indefensible: john gruber

Wait til he hears about trade unions. The gall of these people

would be fun to go to work at apple and be the only person there, riding an electric scooter around the giant loop blasting whitney houston from a bluetooth speaker

silviojustwhenithoughtiwasout dot gif

Maybe that’s why Chrome is so memory and energy efficient. https://t.co/eVaZvffAkP

— John Gruber (@gruber) August 16, 2021

John eat a dick

I mean Chrome also sucks but yknow

some people are just born assholes

He’s perfecting it atm though. (also IE 3 was utter shite despite the marriage-destroying crunch so his point is doubly stupid)

i wonder if there's a gene for 'will definitely be a douchebag'

A post where Gruber whines that his coffee maker got snubbed for being too expensive

He'd be horrified to find out you can buy a $100 Bonavita and a $40 Chemex and have a less cool-looking Ratio Eight.

Christ this guy. Say what you will about Wirecutter but they’ve never ever had a focus on the highest end of anything! The whole premise is “how to spend just enough money to make you happy if you want something good but don’t care about spectacular”

You don’t need a high end Wirecutter just look at what they suggest and find something that costs 2 to 10 times as much

Increasingly difficult to remember a time when this guy’s point of view was useful or interesting, maybe it never existed

ding ding ding ding

is he getting divorced or something? his posting recently reminds me of men I know struggling either with mid-life or with breakups.

he’s been divorced from reality for a while now!

the pivot from that era of mid-00s blogging where you could post cool shots from kubrick movies, mumble some stuff about the best way to do web design, fetishize typography, and then talk about the best way to use your apple devices to the modern era completely broke this dude

there’s a different apple-oriented site I go to when I want to giggle at absurdity (macstories) because they really crank it up a bunch of notches. like, an entire series of posts on how to buy thousands of dollars of accessories so you can use your iPad as a primary computer

gruber’s just a weird cranky old neoliberal who thinks he’s a wonk when he has absolutely zero technical knowledge

i probably keep making that post, don’t i

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