27 items tagged “john-gruber”
2024
I really dislike the practice of replacing passwords with email “magic links”. Autofilling a password from my keychain happens instantly; getting a magic link from email can take minutes sometimes, and even in the fastest case, it’s nowhere near instantaneous. Replacing something very fast — password autofill — with something slower is just a terrible idea.
I listened to the whole 15-minute podcast this morning. It was, indeed, surprisingly effective. It remains somewhere in the uncanny valley, but not at all in a creepy way. Just more in a “this is a bit vapid and phony” way. [...] But ultimately the conversation has all the flavor of a bowl of unseasoned white rice.
Everyone alive today has grown up in a world where you can’t believe everything you read. Now we need to adapt to a world where that applies just as equally to photos and videos. Trusting the sources of what we believe is becoming more important than ever.
What Apple unveiled last week with Apple Intelligence wasn't so much new products, but new features—a slew of them—for existing products, powered by generative AI.
[...] These aren't new apps or new products. They're the most used, most important apps Apple makes, the core apps that define the Apple platforms ecosystem, and Apple is using generative AI to make them better and more useful—without, in any way, rendering them unfamiliar.
The MacBook Airs are Apple’s best-selling laptops; the iPad Pros are Apple’s least-selling iPads. I think it’s as simple as this: the current MacBook Airs have the M3, not the M4, because there isn’t yet sufficient supply of M4 chips to satisfy demand for MacBook Airs.
2023
And the notion that security updates, for every user in the world, would need the approval of the U.K. Home Office just to make sure the patches weren’t closing vulnerabilities that the government itself is exploiting — it boggles the mind. Even if the U.K. were the only country in the world to pass such a law, it would be madness, but what happens when other countries follow?
First Impressions of Vision Pro and VisionOS. John Gruber’s description of his thirty minute Vision Pro demo includes a bunch of details I haven’t seen described anywhere else, including how calibration and corrective lenses work and how precise and stable the overlays of additional information are.
2020
Without touching upon the question of who’s right and who’s wrong in the specific case of Basecamp’s Hey app, or the broader questions of what, if anything, ought to change in Apple’s App Store policies, an undeniable and important undercurrent to this story is that the business model policies of the App Store have resulted in a tremendous amount of resentment. This spans the entire gamut from one-person indies all the way up to the handful of large corporations that can be considered Apple’s peers or near-peers.
2018
I spent more time on my iPhone X review than anything I’ve written in years, and it went to paper twice. (Here’s a scan of my second printed draft, with handwritten revisions.) My thing is that I don’t use my favorite pen — which, of course, has black ink — but instead a pen with red ink. Editing is an angry, bloody act and therefore must be done in red.
2010
32.38 percent of visitors to DF last week did not have Flash.
Who Can Do Something About Those Blue Boxes? John Gruber makes the case for the fading significance of Flash, brought about by Apple’s point-blank refusal to support it on the iPhone or iPad. “Flash is no longer ubiquitous. There’s a big difference between “everywhere” and “almost everywhere”.”
The Tablet. John Gruber further demonstrates his mastery of long-form blogging. It’s reassuring to know that he started putting the notes for this entry together way back on the 24th of September.
2009
The OS Opportunity. John Gruber repeats his argument that PC makers should create their own OSes, and points out that compatibility concerns are less important than they’ve ever been because “the Web provides us with a core set of software and APIs that work everywhere”.
This is very interesting technology. But that Adobe would go to this length suggests that they suspect that Apple will never allow the Flash runtime on the iPhone.
2008
I'll put forth one central, overriding guideline for iPhone UI design: Figure out the absolute least you need to do to implement the idea, do just that, and then polish the hell out of the experience.
ExpanDrive. Looks like this SFTP mounting application for OS X fixes the problems I’ve had with sshfs (which tends to freeze things up if you lose your network connection while using it).
2007
Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers' hands in February.
For any song you already own on CD, Apple is asking you to pay three times for it in order to use it as a ringtone on your iPhone: once for the CD you’ve already purchased, again to buy a needless duplicate of the track from the iTunes Store, and a third time to generate the ringtone.
Ways in Which iTunes’s Just-Released Official Ringtone Support Is Weird, Rude, and/or Just Plain Buggy. I’ve long been saying that the existence of a ringtone “industry” is a bug, not a feature.
It Is Estimated That NBC Could Not Have Screwed This iTunes Thing Up Any Worse. NBC’s request that Apple “stiffen anti-piracy provisions” is down-right scary.
This is all your app is: a collection of tiny details.
Mobile Device Connectivity to Exchange using IMAP vs Exchange ActiveSync (via) I count 14 instances of “experience” in this 1,000 word blog entry. Do real people talk like this?
CSSEdit 2.5 Out Now! (via) Like John Gruber says, this is the best implementation of application tabs I’ve ever seen.
Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Macrovision CEO Fred Amoroso’s Response to Steve Jobs’s “Thoughts on Music”. By John Gruber.
Reading Between the Lines of Steve Jobs’s ’Thoughts on Music’. John Gruber’s analysis.
Mac OS X and OS X are not the same thing, although they are most certainly siblings. The days of lazily referring to "Mac OS X" as "OS X" are now over.
2004
Daring Fireball: Security Cannot Be Spun. Apple’s communication handling of the recent security problem was atrocious.