Links tagged with “John Gruber”
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John Gruber's Thoughts on the iPad
I especially liked this bit:
Used to be that to drive a car, you, the driver, needed to operate a clutch pedal and gear shifter and manually change gears for the transmission as you accelerated and decelerated. Then came the automatic transmission. With an automatic, the transmission is entirely abstracted away. The clutch is gone. To go faster, you just press harder on the gas pedal.
That’s where Apple is taking computing. A car with an automatic transmission still shifts gears; the driver just doesn’t need to know about it. A computer running iPhone OS still has a hierarchical file system; the user just never sees it.
Untitled Document Syndrome
Great post by John Gruber on how effective applications can be when they don’t require the author to ever “save” anything. For instance, he refers to iMovie, where the user never has to deal with saving a file somewhere–the application just figures it behind the scenes. Also check out Chris Clark’s response “By Proxy, By Proxy, By Proxy”, where he talks about how download windows could be helped by the very same idea.
Communicating with code
Paul Buchheit discusses how Gmail was first built: not by long meetings about strategy, but rather through prototyping. I tend to really enjoy this approach, because it allows you to actually try thing outs, instead of just discussing if a feature might work. It may mean having some truly awful code at first, but it’s a great way to really learn what works and what doesn’t, and I think with the rise of frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django, this style of development becomes a lot easier.