Ten Years of Daring Fireball ⇥ daringfireball.net

Daring Fireball turned ten years old yesterday. John Gruber’s first paragraph, from his first post “Baby Needs a New Pair of Processors“:

You might think that if you were about to debut a Macintosh-oriented weblog, it would be quite a stroke of good fortune for some Really Big News to break on the very day you plan to start writing. Like, say, a brand new line of PowerMac G4’s.

You’d think that after ten years, something would change. But as David Smith points out, the design is almost identical. And, as Shawn Blanc notes, the writing is classic Gruber. This ten year run even got a little writeup on The Atlantic‘s blog.

There wasn’t a clear celebratory post on Daring Fireball, but Gruber’s review of the retina MacBook Pro (mostly its display, really) served that purpose just fine:

When I first started using the retina MacBook Pro, the whole thing felt fake, like I was using a demo version of Mac OS X ginned up in After Effects for shooting closeups of the screen for, say, an Apple commercial in which they didn’t want UI elements to look pixelated. Some degree of pixelation has always been part of my Mac experience.

I first found Daring Fireball in around 2004, but I began reading it religiously (like so many of you certainly do) in about 2007. The writing has remained consistently precise and honest all these years. Despite the imitators DF spawned (yours truly, included), there is one original, and it’s still as snarky as on day one. Congratulations, Mr. Gruber.