John Gruber

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pages: 132 words: 31,976

Getting Real by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson, Matthew Linderman, 37 Signals

call centre, David Heinemeier Hansson, iterative process, John Gruber, knowledge worker, Merlin Mann, Metcalfe's law, performance metric, post-work, premature optimization, Ruby on Rails, slashdot, social bookmarking, Steve Jobs, web application

I think Jobs is keenly aware of the importance of first impressions...I think Jobs looks at the first-run experience and thinks, it may only be one-thousandth of a user's overall experience with the machine, but it's the most important onethousandth, because it's the first one-thousandth, and it sets their expectations and initial impression. —John Gruber, author and web developer (from Interview with John Gruber) Table of contents | Essay list for this chapter | Next essay Get Defensive Design for when things go wrong Let's admit it: Things will go wrong online. No matter how carefully you design your app, no matter how much testing you do, customers will still encounter problems.

Thomas Weber of the Wall Street Journal said it's the best product in its class and David Pogue of the New York Times called it a "very cool" organization tool. Writeboard lets you write, share, revise, and compare text solo or with others. It's the refreshing alternative to bloated word processors that are overkill for 95% of what you write. John Gruber of Daring Fireball said, "Writeboard might be the clearest, simplest web application I've ever seen." Web-guru Jeffrey Zeldman said, "The brilliant minds at 37signals have done it again." Ta-da List keeps all your to-do lists together and organized online. Keep the lists to yourself or share them with others for easy collaboration.


pages: 276 words: 78,094

Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty by David Kadavy

Airbnb, complexity theory, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Hacker News, Isaac Newton, John Gruber, Paul Graham, Ruby on Rails, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, web application, wikimedia commons, Y Combinator

They’re usually designed to have large counters, or are otherwise simplified to maintain the readability of the type at smaller sizes – attributes that looks less than flattering when displayed at larger sizes. You can see this in action in Figure A-11, which features John Gruber’s website, www.daringfireball.net. The larger portions of type – the titles of blog posts and the menu items, for example – are displayed in a more nuanced face, Gill Sans. Although the menu item faces aren’t very large, Gill Sans still wouldn’t read as well in body copy, so Verdana is used instead. Figure A-11 John Gruber’s website uses Verdana for readable body copy and Gill Sans for more interesting headers. Copyright © 2002–2011 John Gruber But this pairing is no accident. Verdana has a humanist letter structure that is quite similar to that of Gill Sans.


pages: 390 words: 114,538

Digital Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Battle for the Internet by Charles Arthur

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, gravity well, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, pre–internet, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, software patent, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the long tail, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, turn-by-turn navigation, upwardly mobile, vertical integration

They’re easy to update; just update it on your server. The silence was almost threatening. The audience knew they were being short-changed. Apple’s developers, after all, had obviously written apps, and Jobs had boasted about the software. So clearly APIs existed. And an SDK must exist for the developers to have written the apps. Afterwards John Gruber, an independent (and professional) blogger whose Daring Fireball site is regarded as a nexus for thinking about Apple (and other) news, called the suggestion ‘insulting, because it’s not a way to write iPhone apps’,34 and said that developers could not be fooled. Jobs, he suggested, should just have said that Apple was working on it but did not have anything to announce yet.

You could run Windows 7 on a tablet, but the experience was dire: icons were too small, and fingers too large to operate the standard Windows interface. Ahead of the launch, Apple’s detractors lost no time in pointing out that Microsoft had tried tablet PCs, and they sold about a million per year, so Apple – with an even tinier share of the PC market – was clearly on course to sell only a few thousand devices. John Gruber, a self-described raconteur (more precisely, a Philadelphia-based blogger who has developed wide and deep connections inside and around Apple), responded: ‘The hype isn’t about Apple possibly unveiling the first tablet computing device; it’s about Apple possibly unveiling the first great one.’5 Third category A few weeks later, with CES all but forgotten, Steve Jobs took the stage at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco to announce a new product – the iPad.

