indefensible: john gruber

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/05/11/cameron

asshole

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/05/11/green-day-rip-this-joint

yuppie

(PEDANTIC NOTE: House style here at Daring Fireball is to capitalize the second words in “iPod Mini” and “iPod Photo”, on the basis that they’re proper names, despite the fact that Apple’s marketing style is to use lowercase.)

you write a blog

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/06/08/campus

lol

Really beginning to think that Gruber needs his own thread, but I don't want to be the one to start it.

The latest Talk Show podcast, 35-ish minutes in. They're discussing the new iPad cover and he's practically on some kind of nerd interpretation of the old "Magnets? How the fuck do they work?" routine.

So I dare to visit his website today because of his verbal spastic attack, and one of the links is to a news story about the actress from The Wire with his heartfelt and not at all patronisingly semi-racist comment of "That’s a shame, but I’m glad to see her alive."

― James Mitchell, Thursday, March 10, 2011 8:36 PM (2 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/06/08/campus

he is a champ at this glib commencement speech bullshit

arsehole

The rate card for his weekly sponsorship is now $5,500 -- $286,000 a year if it sells out at full price.

http://www.businessinsider.com/daring-fireball-2011-3#ixzz1OltvorIZ

not bad considering he just lazily throws up links most of the time.

Don't think of iCloud as the new MobileMe; think of iCloud as the new iTunes.

It also means iPhone users with iPhone-using friends and family no longer need SMS. I’ll cancel my SMS plan as soon as this ships.

I don’t think over-the-air backups or media syncing are coming soon. Wireless networking just isn’t fast enough. I’m not talking about Wi-Fi syncing over a local network to iTunes running on your Mac or PC — that may well be coming soon, but it wouldn’t solve the “how can these devices be ‘post-PC’ if they require a PC?” problem. We’re not talking about why the iPad needs a USB cable; we’re talking about why it needs a PC, period.

haha, i'd forgotten that. glad that there is a place to document gruber's predictions with the same mixture of obsessiveness and gloating that he reserves for everyone else.

"we’re talking about why it needs a PC, period"

http://daringfireball.net/2005/06/shuffling

The music on FM radio pretty much totally sucks

where did you read that? in a rolling stone you bought at an airport?

I’m biased, insofar as I consider Apple’s strategy more appealing than Google’s. But that’s because my interest lies in having the best possible user experience — the best-looking UIs, the lowest-latency responses, the smoothest animation, the most elegant designs. I share that interest with Apple. Google’s interest is in reaching the largest possible audience. That’s why I chose, at the outset of this paragraph, to say that I find Apple’s strategy “more appealing than”, rather than, say, “superior to”, Google’s. Apple’s strategy is correct for optimizing the quality of the user experience. Google’s strategy is correct for maximizing the number of users for its apps.

haha liking this thread no matter how redundant it is - keep em coming

Will be interesting to see how this pans out. Not sure what it means if it’s true that their initial target is Mobile Safari specifically, not mobile WebKit in general. My guess is that it’s simply a result of Mobile Safari being so far ahead of the Android WebKit engine.

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/06/17/apple-buy-phone-industry

yes, but it would be illegal under US, UK and EU law, so what's your point?

Has he always been so mean-spirited? I don't remember him being so spiteful just a few years ago.

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2011/06/17/come-on-gruber-youre-better-than-this

url a bit generous but otherwise, oh snap

Gruber seems to be right about things a lot of the time, though that's easy when the people he disagrees with are prone to willfully ignoring the fact that Apple is making hundreds of millions of dollars doing what it's doing and is preposterously unlikely to make any sudden changes in strategy. Also less of a raging, belligerent asshole than you might expect.

Also wrt the "buy whole cell phone industry" post that is sort of following up on an earlier link about how Apple could easily have enough cash in a few years to take itself private. That is, in an industry where firms are frequently assessed by their market cap or their VC funding or what have you, Apple actually has HUMONGOUS FAT STACKS OF CASH.

agreed that this guy is a bit of a dick, he has unsavory triumphalist tendencies, and thinks various middlebrow stuff is the height of human achievement - however as to his core competency, i do believe hes one of the best writers on design out there today

Chock full of SEO crap: My comment on Marco Arment's comment on John Gruber's comment on David Pogue's comment on Google's Chromebook.

Has anyone read the marco aren't Phish post?

Damn autocorrect: Arment

however as to his core competency, i do believe hes one of the best writers on design out there today

he doesn't really do this any more though?

Got sick of his blog a while ago - but I have to admit his comment on the Chromebook is kinda on point, why does it deserve a "good try!" sentiment?

Gruber's predictions that don't come true are still reasonable and make sense when you evaluate the facts available at the time. He can't rely on his mysterious inside sources all the time, you see.

