74 karma · joined April 8, 2012
He also writes really good essays. Can we please also have more people delivering this kind of medicine?
Look, I agree that Gruber has blinders on sometimes. (I thought his posts today about earPods was blindingly positive until the addendum.) But people seem to react with vitriol more than arguments.
I find Daring Fireball to be at its best when Gruber pushes back on Apple's design decisions with thoughtful critique: skeuomorphism, Safari tabs experiments, this screen thing.
I guess this is the official launch.
I'm concerned about the rules about embedding a tweet. So now there'll be all this widget stuff on websites when all I'm trying to read is a quoted tweet? I guess this move is to let Twitter track my behavior across the web (http://dcurt.is/twitter-is-tracking-you-on-the-web), but I worry about its impact on other sites that use the API.
You have an interesting point about commoditization, however. It makes me think about the IM space and all the different services there.
As for eyeballs, I think a Twitter competitor can do what media companies do — pay for certain celebrities, authors, speakers to move their microblog to their service — do a few of those, and you'll start to have an audience.
Slightly off topic: The Atlantic had an article yesterday about DF's 10th anniversary (http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/12/08/happy-10...), and it had this bit of astute criticism:
The past year, DF hasn't been as enjoyable as its been in the past. Apple, Gruber's Beatrice, is engorged as a company, and seems now to be veering from interestingly complex to dully complicated. [...] But, in light of that victory, his renegade confidence has become an assured superiority. He hasn't written, for a long time, an engaging description of a laptop or an account of an anthropomorphized interface element.
To which Jason Kottke agreed: http://kottke.org/12/08/an-appreciation-of-10-years-of-darin...
So perhaps Gruber is consciously responding to these critiques and upping his game - which is nice, because this post was a great read.
If anything, they should hear him out more because he was an early advocate.
Regarding the article, I think flash photography should still be banned, simply because it makes for a better museum experience. Can you imagine the crowd in front of the Mona Lisa? It would be like red carpet for the Oscars.
Beyond a startup, I would also recommend volunteering, doing sports, taking a class, or if you're spiritually-inclined, going to church, in order to make new friendships. Those tend to be more regular, and you're not so focused on the conversation itself.
Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates' "Head First Java" book.
Her SCJP book is also pretty good, but it's more skewed towards the certification exam.
I'd guess a part of this may be that Gruber wants an editorial reboot with the new show, so that he has more control and it directly complements Daring Fireball (Note the new description: "Sort of like the director's commentary track for Daring Fireball.") I actually look forward to it.
Dan's a good host on other shows, and a class act, but I've felt that he and Gruber lacked chemistry for a long time.
I've had at least five friends who have unknowingly shared their readings on Facebook. A few of them were guys who were reading about sexy gossip and celebrity bikini shots and whatnot. The result was embarrassing and annoying for them.
As for just using the social reader as a user — well, I shouldn't have to agree to an app and share my social graph just to read news stories. Friction Sharing is great and working already.