Stripping out what is unnecessary, and improving what is left to the best possible. Even before Jobs left, Apple had an enormous internal project, called the Apple University, to educate its staff in how the most effective traits of the company could be promulgated, refined and reproduced. Even without Jobs, his spirit would still live on inside the company. As John Gruber put it, as he pondered the Apple co-founder’s goodbye, ‘Jobs’s greatest creation isn’t any Apple product. It is Apple itself.’ On 5 October, Jobs’s death was announced. Bill Gates was among the first to offer his condolences, and praise his long-time friend’s legacy: ‘The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come.


pages: 89 words: 24,277

Designing for Emotion by Aarron Walter

Abraham Maslow, big-box store, cotton gin, en.wikipedia.org, game design, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Skype, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, Wall-E, web application

Most people don’t have a love/joy for software like geeks do. Users react with effusive emotion to these cartoony, yet seemingly tangible interfaces enhanced by robotic whirs, bleeps, and blips. You can certainly see the parallels with WALL•E, in physical and personality traits. Both are friendly, endearing, and reliable. Technology blogger John Gruber sums up audience sentiment about Tapbots apps with this simple review (http://bkaprt.com/de/6): I adore the way their apps look and sound. Ironically, Gruber doesn’t even mention the apps’ functionality, though his appreciation of it is implied. He uses the word “adore.” Gruber doesn’t just like these apps; he loves them.


pages: 412 words: 116,685

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple Newton, augmented reality, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, game design, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, hype cycle, intermodal, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, non-fungible token, open economy, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Planet Labs, pre–internet, QR code, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, satellite internet, self-driving car, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, TSMC, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, Y2K

And Apple uses its control over its App Store to prevent competing browsers on its iOS devices. This may be surprising if you regularly use Chrome on your iPhone or iPad. However, these are really just the “iOS system version of [Apple’s Safari] WebKit wrapped around Google’s own browser UI,” according to the Apple expert John Gruber, and the iOS Chrome app [cannot] “use the Chrome rendering or JavaScript engines.” What we think of as Chrome on iOS is simply a variant of Apple’s own Safari browser, but one that logs into Google’s account system.§10 Because Safari underpins all iOS browsers, Apple’s technical decisions for its browser define what the nominally “open web” can and cannot offer developers and users.

Adi Robertson, “Tim Cook Faces Harsh Questions about the App Store from Judge in Fortnite Trial,” The Verge, May 21, 2021, accessed January 5, 2022, https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/21/22448023/epic-apple-fortnite-antitrust-lawsuit-judge-tim-cook-app-store-questions. 9. Nick Wingfield, “IPhone Software Sales Take Off: Apple’s Jobs,” Wall Street Journal, August 11, 2008. 10. John Gruber, “Google Announces Chrome for iPhone and iPad, Available Today,” Daring Fireball, June 28, 2021, accessed January 4, 2022, https://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/06/28/chrome-ios. 11. Kate Rooney, “Apple: Don’t Use Your iPhone to Mine Cryptocurrencies,” CNBC, June 11, 2018, accessed January 4, 2021, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/11/dont-even-think-about-trying-to-bitcoin-with-your-iphone.html. 12.


pages: 137 words: 44,363

Design Is a Job by Mike Monteiro

4chan, crowdsourcing, do what you love, index card, iterative process, John Gruber, Kickstarter, late fees, Steve Jobs

Do you become a well-sought consultant where you only work six months of the year out of your swank modernist home in the hills? The choice is yours. But I’d caution you to stay away from jobs that take you away from the thing you love to do, which is to design things. Although your definition of “designing things” may change. My friend John Gruber once said that Steve Jobs’ greatest accomplishment wasn’t designing any particular Apple product—it was designing Apple itself. At some point you may get to the point where you’re no longer designing specific products, or specific websites, but instead helping to design the teams that design those things.


The Complete Android Guide: 3Ones by Kevin Purdy

car-free, card file, crowdsourcing, Firefox, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, John Gruber, lock screen, QR code, Skype, speech recognition, telemarketer, turn-by-turn navigation

Sign up at appbrain.com (which signs you in through your Google account), download the app, and you can then browse AppBrain's better-organized web market, install apps in bulk, share a list of your current apps with friends, and go a step further with the Fast Web Installer, an app that, once installed and activated online, lets you click a button and have an app instantly download to your phone. (Free) Dropbox Dropbox To paraphrase John Gruber at the Daring Fireball blog, the only people not using Dropbox are probably those who haven't heard of it, or gotten around to installing it. Every sign-up gets 2 GB of free space on Dropbox's servers, which then exists as a kind of magic folder on any computer or smartphone. So Dropbox is great for instantly getting files from your computer to your Android phone, but it's even better at stashing content right from your phone.


pages: 184 words: 53,625

Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age by Steven Johnson

Airbus A320, airport security, algorithmic trading, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Donald Davies, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, Jane Jacobs, John Gruber, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mega-rich, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, techno-determinism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche, working poor, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, your tax dollars at work

