My vote goes to Ali Ozer. His influence goes back to the NeXT days and the fact that he’s still working on the Appkit shows an amazing dedication (or maybe Steve is blackmailing him). Plus, from what I’ve heard he’s a really nice guy which I was able to confirm from my brief encounter with him at the last WWDC. In any case, he’s an Apple employee so he’s not eligible but I thought I’d shine the light on someone who works behind the scenes and is influential without having to say a word.

After all, you (singular) nominated people from your family, user interface themes and styles e.g. brushed metal, side bar, smart lists, media browser, etc. Obviously, that is what you (singular) care about most so people involved with that most influence you (singular). Am I right ?

It looks like a bit as if the rule is to list the members of your own family. DJ is listing mainly people from the Mac blog family. EB is listing veteran from the NeXTStep family. It’s like auto-congratulations. While some of these persons did write some interesting articles, I would not consider them as influential as the Apple’s teams working on the iLife/iWork applications. Because that’s where I believe the influence is coming from : Brushed metal, Side bar, smart lists, media browser, etc.

In particular, Scott Anguish’s public role over the past several years shares qualities with both Scott Stevenson and Aaron Hillegass. The authoring and public education aspect of these guys’ work has been really awesome. I still enjoy Scott’s Stepwise, which is not updated so much for articles, but has an active links section.

Seeing your comments here is a great honor. I would rank your contributions in Cocoa Programming as also very influential, and I only wish we’d had the good fortune of seeing the design patterns book come to light.

Also, I find your comments sort of reek of jealousy and spite, and the way you phrase your personal attack sort of turns it into an implicit attack against anybody who does enjoy Gruber’s work, including myself. So I take some offense to your comment, even if you only intended to vent against Gruber.

I’m pretty sure calling the Mac community a “self congratulatory circle-jerk” scene would increase your odds of being blackballed. Who would want to have you at the party?

For me, I would add Amit Singh to the list. He’s ridiculously knowledgeable about the innards of Mac OS X, and he has demonstrated as such with his utilities that allow other Mac developers to access the MacBook Pro’s ambient light sensor, the accelerometer in all of Apple’s laptops, and the awesome piece of software that is MacFUSE. And when he writes about this stuff, he makes it fun to read, even if some of the stuff I don’t necessarily understand.

And then there’s John Siracusa, who tirelessly reviews each major revision of Mac OS X. Mac bloggers are useful when new releases of Mac OS X come out because they can give you the occasional tip or reveal the occasional hidden feature. Most Mac news sites, though, are entirely worthless when it comes to Mac OS X reviews — they all want to get a review out ASAP, so they end up simply rehashing all the bullet points on Apple’s website without really using them and looking at them in depth. This, however, doesn’t apply to ArsTechnica, solely because of John Siracusa. He creates reviews that have page numbers running into the three digits, and he relentlessly and tirelessly exposes all the crap and/or awesome new functionality that Apple has introduced into the new OS. His dedication to this annual (or biannual, now) review of Mac OS X and to beating the UI drum also gives him an easy spot in my top three list.

try reading for *content* next time. And if an item contains the word “jackass” in the title, well, just skip on by. This sort of content is at the lower end of the difficult-to-avoid scale, so you shouldn’t have too much trouble. Bookmark this blog entry and drop down to my comment for a refresher course as required.

All the best,
Paul