This is the place to leave suggestions and requests.
- Topics you’d like to see covered
- Things you’d like to know about working for Apple that I may not have covered (or even thought about)
- General stylistic and editorial comments about this work in progress
I’ll be editing these comments more strictly than I do in the other comment areas, to keep it concise and on-topic. Please use the comments area of individual posts if your suggestion relates only to that item.
I think it would be interesting if you could write about the international workings of Apple and what Steve thinks about them. It often seems to me here in the UK that we mish out on part of what makes Apple great. The support is shoddy (my iBook was away for six weeks to be repaired then it was sent back but still broken – finally after sending it away four times but it still not being fixed they agreed to replace it). Also things generally come later internationally. Perhaps this is inevitable from a US company but I would be interested to know what feelings about this are inside Apple.
Would be excellent with a podcast of the content on this site…
Hi Mike,
I’ve been reading your website since the beginning, when it had like 3 posts on it. I still remember the old template used, w/the Writers Block Live box in a blue tone and a more close-up shot of the pen. At the right I could find about 3 white boxes w/â€Put your ad here†written on them. All this included in a sensation of a very promissing website, where I could finally know lots of inside information about the technology company I like most.
), but in the condition that “Writers Block Live†is today, it’s certainly much less attractive then it was a few months ago.
But time have passed, not much but still passed. As me, loads of people from all around came around w/the avid curiosity about what some call the “Cult of Macâ€, it was even “slashdoted“! As consequence for those happenings, an ever increasing demanding for bandwidth that we all web-state owners are afraid of.
I know that the costs to keep up a website popular as yours aren’t cheap, even though the price of storage is decreasing everyday. I know that you still want to share the writing of this book, and still receive our instant feedback for it. But one thing I can’t understand is your option to accomplish that through making “Writers Block Live†a classified page, packed w/tons of eye blinking graphics to, worse, unrelated stuff. And to complicate the situation, make the very heart of your project (the writings of “Jobs I’ve Known”) almost disappear because it’s buried under tons of ads.
Shortly after I started visiting your website, I notice the appearance of Google Ads. Maybe because of it’s dominance over the internet, or because it’s mechanism of showing ads related to what it’s showed on the page, or even because people are so thankful to use Google tools and service (that many rely on to survive in the internet), I couldn’t complaint. And actually you may find something that is of your interest.
By the same time, the white boxes at the right on the main page started to give their places to ads (including from Google), which also are acceptable.
However to my disappointment (and disgust), by the middle of this month your main page started to get polluted w/15 ads, some of them are pretty big, using shocking colors to get excelled from whatever else at the page. For me, more than the extra cost I’m paying to navigate at your website (because the many more KB added for the graphics on the ads — and this under a sluggish 33.6 Kbps connection here in Guantánamo, Cuba; paying €6 an hour for it), I’m suffering to find the content I want because I need almost archeological knowledge to dig under so many unrelated stuff from annoying ads.
When I have written at the address bar of my web browser, I’m not looking for shopping women’s underwear for valentines day (even because in Brasil, where I was born, we celebrate it at June 12th, for Saint Anthony day) nor free-shipping from a store that doesn’t even accept international credit cards (because I’m not an US resident), nor I need a graphic of a blond woman telling me that some service is selling US$ 2,95 .com domains. When I want this stuff, I look at Froogle or search somewhere more appropiate. When at Writes Block Live, I’m in search of the Apple’s backstage and also your comments on Aperture and DRM. And you can bring this w/o all the annoyance you are putting on us today.
The decision of summarized text on RSS is surely understandable (although people like Siracusa would be upset, as he said that NetNewsWire is his default browser); putting text ads or 1 graphic ad at the page of your articles is something everyone may expect to find; adding “Writers Block Live†branded merchandise beyond bringing revenue adds “cool factor†to it; putting a few adds at the main page won’t annoy people, but privileging them like and multiplying them by 5, like what is happening today, surely make many of us upset and that way have lower consideration w/it’s content.
The internet is full of personal sites that are popular, all having high bandwidth demands, but that doesn’t mean that all of them used the option to make themselves a Christmas tree of ads. See for example Daring Fireball .
This site has it’s RSS loaded in every NetNewsWire copy (which is by far the most popular and dominant RSS reader), but still have a clean page that incredibly just show only 1 text add, for all of it’s content. Now look at Kotke , and how clean it’s webpage. And he dedicates himself 100% for it’s blog. And finalizing, look at Gui Leite’s , which has the most popular podcast in Portuguese . All of them high demand but none clogged w/ads.
Sorry by the length of this, but it was really sad to me to see one of my favorite bookmarks turned up in a corkboard of ads. I can’t wait to see the release of your book, and I’ll surely be one of the the first in line to buy it (unless if it costs like US$80
I’m confident that this is just a temporary lack of taste and you’re doing your best to bring us the best experience when reading your site.
Keep up the good work Mike.
Sincerely,
Carlos Alberto Pinto Peixoto Bastos Santos
The links I added between Ҡdisappeared, so I’m going to put them here:
Daring Fireball:
http://daringfireball.net/
Kotke:
http://www.kottke.org
Gui Leite:
http://www.guileite.com/
Those links are to illustrate the examples I gave at the text above.
Cheers;
Carlos Alberto Pinto Peixoto Bastos Santos
Carlos – Your feedback is much appreciated. The ads are an experiment. I can tell you that so far they are mostly worthless. I am making no money from them. So I’ll probably end up removing most or all of them. This will be good for the ‘look’ of the site, but not so good for helping me spend more of my time working on it. I’ll keep looking for a balance. Thanks again. Mike
Hi.
I’ve been looking at some vintage Mac systems for the past few days and after looking at so many beautifully designed systems (even by todays standard) I have set my heart on getting the G4 Cube. I’ve placed my order for it.
From reading about it, despite its problems that it encounters, I still don’t understand why this machine didn’t sell. Was it just ahead of it’s time.
Perhaps you could shed some more light on this particular product. I think that if Apple came out with a product like that today (with its design flaws corrected) it would be a hit. It’s got flair, it’s new, original, something different. What’s not to like!
I like it!
Jobs I´ve Known in Spanish too, please.
Though I understand many things in english, I cannot with an entire book, like I tried buying The Da Vinci Code, after read it in spanish, I don´t know many english words, so I write this to say Mike that don´t forget an spanish version of his book. And I say spanish, not mexican or seemed languages because it´s not the same, style and expressions are very different.
Here, in Spain, there is a great Apple market, so I think you´ll have a good number of books sold. Good luck and don´t forget this,please.
Regards from Spain.
In this article about an encounter with Steve you mention that you’ve been called a ‘Steve Jobs Apologist’. I don’t think it’s important whether you are or not, and I don’t think you need to try and proove it either way.
I think rather than try to convince us one way or the other, just tell the story and let us make up our own minds. Honestly, I don’t think it matters – Steve Jobs isn’t exactly the first person to have other people have different opinions of him.
No one can doubt that Steve’s methodology works, and you said yourself that it’s to push you to do better work – I don’t think he’s doing it because he wants to be malicous. I might be wrong, but I’m just beating a dead horse to tell you not to do it…
We need a time machine and stop GWB from getting to power.
Is it true, that Apple financed Flayakite OSX initiative of freeware full OSX look-n-feel in WinXP?