In the old days, it might have taken months for details from a John Sculley keynote to make it to the College Hill Bookstore; now the lag is seconds, with dozens of people live-blogging every passing phrase from a Steve Jobs or Tim Cook speech. There are 8,000-word dissections of each new release of OS X at the technological site Ars Technica, written with attention to detail and technical sophistication that far exceed anything a traditional newspaper would ever attempt. Writers such as John Gruber and Donald Norman regularly post intricate critiques of user-interface issues. The traditional newspapers have improved their coverage as well: think of David Pogue’s reviews in The New York Times, or Dow-Jones’s extended technology site, AllThingsD. And that’s not even mentioning the rumor blogs.


pages: 245 words: 68,420

Content Everywhere: Strategy and Structure for Future-Ready Content by Sara Wachter-Boettcher

business logic, crowdsourcing, John Gruber, Kickstarter, linked data, machine readable, search engine result page, semantic web, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, TechCrunch disrupt

The Lowdown on Markdown Just because your content needs markup, that doesn’t mean you or those working in your content management system necessarily need to be able to write it, or even that you must use separate fields to distinguish every little bit of content from the others. Instead, some organizations are experimenting with crafting their content in markdown—a lightweight alternative to using HTML to give content shape that was created by John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame. Unlike full HTML, markdown allows authors to write in a standardized but natural language that can be easily read and understood not just by computers, but by humans as well. For example, instead of the <h1> tag used in HTML, you can simply use a single hash mark to denote a heading: # This text is an H1 Meanwhile, subheadings are made just by adding additional hash marks, like so: ## This text is an H2 ##### This text is an H5 No need to close brackets or fuss with backslashes.


pages: 236 words: 77,098

I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works: Why Your World, Work, and Brain Are Being Creatively Disrupted by Nick Bilton

3D printing, 4chan, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Cass Sunstein, death of newspapers, en.wikipedia.org, Internet of things, Joan Didion, John Gruber, John Markoff, Marshall McLuhan, Nicholas Carr, QR code, recommendation engine, RFID, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The future is already here

People like Carr and Bittman have a clear platform for their views, but we’re also seeing “no names” build big brands around their big personalities—people who anoint themselves and then build their trust level by delivering content that is valued. If you’re an Apple computer enthusiast, you surely will have heard of John Gruber, a Mac expert and writer. He isn’t associated with any big-name news outlets or magazines, but he has built a loyal subscriber base with his website daringfireball.com. He is the sole employee and makes a very healthy six-figure income by selling ads on his site and giving talks to companies. Gary Vaynerchuk, a bigger-than-blogger personality, developed Wine Library TV, his own online network of wine reviews and ratings, which claims 80,000 viewers a day.


pages: 252 words: 78,780

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

“Fuck that, fuck you, fuck this, this is bullshit” is how a top Apple engineering executive reportedly responded when he was shown the floor plans of the company’s $5 billion ring-shaped “spaceship” headquarters in Cupertino, California, and realized his group would be put into open-office spaces. “Fuck this, my team isn’t working like this,” he said. Because his engineers are vital to the company—they design the chips that power the iPhone—Apple built a separate building for them, where they would not have to use the open-office plan, according to John Gruber, a blogger with tight connections at Apple. The open-plan arrangement isn’t just unpleasant. Researchers say open offices can make people stressed out and physically sick. Open offices might even be harming our brains. A Cornell study found workers in noisy open offices had elevated levels of epinephrine, also known as adrenaline, after only three hours of exposure.


pages: 315 words: 85,791

Technical Blogging: Turn Your Expertise Into a Remarkable Online Presence by Antonio Cangiano

23andMe, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, bitcoin, bounce rate, cloud computing, content marketing, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, revision control, Ruby on Rails, search engine result page, slashdot, software as a service, web application

But they really boil down to either providing commentary or giving actual technical instructions (or a mix of both). A pundit blog showcases an author’s insights into an industry or a particular niche. It is typically filled with essays on relevant topics or quotes from other interesting blogs and news stories to which an opinion is added. The perfect example of a pundit who mostly blogs about Apple is John Gruber and his popular blog, Daring Fireball.[11] An instructional blog focuses on HOWTOs. The aim of this type of blog is to provide tutorials or reference material for readers. There may be an opinion here and there, but these are mostly a collection of factual posts. For an example, check out igvita.com (a screenshot of which is shown within the introduction to this book).[12] Which one should you choose?


pages: 336 words: 88,320

Being Geek: The Software Developer's Career Handbook by Michael Lopp

do what you love, finite state, game design, job satisfaction, John Gruber, knowledge worker, reality distortion field, remote working, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sorting algorithm, systems thinking, web application

