features they’ve already paid for.

The two features that are being put behind a paywall with this switch, are multiple account support and push notifications. Two notable features of an email app, and for the majority of people, I would imagine these being deal-breakers.

That being said, the first feature, is still free if you had already purchased the app. So this is only no longer available for free, for future users. That’s a bit better, however, it certainly seems strange to me that such a common feature would be behind a paywall. Especially with one that costs either ~$3 a month, or ~$10 a year.

As for the latter, this also seems like such a fundamental part to an email client. Sure, there’s the possibility that this was the reason it was put behind a subscription fee, but I don’t feel like that feature alone is worth the fee. I know that there are server costs for push notifications, but is it honestly $10 a year worth?

I also think it’s worthwhile to note that if you are a paying customer already, while you still maintain access to multiple account support for free (well, free after the initial purchase), the subscription price for the remaining one feature, is the same as what new customers would pay for both features.

There are also a few sections of Apple’s App Store Review Guidelines, that also create a few questions about whether the switch also follows the rules or not.

The first one is that if you switch to being subscription-based, then you’re not allowed to force users to pay for features that they have already paid for:

If you are changing your existing app to a subscription-based business model, you should not take away the primary functionality existing users have already paid for. For example, let customers who have already purchased a “full game unlock” continue to access the full game after you introduce a subscription model for new customers.

I’m guessing they’ve handled this by maintaining multiple account support, but there’s an argument to be made that this should also apply to push notifications.

There is also a rule regarding push notifications:

Monetizing built-in capabilities provided by the hardware or operating system, such as Push Notifications, the camera, or the gyroscope; or Apple services, such as Apple Music access or iCloud storage.

However, with a response to MacRumors, Airmail state that they are “not using system push notifications of CloudKit or other operating system features, but its own server infrastructure.”. I guess they are claiming to show that this rule should not apply to their implementation.

However, regardless of any guidelines, and the ethics in general of making the switch from a paid app to a subscription-based app, it’s surely best to let customers know about the switch as soon as possible. As most complaints, I found online, seemed to come from a place where this is a surprise, and they feel that they’ve been asked for money with no reward being offered to them. Rather than functionality that they have already paid for.

The switch to a subscription app is always going to be hard, especially for an app like Airmail that has existed for so long already as a paid upfront app. As you have to make the subscription seem appealing for new users, and at the same time making existing users feel like there is also something to gain for them too.

In my opinion, this specific case seems a bit rushed. And I think a bit more care could have gone into ensuring new and existing customers had a good experience. Either it should have been coupled with a bigger update, that actually added new features to a subscription, or simply had a longer grace period for existing customers. Four months feels a bit short.

What’s worse for Airmail, is that there are other great email apps available for iOS. Including the stock Mail app that comes with iOS, which is what I use myself.

I’m not sure if this is a thing that other people do. But I never listen to anything, whether it’s a podcast, or just music, as I enter my house.

For some strange reason the transition to moving inside while listening to something, just feels a bit dirty to me. Maybe that’s not the right word, but it has a similar effect.

I used to just turn the volume down as I entered, but that still felt uncomfortable to me. So whatever it is, I always have to pause any audio before opening my door. Luckily I have AirPods, and can just tap the side of one to do this.

What’s maybe even more strange is that I rarely listen to anything using head/earphones indoors. The only exceptions are when I’m on a video call for work, and I’m not alone in the house, or if I have over-ear headphones on while focussing on writing or development. Both rare occasions.

Trevor Nace, writing at Forbes:

NASA has some good news, the world is a greener place today than it was 20 years ago. What prompted the change? Well, it appears China and India can take the majority of the credit.

In contrast to the perception of China and India’s willingness to overexploit land, water and resources for economic gain, the countries are responsible for the largest greening of the planet in the past two decades. The two most populous countries have implemented ambitious tree planting programs and scaled up their implementation and technology around agriculture.

This is very encouraging. Hopefully this is something that we can start to compete on, as it will only result in a better planet for us all.

