SmarterBits

John Gruber, in an interview with Brent Simmons and Daniel Pasco:

What I remember about NetNewsWire back then is that it single-handedly made me spend more time in Mac OS X. At the time, and for a while after that, I had two machines: one running Mac OS 9 and one running Mac OS X. OS X was the new frontier, shinier, the one with a future. But it was slow. Mac OS 9 was clean, fast, and familiar. And most of my favorite apps at the time ran on both, making it relatively easy to switch or dual-boot.

But not NetNewsWire.

Another bit of symbiosis was Daring Fireball’s inclusion in NetNewsWire’s list of default feeds. New NetNewsWire users became new Daring Fireball readers just by launching the app. That was the biggest and most consistent driver of traffic growth in Daring Fireball’s early years.

What’s most striking about this interview is the conviviality of the three parties as they reminisce about the history of a software application. There’s something about NetNewsWire that seems to strike a chord specifically because it seems to have been around so long and part of the personal history of many a people from Gruber’s generation. It’s fascinating to think how much impact something as simple as an RSS reader can have.

10 years from now, I’m pretty sure people from my generation will be talking about Instapaper with that same sense of fondness and appreciation.

Posted at 5:13pm and tagged with: daring fireball, gruber, instapaper, net news wire, one column, rss, tech, readlater,.

October 29th 2010

In Case You Needed More Convincing

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John Gruber, circa February 2008:

“In my initial Macworld Expo coverage, I asked for email from readers who had pre-ordered Airs, asking why they bought one. Responses (and there were many) ran nearly 50-50 between those who bought the Air as a secondary machine and those who bought it as their “fast enough for me and I never use FireWire anyway” main machine. Given the nerd-skewed demographics of the DF audience, I suspect the Air-as-secondary-Mac group is way overrepresented in the responses I received. My money says most people buying an Air will be using it as their one and only computer. Those critics predicting a sales flop seemingly aren’t aware that this second group even exists.

The smartest thing I’ve read about the MacBook Air is this piece by David Galbraith, wherein he points out that the Air’s CPU is several hundred times more powerful than an original Intel Pentium, and most people still use computers for the same sort of tasks. ”

“”What struck me regarding Macworld’s MacBook Air benchmarks wasn’t how much worse the Air performed than the standard MacBook or MacBook Pro, but how much better it performed than their baseline notebook, a 1.67 GHz 15-inch PowerBook G4 — the fastest Mac notebook you could buy two years ago, and the very computer I still use every day. That the Air isn’t as fast as a regular MacBook does not matter because the Air — for most people and most tasks — is clearly fast enough.”

I’d say the same thing can be said about today’s Macbook Airs.

Posted at 12:18pm and tagged with: macbook air, daring fireball, john, gruber,.