O'Reilly Media * * * Dedication To Spencer and Claire. My daily reminders of the value of caring about someone deeply. Praise for Being Geek "Michael Lopp is that rare beast: the completely honest manager who uses plain language. You want to know how to cultivate a thriving career in this industry? Listen to Lopp." John Gruber, Daring Fireball "I've seen too many people who were technically brilliant but who you didn't want to let out of a locked room, because you knew they'd get eaten alive in the real world. Being Geek gives them a fighting chance to adapt to corporate life and manage the 'messy parts' of real life."


pages: 324 words: 89,875

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy by Alex Moazed, Nicholas L. Johnson

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, disintermediation, driverless car, fake it until you make it, future of work, gig economy, hockey-stick growth, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, patent troll, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, platform as a service, power law, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, the medium is the message, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

App Store and Google Play statistics can be found at http://www.statista.com. 17. Quoted in Erick Shonfeld, “RIM CEO Jim Balsillie To Steve Jobs: ‘You Don’t Need An App For The Web,’” Techcrunch, November 16, 2010, http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/16/rim-ceo-balsillie-jobsapp-web/. 18. John Gruber, “WWDC 2007 Keynote News,” June 11, 2007, http://daringfireball.net/2007/06/wwdc_2007_keynote. 19. Quoted in Jonathan S. Geller, “Open Letter to BlackBerry Bosses: Senior RIM Exec Tells All as Company Crumbles Around Him,” June 30, 2011, http://bgr.com/2011/06/30/open-letter-to-blackberry-bosses-senior-rim-exec-tells-all-as-company-crumbles-around-him/. 20.


pages: 377 words: 110,427

The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz by Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig

Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, American Legislative Exchange Council, Benjamin Mako Hill, bitcoin, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brewster Kahle, Cass Sunstein, deliberate practice, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, failed state, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, full employment, functional programming, Hacker News, Howard Zinn, index card, invisible hand, Joan Didion, John Gruber, Lean Startup, low interest rates, More Guns, Less Crime, peer-to-peer, post scarcity, power law, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, semantic web, single-payer health, SpamAssassin, SPARQL, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, unbiased observer, wage slave, Washington Consensus, web application, WikiLeaks, working poor, zero-sum game

He wanted openness, debate, rationality, and critical thinking, and he refused to cut corners—even at the age of thirteen. RSS itself was fundamentally about sharing, taking the content out of its presented form on a website and allowing it to be redistributed and aggregated by other individuals and entities. Another of Swartz’s projects, the webpage authoring tool Markdown (2004, co-designed with John Gruber), was a lightweight tool to easily generate webpages and blogposts by turning marked-up text into HTML. Both point to one of Swartz’s central driving passions: making the creation, distribution, and freedom of information as easy and frictionless as possible. Swartz’s technical skills were obviously superior, but what differentiated him from most programmers, even some of the greatest open-source gurus, was the way he went about his technical projects.


pages: 385 words: 101,761

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire by Bruce Nussbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, declining real wages, demographic dividend, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, game design, gamification, gentrification, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gruber, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lone genius, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Minsky moment, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, reshoring, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The Myth of the Rational Market, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, We are the 99%, Y Combinator, young professional, Zipcar

It had music by the Franks, some speed editing, and a lot of honesty. Provost and Gerhardt asked people to pledge $10,000 to begin making the Glif. To their amazement, they raised the entire $10,000 in just over an hour after Daring Fireball, a website hosted by tech maven and one of the most powerful Apple commentators, John Gruber, ran the video. And the money kept pouring in. They had expected maybe four or five hundred orders, but in the end, they received $137,417 for five thousand preorders from 5,273 “backers.” The top sites for generating business were Kickstarter, their own site, Google, Facebook, Daring Fireball, TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog), Twitter, and the Economist.


pages: 390 words: 109,519

Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media by Tarleton Gillespie

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, borderless world, Burning Man, complexity theory, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, deep learning, do what you love, Donald Trump, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, eternal september, fake news, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, game design, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jean Tirole, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral panic, multi-sided market, Netflix Prize, Network effects, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, two-sided market, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