Leah Burrows, writing at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences blog:

People have long dreamed of re-shaping the Martian climate to make it livable for humans. Carl Sagan was the first outside of the realm of science fiction to propose terraforming. In a 1971 paper, Sagan suggested that vaporizing the northern polar ice caps would “yield ~10 s g cm-2 of atmosphere over the planet, higher global temperatures through the greenhouse effect, and a greatly increased likelihood of liquid water.”

Sagan’s work inspired other researchers and futurists to take seriously the idea of terraforming. The key question was: are there enough greenhouse gases and water on Mars to increase its atmospheric pressure to Earth-like levels?

In 2018, a pair of NASA-funded researchers from the University of Colorado, Boulder and Northern Arizona University found that processing all the sources available on Mars would only increase atmospheric pressure to about 7 percent that of Earth – far short of what is needed to make the planet habitable.

Terraforming Mars, it seemed, was an unfulfillable dream.

Now, researchers from the Harvard University, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, and the University of Edinburgh, have a new idea. Rather than trying to change the whole planet, what if you took a more regional approach?

This is all rather fascinating. And I wonder if any of this stuff will actually happen in the near future? Or if it will remain in theories, and local experiments here on Earth.

BBC:

In 1986, 20-year-old Christopher Knight drove into a forest in rural Maine. He abandoned his car, and taking just some very basic camping supplies, simply walked into the woods. He didn’t come out again for 27 years.

After getting deliberately lost, Knight eventually found the site that would become his home, a small clearing in the densely wooded area surrounding a lake called North Pond. He stretched some tarpaulin between trees, put up his small nylon tent, and settled down. He was completely hidden, despite being only a few minutes’ walk from one of the hundreds of summer cabins that dotted the area.

My immediate expectation of this article, after reading the headline, was a story about how someone worked their way to having a sustainable living outside in the woods. Turns out, I was wrong, and it’s fascinating in a whole other way!

I stumbled upon this video just now, and it immediately grabbed my attention. As for some reason, the working life of others is interesting to me, and the Japanese culture, even more so.

So watch the video, and follow Makoto through a day in his life:

Japanese work day at a Japanese office for an average Japanese salaryman in a Tokyo office.
Living in Japan and working in Japan is quite a unique experience. This is a day in the life of Japanese worker, Makoto, 27 years old who lives in a Tokyo 3-story house with his family.
This Tokyo salaryman works in a small Tokyo office, but spends many of his Japan working hours traveling from client to client on the Tokyo trains.
Makoto works for a company called Mobal and as many Japanese salarymen, he entered the company straight from a Japanese University and he plans to spend his entire salaryman career at the same company.
That is the life in Japan for a salaryman. We take a look inside what it’s like to work in a small Tokyo office as well as to visit clients throughout Tokyo city area.
His job experiences maybe unique to his company, but fundamentally he is very much an average salaryman.

He commutes by train everyday to get to work and has to ride his mama-chari bike to get to the train station from his home.
This Tokyo salaryman life has him arriving to work early and working late. As a salaryman, Makoto receives a standard salary every month for all the long work hours.
The Japanese office is also configured so his boss’ desk is right in front of him, quite a Japanese style office working environment. This very average Japanese work day and work lifestyle showcases a true day in Japan work life.

After just over 6 months, I’m stopping writing my daily journal entries.

Originally I was aiming to complete an entire year, and then rethink what I was going to do with it. However, it’s been about a week that I haven’t written a single entry, and surprisingly I’ve been totally fine with it. And as it’s reached the 6-month milestone, it feels like a good time to stop, have some time off, and refocus on the next thing.

Stats

Just because I can, here are a few quick stats:

• 183 total entries
• 30,579 total words
• 167 averages words per post

And some additional graphs:

What I’ve Learned

I’ve certainly learned a few things from the process though. Mainly that I like writing and especially personal logs, that I can write down quite easily, without a ton of research.

