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John Gruber

My 2015 Interview With ‘Becoming Steve Jobs’ Authors Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli

itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/brent-schlender-rick-tetzeli/id980487310?mt=2

Ten years ago I played two small roles in the release of the aforelinked Becoming Steve Jobs. First, I got to announce the book here at Daring Fireball, after having been sent an advance copy a few weeks earlier. My praise for the book then was glowing, but in hindsight, I think I undersold just how good — and how essential — it is. At the time of its launch, the book remained in the shadow of Walter Isaacson’s Jobs biography. Ten years later, I refer back to Becoming Steve Jobs regularly; Isaacson’s book almost never.

Second, the SoHo Apple Store in New York hosted a “Meet the Authors” event, and I had the pleasure of playing host for the interview. It’s still available, both as video and audio. And as I wrote at the time, “I’m kind of proud that it got flagged as ‘explicit’ — but that was Bill Gates’s fault.”

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John Gruber

The Original ‘Something’s Rotten in Cupertino’ — Brent Schlender’s 1997 Story for Fortune

money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1997/03/03/222710/

During Friday’s episode of Dithering — a free listen — Ben Thompson reminded me that my headline reference last week, alluding to the well-known line from Hamlet, had been used, to great effect, once before. Brent Schlender wrote a crackerjack piece for Fortune in March 1997...

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Palfrey's alarm yesterday was about the Americans who were whisked off to El Salvador. Who they are and what they're accused of is unknown, as if there's any substance to the accusation. No indictment, trial, verdict, appeals, etc. El Salvador wants to be the US dumping ground for undesirables. This is where we have, as Timothy Snyder says, regime change. I thought the elmination of Social Security would have been the moment the light went on for most Americans, but this should be it. Citizens like you and me being disappeared. It's a pretty quick way to get most of the people to behave according to the rules of the government, or off you go.

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Poking around on old servers I found this cute little app that jsonifies an RSS feed. Not sure why I did it.

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I put out a call for Old School Bloggers, and got back a bunch of notes on Mastodon. Gettin' the band back together! :-)

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Pradeep is using WordLand for some of his WordPress blog posts, and has given them a special category. Very smart, good use of categories.

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John Gruber

Dithering: ‘Being Real Points’

dithering.passport.online/member/episode/being-real-points

The March 2025 cover art for Dithering, showing a man, high atop a cityscape, precariously crossing a high wire.

A new feature in our membership CMS (Passport — check it out) lets us make individual episodes of Dithering free for everyone to listen to (on the web). I can’t think of a better way to first use this new capability than to open up Friday’s episode, recapping my “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino” article, and the resonance with which it hit. Even the cover art — selected weeks ago — captures how I’ve felt this week.

Give it a listen. Subscribe if you enjoy it.

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Blogging is due for a refresh

A lot has changed since the last time we took a serious look at blogging. A few items, as examples.

  1. When RSS came along Markdown didn't exist. The two technologies belong together, imho.
  2. Websockets have replaced long polling.
  3. Servers got cheap! (and easy to deploy).
  4. SQL is fast and the tools are much better.
  5. The user interfaces of all the Web 2.0+ products didn't exist last time we created new blogging communities. We can borrow ideas from twitter-like systems, even huge products like Facebook and Spotify have innovations that come long after the initial wave of blogging.

But one thing stays the same -- all the components are replaceable. Absolutely zero lock-in. We use simple standard APIs where they exist, and create new minimal formats and protocols where they don't.

Blogging has a simple philosophy that remains constant.

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WordLand v0.50

Adding and deleting categories are part of WordLand 0.50, released earlier today. These are the same categories you can edit in the WordPress user interface. But I learned that you need to be able to add categories when you're writing. You want this functionality to be close-by.

Two columns in the Categories dialog. More efficient use of space.

Context menu with two new commands.

Change notes are here.

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Seattle Xcoders Presentation Meetings Return

Thanks to the enterprising and tireless Xcoders organizers (not me — I’m just the PR guy), we’re finally returning to presentation meetings. At long last!

