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John Gruber

John Gruber daringfireball.net

Electron and the decline of native apps

Mac users don’t care about mac apps like they used to. Today and the future is a web platform world with JavaScript at the center morphing into this gigantic blackhole (mainly a gravity metaphor) with everything else being pulled into its orbit.

The more Mac users there are, the more Mac apps we should see. The problem is, the users who really care about good native apps — users who know HIG violations when they see them, who care about performance, who care about Mac apps being right — were mostly already on the Mac. A lot of newer Mac users either don’t know or don’t care about what makes for a good Mac app.

John Gruber also quoted SwiftOnSecurity regarding Microsoft’s switch to Chromium as Windows’s built-in rendering engine, saying:

This is the end of desktop applications. There’s nowhere but JavaScript.

John Gruber daringfireball.net

Daring Fireball on Facebook giving advertisers your shadow contact info

Commentary on commentary here, but seriously — we obviously track news on privacy and security — Gruber’s paraphrase from Kashmir Hill’s post on Gizmodo is priceless.

Here is Gruber’s take…

Hill: Facebook, are you doing this terrible thing?

Facebook: No, we don’t do that.

Hill, months later: Here’s academic research that shows you do this terrible thing.

Facebook: Yes, of course we do that.

I agree with Gruber on Facebook being a morally criminal enterprise. Also, I try to avoid Facebook, aside from my wife’s usage, at all costs. I’m even leery of Instagram, which is sad because one of my professional hobbies is photography. Gruber says:

At this point I consider Facebook a criminal enterprise. Maybe not legally, but morally. How in the above scenario is Facebook not stealing Ben’s privacy?

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