Today I’m happy to announce that Rob Griffiths, a Macworld Contributing Editor and the founder of MacOSXHints.com, is joining Mac Publishing as a Senior Editor. And in addition to Rob, we’re adding one other new member to the Mac Publishing family: Mac OS X Hints itself.
First, the backstory: Rob Griffiths has been running MacOSXHints.com since November 2000. Over the years it’s become an excellent community-based source for OS X tips and tricks. We at Macworld got to know Rob via his site and also his long-time participation in our online forums. He began writing for us regularly, which led to a monthly Mac OS X Hints column. (That column is, incidentally, the most popular item in the magazine, month in and month out.)
All of this has been great for us, great for MacOSXHints.com, and great for Rob’s career as a Mac expert — but not so great for balance in his life. You see, these past few years Rob has been performing Herculean Mac tasks — including volunteering as a moderator in the Macworld forums! — while also working a regular, 9-to-5 day job.
With this new arrangement between Rob and the folks who bring you Macworld , Rob gets to stop moonlighting as a Mac expert and do it as his full-time job. The result is that we’ll be seeing even more of Rob’s good work around these parts, and the community at MacOSXHints.com will benefit from an editor who is more focused than ever on making that site a useful resource for the Mac community.
Rob’s got an excellent statement and Q&A on his site about this, and if you’re a MacOSXHints.com reader, I encourage you to read both of them. The good news is, Rob’s not “selling out” — instead, he’s “selling in,” joining forces with Macworld specifically so that he can stop moonlighting and instead put his entire focus on his site and his other Mac-related work.
And to those who would ask if Mac Publishing will simply fold Mac OS X Hints into Macworld.com, the short answer is “no.” While all of us have learned to never say never — one never knows what might happen several years down the road — all of us agree that Mac OS X Hints is its own unique site with its own unique community of users. I can’t envision it ever being anything but its own thing. I’d love for Rob to use some of the things he’s learned at Mac OS X Hints to help improve areas of Macworld.com, but that will be something that will happen in addition to — not instead of — his work on MacOSXHints.com.
I hope that Macworld readers will join me in congratulating Rob on living the dream. Now instead of crunching numbers in Excel, he gets to be a full-time Mac expert. That’s good for Rob, because it’s going to make his life a little more sane. And it’s good for us, because we’re going to get to see even more of Rob’s talents at MacOSXHints.com, at Macworld.com, and in the pages of Macworld magazine.