Nick Heer:

If you do a little poking around in Adobe’s application bundles, a key reason for the jankiness of these user interfaces becomes apparent: it is because they are little webpages. These dialog boxes are HTML files that reference a chunky CSS file and oodles of JavaScript, and appear to be built with React. [...]

I was going to write about how this stuff should have been tried with people who actually use Adobe’s apps in a high-pressure environment, but I am sure it was and, also, it does not matter. Wichary has it right. These are fundamental principles of user interface design that Adobe is ignoring because its internal tooling has taken precedence.

I will quibble only with this line from Heer’s post:

Also, Adobe’s interface has always been unique and not quite at home on either MacOS or Windows.

You have to go back to the 1990s and classic Mac OS, but Adobe’s best apps used to have exemplary native UIs. Apps like Photoshop helped push the state of the art in Mac UI forward. Tabbed palettes were a revelation. Fire up, say, Photoshop 3.0 on MacOS 7.6 and see what I mean.

Also worth noting is how much this new “modern” UI isn’t just subjectively ugly, it’s objectively breaking the habits and expectations of users with literally decades of experience with Photoshop — users who, like me, remember when Adobe’s UI wasn’t just merely tolerable but actually good. It’s insane when you think about it.

How did Adobe lose that good sense of yore? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.

Paul Thurrott:

I may or may not write and publish a short e-book about Markdown sometime this year, most likely as part of a monthly focus. But l’ve written small parts of it already, as I do, and I figured it might be interesting for at least some readers. And so here’s an early draft of an introductory chapter that may or may not be called “On writing.” We’ll see.

It’s odd how things turn out in life. Thurrott’s and my careers are almost uniquely parallel, but have seldom intersected. This book would have been a very surprising outcome to me, if you’d told me about it 20 years ago. Sort of a fun outcome, though, and I must admit to being curious what comes of it.

The fact that Paul Graham personally has billions of dollars at stake with OpenAI doesn’t mean that his public opinion on Sam Altman’s trustworthiness and leadership is invalid. But it certainly seems like the sort of thing that ought to be disclosed when quoting Graham as an Altman character reference.

The New York Times, back in March last year (gift link):

To win the artificial intelligence race, Google not only has developed its own technologies, but has also pumped money into prominent A.I. start-ups. And to preserve its competitive edge, Google has kept its ownership stakes in those start-ups a secret.

Court documents recently obtained by The New York Times reveal Google’s stake in one of those start-ups, Anthropic, as well as how its investment in the young company is set to change. Google owns 14 percent of Anthropic, according to legal filings that the A.I. start-up submitted as part of a Google antitrust case. But that investment gives Google little control over the company. The internet giant can own only up to 15 percent of Anthropic, according to the filings, and Google holds no voting rights, no board seats and no board observer rights at the start-up.

Still, Google is set to invest an additional $750 million in Anthropic in September through a type of loan known as convertible debt, according to the filings. The companies agreed to the convertible note in 2023. In total, Google has invested more than $3 billion in the A.I. company.

Anthropic’s latest funding round — a rare Series G — valued the company at $380 billion. So let’s say Google has invested $4 billion to date, and Anthropic really is worth $380 billion. Google’s slice of that would be worth a little north of $50 billion, quite the return on investment. And competitively, there’s a heads-they-win (with Gemini), tails-they-don’t-lose (with Claude) aspect. Maybe that’s not the best metaphor, since OpenAI would make it a three-sided coin, but still.

(Via today’s subscriber-only Stratechery update, where Ben Thompson noted this in the context of Google last week reporting a 30% increase in operating profit year-over-year, but an eye-popping 81% increase in overall profit. The difference was the growth in their investments, almost certainly Anthropic in particular.)

Jeremy Provost, on the blog for Think Tap Work, his mobile app development company:

iOS App Store search is no longer about relevance. It’s about ad inventory. With Apple’s introduction of a second search ad, for any query where we weren’t #1, we’ve effectively moved down one position. [...] If you’re counting at home, roughly 70% of the interface is covered in ads. A casino ad, to boot.

That was a month ago. Two weeks later, he posted a follow-up, showing the effect on Think Tap Work’s apps in the App Store:

I wanted to share some updated numbers from our own apps. To isolate the impact, these numbers only include App Store Search impressions from iOS devices, comparing Mar 26–Apr 8 to the prior two weeks. In other words: how much visibility we’ve lost in search.

• Morpho Converter: 26% decrease
• Pop Out Timer: 23% decrease
• Attendant for Zoom: 30% decrease
• Participant: 3% increase. As previously mentioned, we advertise Participant using Search Ads. It’s not surprising that it might be getting a bump from this change.

The screenshot in his follow-up shows another casino ad, this time in a search for “Roblox”. Kinda gross.

Here’s Wikipedia on the “Zero-One-Infinity Rule”:

The zero-one-infinity (ZOI) rule is a rule of thumb in software design proposed by early computing pioneer Willem van der Poel. It argues that arbitrary limits on the number of instances of a particular type of data or structure should not be allowed. Instead, an entity should either be forbidden entirely, only one should be allowed, or any number of them should be allowed.

In Apple Notes, you can only have one main window open. In Apple Mail, however, you can open as many Viewer Windows as you want. Both are compliant with the Zero-One-Infinity rule. An app that allowed you to open multiple viewer windows — but no more than some arbitrary limit — would not be. ZOI is a very good rule of thumb.

I feel like a variation of Zero-One-Infinity is a good rule of thumb for ads, too. From the perspective of users — and probably developers — zero was the best number of ads for Apple to show in App Store search results. One was worse but acceptable. But now that they’re showing more than one, they’re on their way to infinity. They’ve started down the slippery slope. Remember when Google only showed one ad in search results?

Anyway, who’s looking forward to ads in Apple Maps this summer?