See also “Average App Store Review Times,” http://appreviewtimes.com/. 25Laura McGann, “Mark Fiore Can Win a Pulitzer Prize, but He Can’t Get his iPhone Cartoon App Past Apple’s Satire Police,” Nieman Lab, April 15, 2010. http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/04/mark-fiore-can-win-a-pulitzer-prize-but-he-cant-get-his-iphone-cartoon-app-past-apples-satire-police/. 26Gabe Jacobs, “Bushisms iPhone App Rejected,” Gabe Jacobs Blog, September 13, 2008, http://www.gabejacobsblog.com/2008/09/13/bushisms-iphone-app-rejected/ (no longer available online); Alec, “Freedom Time Rejected by Apple for App Store,” Juggleware Dev Blog, September 21, 2008, https://www.juggleware.com/blog/2008/09/freedomtime-rejected-by-apple-for-app-store/. 27Robin Wauters, “Apple Rejects Obama Trampoline iPhone App, Leaves Us Puzzled,” TechCrunch, February 7, 2009, http://techcrunch.com/2009/02/07/apple-rejects-obama-trampoline-iphone-app-leaves-us-puzzled/; Don Bora, “Rejected App (Biden’s Teeth),” Eight Bit Blog, June 6, 2009, http://blog.eightbitstudios.com/rejected-app. 28“iSinglePayer iPhone App Censored by Apple,” Lambda Jive, September 26, 2009, http://lambdajive.wordpress.com/2009/09/. 29Alec, “Steve Jobs Responds,” Juggleware Dev Blog, September 23, 2008, http://www.juggleware.com/blog/2008/09/steve-jobs-writes-back/. 30Ryan Singel, “Jobs Rewrites History about Apple Ban on Satire,” Wired, June 3, 2010, https://www.wired.com/2010/06/jobs-apple-satire-ban/. 31Alexia Tsotsis, “WikiLeaks iPhone App Made $5,840 before Pulled by Apple, $1 From Each Sale Will Be Donated to WikiLeaks,” TechCrunch, December 22, 2010, https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/22/wikileaks-2/. 32Rebecca Greenfield, “Apple Rejected the Drone Tracker App Because It Could,” Atlantic, August 30, 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/08/apple-rejected-drone-tracker-app-because-it-could/324120/. 33Ryan Chittum, “Apple’s Speech Policies Should Still Worry the Press,” Columbia Journalism Review, April 20, 2010, http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/apples_speech_policies_should.php. 34Charles Christensen, “iPad Publishing No Savior for Small Press, LGBT Comics Creators,” Prism Comics, June 2010, http://prismcomics.org/display.php?id=1858 (no longer available online). 35John Gruber, “Ninjawords: iPhone Dictionary, Censored by Apple,” Daring Fireball, August 4, 2009, https://daringfireball.net/2009/08/ninjawords; John Gruber, “Phil Schiller Responds Regarding Ninjawords and the App Store,” Daring Fireball, August 6, 2009, https://daringfireball.net/2009/08/phil_schiller_app_store; Ryan Chittum, “Apple’s Controlling Instincts Censor Ulysses All Over Again,” Columbia Journalism Review, June 11, 2010, http://archives.cjr.org/the_audit/apples_controlling_instincts_c.php; James Montgomerie, “Whither Eucalyptus?”


pages: 396 words: 113,613

Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin, Cory Doctorow

Aaron Swartz, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, book value, collective bargaining, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate personhood, corporate raider, COVID-19, disintermediation, distributed generation, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Firefox, forensic accounting, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, George Floyd, gig economy, Golden age of television, Google bus, greed is good, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, index fund, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microplastics / micro fibres, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, passive income, peak TV, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, time value of money, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, WeWork

Order Granting in Part and Denying in Part Motion for Preliminary Injunction, Epic Games, Inc. v. Apple Inc., 4:20-cv-05640-YGR, Dkt. No. 61 (N.D. Cal. Oct. 9, 2020), https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/21949772/gov.uscourts.cand.364265.118.0.pdf. 14. Epic Games v. Apple. 15. Epic Games v. Apple. 16. John Gruber, “Kara Swisher: ‘Is It Finally Hammer Time for Apple and Its App Store?’” Daring Fireball, June 19, 2020, https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/06/19/swisher-app-store-hey; Kara Swisher, “Is It Finally Hammer Time for Apple and Its App Store?” New York Times, June 19, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/opinion/apple-app-store-hey.html; Ben Thompson, “Hey v.


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The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant

Airbnb, animal electricity, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Black Lives Matter, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, deep learning, DeepMind, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Higgs boson, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, information security, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, John Gruber, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Large Hadron Collider, Lyft, M-Pesa, MITM: man-in-the-middle, more computing power than Apollo, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, pirate software, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, TSMC, Turing test, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, zero day

So, just weeks before the release of the first iPhone, at Apple’s annual developer’s conference in San Francisco, Jobs announced that they would be doing apps after all—kind of. Using the Safari engine, they could write web 2.0 apps “that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone.” John Gruber, perhaps the best-known Apple blogger and a developer himself, explained that the “message went over like a lead balloon.” Indeed. “You can’t bullshit developers.… If web apps—which are only accessible over a network; which don’t get app icons in the iPhone home screen; which don’t have any local data storage—are such a great way to write software for iPhone, then why isn’t Apple using this technique for any of their own iPhone apps?”