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Most Influential People In Technical Mac Community
An anonymous reader writes "The MacTech Journal of Macintosh Technology has released MacTech 25, a list of top 25 most influential people in the *Technical* Mac community. According to the magazine 'The MacTech 25 is designed to recognize the technical contributions of developers writers, bloggers, problem-solvers and personalities to the Macintosh technical community.' The people were chosen by popular voting during June. Bios and pictures of the people on the list will be published in the printed MacTech magazine in time for WWDC."
I can't believe they left out Jason Kottke! I think the voting was rigged!
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
works for Apple. So gets a very honorable mention, because employees are exempt from the list.
It's all text, all names, and no links. Who ARE those people? I have no idea! I wanted to find out, but it looks like I'd have to Google each and every name.
Have you ever noticed that when Forbes or someone makes a list like this, they at LEAST give each person a few words to describe who they work for or some such?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
This, like the "Mac Daily Journal Power 25" list that preceded it, seems to be an accounting of 'people who we have heard of'. What does it actually indicate? Do these people have some kind of influence over something? It just seems to be a particularly pointless popularity contest.
Considering the knee-jerk reaction most Apple-philes have to anything this man (or his company) says or does, I would certainly think he would have made the list... I'm willing to bet that Microsoft has had an enormous impact on how Apple has crafted their products and presence in the market over the years.
I'm no healthnut, but I'm interested: www.healthbolt.net
Seriously, I could open up notepad right now and type up 25 names with no bios or links and call that an article too.
It would be easy. None of those bothersome <a href>'s to worry about getting in the way of my list.
Why didn't Dvorvack make the list?
One only has to look at Vista to realize how much is flowing from Apple to Microsoft, not the other way around.
There are very few features Microsoft implements and Apple duplicates. So in what way in Bill influential on what Apple does? Apple seems to be well ahead of Microsoft at this point from a strategic OS and application perspective.
The only recent thing I could see Apple possibly adopting ome variant off is application ribbons from the new Office.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There's someone other than Steve? wow.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
I was surprised that Leo Laporte wasn't on this list. He's done wonders over the years in knocking out the Mac myths that became irrelevant with Os X. His voice travels far and is broadcast wide as well.
Here's what I know of and/or could find for the ones I didn't.
Unfortunately, it seems that Slashdot has a limitation on the minimum number of characters per line. So I can't just create a nice, simple list, but instead need a significant amount of text to pad out the list, so that I can make it past the filters being used. But I'm still not there yet... sooner or later I will (20.4 is still too few). I'm probably going to have to type a whole lot of crap in here just to deal with the 25 names that are only a few characters each. (and I tried removing returns from the message, but it didn't seem to help at all)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Yeah, since the list was a bit heavy with writers, you'd think he'd rate. His Qdial desk accessory was one of my favorate bits of code back in the mid-80's, when I was constantly dialing up BBS'. Its innovation was to flog the modem during a Mac's vertical blanking interval (screen refresh, when whatever application you were using and the OS were otherwise twiddling their thumbs), which allowed me to keep working while I waited to connect to a busy board. This was before the Multifinder, and my first practical taste of multitasking, outside of a VAX/VMS system.
Luke, help me take this mask off
About half the people on this list write for the magazine that published the list.
Here's how this works:
(1) Magazine publishes list of "influencial" people.
(2) Magazine includes their regular contributors on the list.
(3) Magazine begins referring to their contributors as "highly influencial members of the Mac community."
(4) Magazine hopes we all fall for it.
This is no different than George W. Bush calling his house in Texas a "ranch" in hopes that everyone else will call it a ranch.
It has no lifestock and (originally had) no horses, yet all the press called it a ranch because that's what they were told. Six years later, his house is a ranch.
Some of these guys are fairly well-known in the community, but I can't think of any example of them exerting influence on Apple, the developers, or the users.. Aaron does a good job of introducing new Cocoa developers to what I'd consider best coding practices, though...
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The MacTech 25 is no popularity contest, nor
is it to "pick your favorite CEO." We looked for the most influential in
the Mac TECHNICAL market.
This seems simliar to American Idol saying that this year, they've instructed the caller-in voters to pick purely on ability. How else could David Pogue and Mike Breeden -- admittedly both *very* influencial writers and news reporters in the Mac "space" -- out-garner Glenda Adams (of Aspyr.com fame, formerly president of Westlake Interactive), who seems, at times, to single-handedly not only keep Mac gamers with options, but also keep anyone interested in the Mac as a gaming platform?
Even then I'm just picking from my own favorites. What techs have these people championed? What BurgerLibs have they created or OpenGLs have they supported?
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
Or was that last week?
Oops! My bad. This ain't MacDailyNews.
I was surprised and pleased to see Andy Ihnatko on there. I guess I'd missed him for a few years -- ever since he stopped doing the second-to-last-page columns for MacWorld (and before that, if memory serves, MacUser), I'd been wondering whatever happened to him. There was a considerable period during what I call the "dark ages" of the Mac when the only reason I kept up my subscription was for his column.
After all, props are still in order if only for being the inventor of "Web That Smut," possibly the only good thing to ever happen as the result of the Communications Decency Act. (The original column is here, archived via the Wayback Machine, but I'm not sure if Slashdot is going to mangle the link.)
And of course there's also the millenial version, Web That DeCSS!
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Kottke ... is that Dutch?