John Gruber

Channel and publications

Daring Fireball's archive runs back to August 2002, and the site's copyright line covers 2002 to 2026 under The Daring Fireball Company LLC. The colophon credits John Gruber as the site's writer and producer and notes that its articles and links are still published through Movable Type.³¹

The Talk Show page lists recent episodes in which John Gruber and returning guests discuss Apple's product events, operating-system betas, and interface and icon design on Apple's platforms.²

Open-source work

John Gruber wrote Markdown, which the project page describes as both a plain-text formatting syntax and a Perl tool that converts that syntax into structurally valid HTML. The page says the syntax was designed to stay readable as plain text, drew its main inspiration from the conventions of plain-text email, and credits Aaron Swartz for feedback on its design. Markdown is distributed under a BSD-style open-source license, and version 1.0.1 was released in December 2004.⁴⁵

John Gruber also wrote SmartyPants, a free plug-in for Movable Type, Blosxom, and BBEdit that converts straight quotes, dashes, and ellipses into typographic punctuation entities. Version 1.5.1 was released in March 2004.⁶

Work and contributions

• Daring Fireball Show, channel or publication

  Writes and produces the Daring Fireball website of articles and links.¹

• The Talk Show Show, channel or publication

  Hosts The Talk Show, a podcast with guests on Apple events and products, operating-system betas, and interface design.²

• Markdown Open-source code

  Wrote Markdown, a plain-text formatting syntax and a Perl tool that converts it to HTML, released as free software under a BSD-style license that carries John Gruber's 2004 copyright notice.⁴⁵

• SmartyPants Open-source code

  Wrote SmartyPants, a free web publishing plug-in for Movable Type, Blosxom, and BBEdit that turns plain ASCII punctuation into typographic punctuation HTML entities.⁶

Timeline

1. Aug 2002Began publishing articles on Daring Fireball, according to the site's archive.³
2. 2004Published Markdown as free software under a BSD-style open-source license.⁵
3. Mar 12, 2004Released SmartyPants 1.5.1, a typographic punctuation plug-in for web publishing tools.⁶
4. Dec 17, 2004Released Markdown 1.0.1, the current download on the project page.⁴

Where they work

• Daring Fireball 1 person in the wiki

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