inessential by Brent Simmons

Why the Safari folks are cool

I think my favorite folks at Apple are the people who work on WebKit and on Safari.

I got the chance to talk to Jens Alfke and Jessica Kahn a couple days ago: I told them both how Safari in Tiger has been nothing less than a gift. It does three super-important things:

1. It educates people about RSS.

2. It makes it amazingly easy to subscribe to feeds.

3. It allows you to choose a newsreader other than Safari as your default.

I don’t know the inner details of how the decision to support other newsreaders was made, but the people I talked to convinced those who needed convincing that it was the Right Thing to Do.

To them I say: thank you!

P.S. Because I’m sentimental, at the weblogger dinner I suggested to Buzz that we get a photograph of aggregator developers. Somewhere there’s a photograph of me, Jens Alfke, and David Watanabe. I don’t know it it’s been posted yet (since I can barely get online here) but I’ll link to it when it goes up or when I see it.