Something that made it really easy was automation, obviously. I’ve written about my automation before on the blog. First with “How I Automate My Daily Journal”, where I discussed the way I reminded myself to write, and also to generate a new file based upon a template. And also with “How I Automate Publishing Blog Posts”, where I go through how I take a markdown file and publish it to the blog.

However, even though it was relatively friction-free to write and publish journal entries to my blog, sometimes it just felt like a chore. Especially when a day was simply too boring to write about, where I was just forcing myself to write something.

What It Means for the Future

If I’m going to take anything away from this for the future of this blog, it’s that I enjoy writing about more personal experiences. So while I’m not promising anything, that’s the direction I want to go down.

I also want to combine that with some more photography of mine. I take tons of photos, and I just don’t feel that Instagram is a good place to host all of that. After trips, I’ve shared photos on the blog before, where I select a handful of my favourites, and this is the style I will most likely continue.

But in general, I want this blog to feel more like my blog. I’m steering away from generic tech review and Apple news. Because there are so many good writers covering that stuff already, and I’m fine with reading what they have to say, rather than me repeating most of what’s already out there. So hopefully I can start living up to the appropriately named “Chris Hannah” blog.

You’ll also notice that the Journal category has been moved from the top navigation menu to the sidebar.

Today was very much a continuation of yesterday at work, in that I was still pairing on the same piece of work, and we got quite a lot done.

In the most basic terms, it’s a Java Spring Boot server that has a few endpoints, and a database. I’m not exactly excited that I’m writing Java, seeing as I’m a Swift developer, but it’s something the team has been assigned to. Deadlines 🤷🏻‍♂️. However, I’m now properly writing tests, and I’m learning a lot of fundamental things that I take back to my Swift code.

In this specific piece of work, we have unit tests, integration tests, and also functional tests in the form of BDD/Gherkin scenarios. It’s interesting to see it all working together.

After work, I’ve mainly been doing house work. Things like washing up, laundry, and in general tidying up.

I did however, get a chance to look at Text Case for a bit, and I’ve started work on supporting parameters in Shortcuts actions! It will only be relatively simple, have a text input, and a text output, so hopefully I can get a build out via TestFlight soon.

I did notice one cool thing in iOS 13 beta 3 while I was doing this, and that’s that a bug that was introduced in the 1st beta, has now been fixed. It’s where in the custom icon select page, the icon images would expand past their bounds, and overlap nearly half the screen. I tried various ways to fix it when it first came up, but thank god the latest beta simply fixes it. That’s one less thing to think about.

I finally had a productive day at work for once! I was pairing with another developer, and we were finally left alone to actually get some work done for once. There was the odd thing I was needed for, but it was a nice change from yesterday.

Since finishing work, I’ve been at my girlfriends parents house. They invited us round for a BBQ and we then stayed to watch the football. Sadly USA beat England, which means I’ll be supporting The Netherlands from now on.

I also managed to write something on my blog today. Nothing major, just a realisation I’ve had about light and dark themed interfaces.

Ever since the iOS/iPadOS 13 betas have been available, I’ve been running them on my main devices. That’s down to multiple reasons, but one of the main ones was the new Dark Mode that’s now available system wide.

Before this global setting, I’ve been a big fan of dark themes for everything I use. Whether it’s a Twitter client, text editor, or Xcode.

However, recently I’ve noticed myself purposefully switching back to the Light theme. And I think it’s been down to two things.

Firstly, it’s been rather sunny here in England recently, and having a dark interface just isn’t clear enough. I’ve noticed this the most when I’m outside and catching up on Twitter. Thankfully I’m using Tweetbot as my client, so I can quickly two-finger swipe between themes, until I find a light theme where I can actually read the content.

The other reason is simple because sometimes a light interface just makes content a lot clearer. Especially because I’ve noticed a trend with some dark themes where the text is light grey with a dark grey background. Whereas the light mode alternative would feature black text on a white background. So the level of contrast suffers simply because of colour choices.

This won’t exactly be a surprising realisation for some people, but ever since I’ve had the ability to have a system wide dark mode, I’ve started to actually value the light mode more.