Thursday, April 3. Read all about it on the Xcoders blog.

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Adding and deleting categories coming to WordLand, probably later today. These are the same categories you can edit in the WordPress user interface. But I learned that you need to be able to add categories when you're writing. You want this functionality to be close-by.

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John Gruber

★ A Postscript on the Singular Nature of Mark Gurman’s Reporting

But I’d feel a lot better about our collective conventional wisdom regarding the nature of this particular all-hands Siri meeting if it had leaked to, and been reported on, by more than one reporter at more than one publication.

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John Gruber

WorkOS: Scalable, Secure Authentication

workos.com/?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=q12025

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring this week at DF. Modern authentication should be seamless and secure. WorkOS makes it easy to integrate features like MFA, SSO, and RBAC.

Whether you’re replacing passwords, stopping fraud, or adding enterprise auth, WorkOS can help you build frictionless auth that scales. Future-proof your authentication stack with the identity layer trusted by OpenAI, Cursor, Perplexity, and Vercel. Upgrade your auth today.

 ★ 

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John Gruber

How to Generate a Report of Apple Intelligence Requests Sent to Private Cloud Compute

support.apple.com/guide/iphone/apple-intelligence-and-privacy-iphe3f499e0e/ios

From Apple’s support documentation: You can generate a report of requests your iPhone has sent to Private Cloud Compute. Go to Settings, then tap Privacy & Security. Tap Apple Intelligence Report, then choose a report duration for the last 15 minutes (default) or ...

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Looking for help with wpcom API in Node.js app.

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John Gruber

New RCS Spec From GSM Association Adds E2EE; Both Apple and Google to Support It

theverge.com/news/629620/apple-iphone-e2ee-encryption-rcs-messaging-android

Jess Weatherbed, reporting for The Verge: iPhone and Android users will be able to exchange end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) RCS messages in the near future thanks to newly updated RCS specifications. The GSM Association announced that the latest RCS standard includes E2EE ba...

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John Gruber

Apple Did Demo Swift Assist at WWDC Last Year, and Has Shown It, Under NDA, Since Then

macstories.net/news/a-look-at-code-completion-and-swift-assist-coming-in-xcode-16/

In an item earlier this week observing that Swift Assist, the most ambitious Xcode-related Apple Intelligence feature shown at WWDC last year, not only hasn’t yet shipped but still is not in beta, I wondered whether Apple actually demoed it live last year. John Voorhees, wri...

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John Gruber

Imagine How Powerful Meta Might Be Today If Their PR Wasn’t Run by Sycophantic Morons

businessinsider.com/meta-book-mark-zuckerberg-defense-drawing-more-attention-2025-3

Katie Notopoulos, writing at Business Insider (Apple News+ link): It’s possible that this strident defense is backfiring — creating a “Streisand Effect” that’s publicizing the book even more. Notopoulos isn’t one to pull punches or hedge, normally, but there’s no quest...

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John Gruber

‘Ted Lasso’ Renewed for a Fourth Season

hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/ted-lasso-renewed-season-4-apple-tv-1236163347/

Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter:

After more than a year of speculation, Apple TV+ has ordered a fourth season of its Emmy-winning comedy Ted Lasso. The pickup comes after co-creator and star Jason Sudeikis closed a deal to reprise his role as the title character, the manager of the fictional AFC Richmond soccer club in London.

I dig Ted Lasso but this is like 0.1 percent as interesting as When are we going to get Severance season 3?! Gimme gimme gimme. And we haven’t even gotten to next week’s season 2 finale yet.

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John Gruber

Best vs. First

cnbc.com/2016/10/07/the-one-great-reason-apple-ceo-tim-cook-doesnt-care-about-being-first.html

CNBC story from 2016: At a recent public appearance at the Utah Tech Tour, in a conversation moderated by Utah’s Senator Orrin Hatch, Apple CEO Tim Cook pointed out that Microsoft had tablets on the market decades before Apple. Cook emphasized his company’s timing comin...