Jean-Marie Hullot, RIP

Bruce Henderson:

For those of you well versed in computer history, Jean-Marie Hullot died today. Though there is a very small Wikipedia article on him, his contribution to Objective-C, NeXT and eventually Apple and iOS cannot be understated. He was a blazing intellect who saw farther, did more.

Florent Pillet:

So long Jean-Marie Hulot, father of Interface Builder and so many other nice things … RIP

He also led the iCal and iSync teams.

Chris Parker:

Heartbroken to hear this; Jean-Marie Hullot was the original Interface Builder engineer/inventor and just a fantastic man to speak with. I loved talking to him when he visited the AppKit team in Cupertino. He’ll be missed.

Olivier Gutknecht:

I remember reading an article, a long long time ago, about NeXT development tools and Interface Builder, with this picture of Jean-Marie Hullot

Gérard Berry and Gérard Huet (tweet, Google translation):

Jean-Marie Hullot then took the leadership of the interfaces and interactions of the new Macintosh as technical director of the application service of Apple. His creations and those of his team always mark modern computing. He then left Apple and California to settle in Paris. There, Steve Jobs reminded him to regenerate the creative spirit of Apple, but he refused to return to California, and proposed instead to create a phone, or rather a smartphone as they say now. After some difficulties to convince Steve Jobs who did not believe it too much, he created the iPhone in a secret laboratory of twenty people in Paris.

Mark Ames:

Hullot’s team was important in laying the groundwork for the iPhone, but when Jobs decided to pull the trigger on the phone, the project moved to Silicon Valley with all of Apple’s attendant secrecy, a move Hullot didn’t want to make again. So he left Apple, along with his four engineers.

See also: Denis Delbecq (Google translation).

Previously:

• Apple/Google Hiring Lawsuit
• SwiftUI and Combine
• Organ Banked

Update (2019-06-24): Michael B. Johnson:

This is super sad. Interface Builder was one of the most important apps I ever used. My PhD thesis work was packaged up as a set of IB “palettes”, bundles of code that extended it.

It was a beautiful piece of work that gave pure workflow joy for me.

Thanks, Jean-Marie.

Olivier B.:

It’s 2005, first job after graduating.

Jean-Marie hires me as a SW Engineer at Apple in France. We’re pre-iPhone, the team is working on iSync (and other things…).

Those years were foundational. I learnt so much from him, from @guiheneuf and the team. Rest In Peace, Jean-Marie.

Damien Petrilli:

The stories are really good at showing one thing: how much talents Apple is losing by not allowing to work on other locations.

A lot of people aren’t willing/interested to relocate to the silicon valley.

Update (2019-07-01): John Furrier:

Nice post on JMH. I had the good fortune to spend about a year working with him on a project.

Update (2019-07-05): Roberto Di Cosmo:

Jean_Marie Hullot, visionary computer scientist whose élégant creations changed our world, had so much more to tell. He's now gone, too soon, a terrible loss. Here is a picture taken at @inria a few months ago.

Apple History iCal Interface Builder iOS iPhone iSync Mac NeXT Programming Rest in Peace

Chrome to Limit Ad Blocking Extensions

Kyle Bradshaw (via Eva):

Google is essentially saying that Chrome will still have the capability to block unwanted content, but this will be restricted to only paid, enterprise users of Chrome. This is likely to allow enterprise customers to develop in-house Chrome extensions, not for ad blocking usage.

For the rest of us, Google hasn’t budged on their changes to content blockers, meaning that ad blockers will need to switch to a less effective, rules-based system, called “declarativeNetRequest.”

Justin Schuh (via Dan Masters):

The sole motivation here is correcting major privacy and security deficiencies in the current system. I know, because I set that focus, and the team reports up through me. And here’s a bit more context on the uBlock assertions.

Justin Schuh:

Chrome does let sysadmins manage things beyond user-facing settings (without paying anyone anything!). That’s because enterprises have complex needs and admins responsible for assessing security, privacy, and perf tradeoffs that we can’t foist on the average user.

Then there’s the uBlock Origin arguments. The big problem with webRequest is unfixable privacy and security holes. They ignored that to solely argue perf, but then ignored the biggest perf cost of every webRequest extension stacking a full renderer process, blocking IPC, etc.

Simeon Vincent:

Each of these groups has their own distinct maximum number of allowed rules. These current placeholder max values are specified in the DNR properties documentation. We are planning to raise these values but we won’t have updated numbers until we can run performance tests to find a good upper bound that will work across all supported devices.

Previously:

• Ghostery Lite

Update (2019-06-25): Tanner Bennett:

Some good snippets from the forum thread

1/ “Also, privacy concerns have yet to be substantiated…. Worth noting is the content usually blocked using existing APIs/extensions is much more privacy intrusive: give me an advertising provider that actually respects privacy…”

2/ “Chromium devs pushing this change that no one seems to need and…without…the research that justifies the change makes them and Google look arrogant and uncaring, while covering it all under the “security, privacy, and performance” cliche.

… We haven’t even yet seen the evidence, e.g. a performance analysis or some in-depth metrics that show why webRequest API must be limited and why it should be a global rewrite of the API.”

Google Chrome Mac Mac App macOS 10.14 Mojave Web