You don't have to believe me, just ask Gruber. He's always Gruber. I mean, right.

he doesn't really do this any more though?

― caek, Sunday, June 19, 2011 6:18 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah its not most of his posts, but when he does write a long piece i feel like he really gets where design is at re todays technologies

also hes a v good clear writer

chrisdejabet Chris De Jabet by daringfireball
Just got complimented on my @daringfireball shirt at the Apple Store. Because I'm handsome.
18 hours ago

*stabs twitter in the face*

thought it was really out of line when this guy shot mr takagi

i really like gruber

which mac writers do you guys really like? i could use some more feeds in my google reader

Jean-Louis Gassee

totally forgot abt him, thanking u

feel like this post embodies many of his less good qualities

http://grab.by/cBWF

how long till some shill links him this thread and ilx gets ~fireballed~

one can dream

You are trying to view American McCarver on a shitty browser. Won't work.

Note that the UI screenshots are even set in Helvetica, not Arial. Some of the best evidence of good taste at Google I can ever recall.

duly noted.

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/06/28/google-plus-videos

guh arial and helvetica are like exactly the same shit stfu already

A friend shared this blog post on Google Reader: http://stu.mp/2011/06/dear-yahoo-hire-me-as-your-next-ceo.html

I’d buy the NYT (for a mere $1.5bn!) and recruit John Gruber to be Editor in Chief of the “Yahoo! News” division.

I cried a little.

Oh god, until I read that blog post in full I thought that was a joke, like forcing him to cover stories about Microsoft.

Cringely's been half-nuts for years. Now I think he's full-nuts.

well, he's got a point

I guess it's not as bad as how he keeps referring to Paul Thurrott as a 'dick' purely because he writes about Microsoft.

cringelys nutsness is the best part of his shtick, guy is not afraid to think big

I don't think Cringely's being nuts there! Even if Jobs is showing pictures of full server rooms, it's not like he's shown pictures of the entire interior of the facility, and it's completely possible that it's not that densely populated.

yeah but thats not some weird conspiracy designed to intimidate rivals, its just building out future capacity

p sure this dood killed caylee http://horace.dediu.usesthis.com

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/05/11/cameron

asshole

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/07/08/murdoch

"congratulations to the tories"

wish someone would put this asshole in a room w/paul thurrott and then they can mutually annihilate each other

You are trying to view American McCarver on a shitty browser. Won't work.

maybe i've just been developing for legacy browsers too long at this point, but this kills me. laziest shit ever - you run a SPORTS BLOG ffs

lol mh that is such a brutally accurate dunk of so much manblogging. the sheer volume of this stuff. people who would reverentially re-explain edward tufte and call it a career.

what is “the modern era” that has broken his brain though? feels harder to nail

Yeah great point that I hadn’t noticed until you said. Feels to me similar to the loss of gatekeeping authority the old-school print columnists went through.

Like happened with the political correspondents: when their subjects all got themselves on social media, the hacks lost their exclusive access and people could see for themselves what politicians were like, so that just left them with their analysis. Then Twitter and other places filled up with much better analysis. There is little left for the hacks to do but become client journalists.

Same deal with the Grubers and the Mossbergs. You can read more tweets than you can bear directly from every developer out there, you don’t need to hang around at WWDC to get access. Typographers aren’t these remote artists only read about in design journals printed on 300gsm stock, they’re on TikTok. You can get esoteric French movie stills without being a magazine deep-pocketed enough to pay Mary Evans. There are better and more immediate product reviewers on YouTube who don’t have to try and explain the minute differences between iPhone versions in sub-DFW prose but can just … show them to you.

So what’s left for Gruber but a combination of Apple’s brand of client journalism (see recent defence of the CSAM backdown), challops and “little birdies”? If Apple staff were allowed tweet he’d be done for.

Also fuck markdown

otm lol

stet nails a lot of it

what is “the modern era” that has broken his brain though? feels harder to nail
signposts for me:

• the explosion and then contraction of blogging. his site has that tuned but barely-tweaked moveabletype platform feel. since he started, which he probably feels is classic
• apple becoming not only mainstream, but ubiquitous. the market for non-developers finding a new apple feature or software api novel or interesting diminished by the month post-OS X release and there’s nothing fringe or counterculture about any of it
• “cultivating an aesthetic” was more of a way to create affinity groups among bloggers and readers. post-tumblr and pinterest, it’s not an “elite” pursuit

tl;dr every middle manager is gruber now

explain the minute differences between iPhone versions in sub-DFW prose

unexpectedly chortled so hard I got a brain aneurysm reading this one

the film still thing is such a funny signpost of the blog times

https://variety.com/2020/tv/news/ava-duvernay-one-perfect-shot-docuseries-hbo-max-1234728822/

