[Doxxic]

http://roughlydrafted.com/RD/TechQ307/TechQ307.html

RoughlyDrafted Magazine is a weblog, written by Daniel Eran.
It's written with 110 % sense & 110 sensibility.
The sensibility consists of a passionate love for Apple as a brave and smart maker of beautiful products and a dito hate for Microsoft, which he fervently depicts as a monopolist which is continuously getting dumber and paler because of lack of competition, and therefore making lame, unprofitable products while living on their ubiquitous but ancient cash cows.
The sense consists of great factual knowledge and clear reasoning (as far as I can see), thrown at you in large, sometimes even intimidating quantities.

His writings can be roughly distinguished into 3 categories:

- Bashing a small group of MS oriented tech bloggers. He recently invented the "Zoon", an award highlighting "the world's absolute worst in small minded ignorance, paid to say propagandism, and blind devotion to products without merit". He writes eloquently and funny. We always get to see non-flattering pictures of the victims, sometimes photoshopped roughlydraftedly against nasty backgrounds, like hells full of burning zunes.

- Epic reports of standards wars, wether it's video formats, operating systems, storage media, audio, drm, etc. It's funny how you can write about these things and give the reader the feeling that this is like Frodo against Sauron, or Odysseus against the gods. These stories come with a quite a lot of graphs and stats, that reveal their truth by looking at it slightly differently from how the Microsoft hordes depict it. Usually, I agree with how it's done, although Eran himself is not totally immune to the temptation of making suggestive 3d-effects in his graphs.
Sometimes we get a look into the future, where Microsoft is a dead, smoking carcass and Apple is still not a monopolist, just your good natured, succesful, next door tech company.

- Reviews of Apple products. Detailed, critical, supportive. This is the only category where Apple is not always right although they may have been wrong in the past.


My opinion about RDM: love it, it's very informative although it's sometimes a little hysterical and too much out for the jugular. But then, I wouldn't have even found the whole website if it were otherwise and now I have an RSS subscription.

Wonder how much impact the "Zoons" have on the group of bloggers he's hunting...

edit: one thing I forgot to mention is what actually amazes me is how one can write both so biasedly and well thought out at the same time...

[rasmits]

I subscribe to the RSS feed and liked the 'Office Wars' segment recently. I think it's well written and certainly well thought out.

I usually skip through it though. It's very long...

[chucker]

He has quite a bit of insight on the history of Apple vs. Microsoft around the 80s and 90s, with side players such as the various Unix companies.

However, that also translates to virtually all of his pieces being somehow linked to that, as if even a story about flying hamsters had to do with Microsoft's questionable practices in maintaining high market share. This, combined with his excessive linking-to-previous-stories-of-his can get a little tiresome when reading.

Worse, however, he does not fix mistakes, no matter how glaring. He had an entire article based on the premise on how Safari 3 for Windows is, in a way, a late promise on "Yellow Box on Windows", which would have been a beautiful thought if only Safari 3 had any Cocoa code at all: it doesn't. The back-end is the same WebKit engine as on Mac OS X which isn't Cocoa, and the front-end, unlike on Safari for OS X, is simply a Windows app with some Apple-specific CoreFoundation stuff, but none whatsoever from Cocoa. Me pointing that out to him resulted in him defending his assertion on that "the definition of Yellow Dog is kinda wishy-washy anyway". Nope. Try again.

So on occasion, I find him an interesting read. But nothing more than that, I'm afraid. He's no John Gruber.

[rampancy]

Didn't he also claim that the older versions of the iPod ran OS X?

In some ways he reminds me of James Burke from "Connections", but sometimes the connections he makes between past and present events are really shaky, or just flat out wrong. I kinda stopped reading him after his "Safari 3 has Cocoa" gaffe.

I really miss Drunken Blog though - I still go back to the archives every once in a while to read some of his longer posts.

[scratt]

Thanks for the heads-up. I will check him out..

[Doxxic]

Originally Posted by chucker He has quite a bit of insight on the history of Apple vs. Microsoft around the 80s and 90s, with side players such as the various Unix companies. However, that also translates to virtually all of his pieces being somehow linked to that, as if even a story about flying hamsters had to do with Microsoft's questionable practices in maintaining high market share. This, combined with his excessive linking-to-previous-stories-of-his can get a little tiresome when reading. Worse, however, he does not fix mistakes, no matter how glaring. He had an entire article based on the premise on how Safari 3 for Windows is, in a way, a late promise on "Yellow Box on Windows", which would have been a beautiful thought if only Safari 3 had any Cocoa code at all: it doesn't. The back-end is the same WebKit engine as on Mac OS X which isn't Cocoa, and the front-end, unlike on Safari for OS X, is simply a Windows app with some Apple-specific CoreFoundation stuff, but none whatsoever from Cocoa. Me pointing that out to him resulted in him defending his assertion on that "the definition of Yellow Dog is kinda wishy-washy anyway". Nope. Try again. So on occasion, I find him an interesting read. But nothing more than that, I'm afraid. He's no John Gruber.

Thanks!
Time to check out John Gruber now...
update: Ah, yes, http://daringfireball.net/ - been there before. Love the little site description. Now the rest of it. :-)

[chucker]

Originally Posted by rampancy Didn't he also claim that the older versions of the iPod ran OS X?

Ah, yes. That was him, too.

[Mac+]

Originally Posted by rasmits I subscribe to the RSS feed and liked the 'Office Wars' segment recently. I think it's well written and certainly well thought out.

Same here.

Originally Posted by chucker He has quite a bit of insight on the history of Apple vs. Microsoft around the 80s and 90s, with side players such as the various Unix companies. However, that also translates to virtually all of his pieces being somehow linked to that, as if even a story about flying hamsters had to do with Microsoft's questionable practices in maintaining high market share. This, combined with his excessive linking-to-previous-stories-of-his can get a little tiresome when reading.

Agreed.

I really do like getting into the nitty gritty of that 80s/90s era and he provides great insight there. The excessive linking back to his own columns is a bit tedious though, and there's something about the structure of his website that bothers me. However, it's not a big deal, b/c I usually pop over to read a new article when they are posted.

Gruber's site, on the other hand, I hit pretty much every day.

[rampancy]

Actually, come to think of it, I think his personal high-water mark for me was his very well-done debunking of the critiques by Greenpeace (and other "Environmental" groups) of Apple's policies. He even personally called them out on their BS with their "Guide to Green Electronics".

[chucker]

Originally Posted by rampancy Actually, come to think of it, I think his personal high-water mark for me was his very well-done debunking of the critiques by Greenpeace (and other "Environmental" groups) of Apple's policies. He even personally called them out on their BS with their "Guide to Green Electronics".

Agreed, that article was decent. There was a better one someone else wrote, but I don't recall who/where.

[Hottie]

We read it all the time, it's great.