the number of copycat attempts on twitter that seem to get the goal but none of the substance of that “perfect shot” aesthetic is amazing, just screenshots of any time the camera pauses on a wide shot in a superhero movie. but there’s still an intellectual curiosity there and opportunity for dialogue than just posting the same still from 2001 that’s likely been printed in a dozen Taschen volumes

a big idea of his was software could be usable by being well designed, which is these days much less of a novel idea due in no small part to apple/iphone, he kind of won but now what kingdom is left to conquer, makes you think

did anyone ever use the iOS notes app he “designed”

it was uh, not good. although he did learn a little bit about the minutiae of file syncing

iirc this was just pre-iCloud document storage and his fan base was large enough they cut some deal to use microsoft’s file storage stuff, and then he blogged glowingly about it while anyone who had actually done software development rolled their eyes

the big selling points were that it had a nice font and was named after the drink/lady from the james bond movie

good work if you can get it (not as good as podcasting tho)

he weird clique of blogging inspired by the “getting things done” cult and all of the software tools involved in that seem, in retrospect, to be kind of a reaction to what was going on in software development at the time. i’m sure there are column inches to be written about organizational strategies, but it’s over. half of all cubicle-based industries use some ridiculous task system now and no one is going to seem cool or interesting blogging about that. they’re going to seem like a management consultant or one of those perverts who posts on linkedin

― mh, Wednesday, September 8, 2021 10:04 AM (three hours ago)

lol

it's like the fucked up "wealthy freelancer" fantasy, that you have a lot to do, all of it at your own direction

(Disclosure: I use GTD-inspired todo app Things to keep track of job stuff since putting everything in Jira would be insane)

the big selling points were that it had a nice font and was named after the drink/lady from the james bond movie

I checked to see if it’s still on the App Store, and it is — but the last update was Apple auto-bumping their certificate for them so it’d still be a signed app. Officially mothballed for five years

I forgot the name of their company to develop the app was “Q Branch”

jesus christ

A lot of folks were damaged when Steve Jobs called developers "artists." Some are worse off than others.

“Chairman Pooh”

thought it was really out of line when this guy shot mr takagi

― little dieter wants to FUCK (Princess TamTam), Sunday, June 19, 2011 11:50 AM (ten years ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think about this joke and laugh every time I see this thread revived

loaded it up today for the first time in a while and the latest post was some asinine shit about how much Arial makes his eyes bleed. this guy is probably a terf

hes really mad that apple has ads now but he can’t say that so he quotes everyone else saying and then trails off poignantly rip apple

that's pretty rich for someone whose CSS specifies Verdana first:

body {
    font-family: Verdana, system-ui, Helvetica, sans-serif;
}

going to hack his blog and change the default font to webdings

“congratulations to the tories”

Does he ever claim chowder himself?

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2022/10/27/musk-twitter-open-letter

Apparently I’m a very slow learner on the “Elon Musk is an absolute shithead” front

congrats to the tories

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/02/02/twitter-killing-bots

Congrats to lagoon

cant believe im still only 15 feels like ive been posting to this site that long

I’m more optimistic about Twitter’s future than I have been in years.

Amen brother!

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/twitter-bot-api-changes-killing-fun

cant believe i made it to daring fireball its a dream

"Fuck Elon, I never liked that guy" - in awe of this

"They say there are no atheists in a foxhole, but there are more of them than there are libertarians in a bank run."

okay it's very clunky but full credit here

https://mastodon.social/@gruber/110667962169426329

We gonna need Threads/Mastodon embeds now i guess?

congratulation etc

classic john "gatekeeper is my favorite feature of mountain lion" gruber

I’m more optimistic about Twitter’s future than I have been in years. Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s a very real chance that under Musk’s leadership, Twitter might break apart and fade into irrelevance. But Musk himself notes the same thing! Keeping Twitter open to a wide range of content, but making it easy to control what content you see, as user, is a worthy ideal. Pulling it off, that’s the trick. But as a privately-held company Musk is free to make changes that move Twitter away from being optimized for engagement and towards being optimized for enjoyment.

October 2022.

He’s now on a tear about the evil EU daring to try and regulate the best product of the year, Threads

It’s interesting that Threads has entirely leapfrogged the “cool place to chat with chums” phase of its social network existence and gone straight into the “bad office party” phase

everyones there brands influencers blue checks linkdin guys

kinda funny how blue check in facebook world still means verified

i’m no longer complaining about twitter’s “for you” tab after seeing threads so they’ve accomplished that

“Twitter with the TikTok algorithm” is a good description of threads I saw somewhere.

i said that in the twitter thread, but in a more artful way

He’s still got it

TikTok has far fewer brands and celebrities.

Low-hanging fruit, but this review of a $100 box cutter is a masterpiece of the form.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/09/05/studio-neat-keen