Saying Goodbye

Our first family computer was an Apple IIc. The IIc ushered in the Snow White design period for Apple; an obvious nod to Dieter Rams. It was a beautiful machine. I spent hours on it playing One on One: Dr. J vs. Larry Bird and completing ASCII art projects from a book I’d ordered through Scholastics. Those books and that machine inspired me to ask my mother to enrol me in a weekend computer camp offered at the University where we would design graphics using Logo or as I always remember it, Turtle. My interest in computers would fade during High School while music became the most important thing in my life. Until 1997.

In ‘97, I got my own personal computer, a Power Macintosh G3. On that machine, I learned the tools of another growing passion (Photoshop 4, QuarkXPress 4, Macromedia Dreamweaver 2) while playing music through SoundJam, which you of course now know as iTunes. That machine was a revelation to me and it did, quite honestly, change my life.

I used that G3 right up until the Macbook Pro was released in 2006. I’ve owned two of those. I’ve bought an iPod, iPod Touch, iPad, iPhone, two Apple TVs (one of each generation) and my current 27” iMac. I’m a Fanboy. There are things that just ‘click’ in your life and the IIc and G3 were two of them. Because of those two machines, other things just started to ‘click’ for me as well.

I’ve had people I idolize in my life and I reserve that spot for those I greatly respect like Ian MacKaye and Corey Rusk. Years ago, I added Steve Jobs to that list. Outside of the flash and sizzle of Apple’s keynotes and marketing, there was a man who made a difference in my life regardless of the products he helped create. There’s a challenge that Steve Jobs laid out that resonates with me as I grow older and look for direction in my own life. Do what you love and do it well. “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

Thanks so much Mr. Jobs. You’ll be missed.

Jobs

Words to live by:

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

From Steve Jobs Stanford commencement speech.

Where All Of This Is Going

If you haven’t read Adam Lisagor’s excellent iPad TV post yet, you should. I think he’s on to something with this:

If you look at QuickTime’s UI elements across the iPad and iPhone OS and compare them with QuickTime X’s UI on the Mac, it’s not hard to conclude that Apple is making efforts at a shared UI language which spans both platforms, for the sake of unity and singularity of purpose. When QuickTime X was released, its player controls now locked within the bounds of the video frame, disappearing and reappearing on mouse hover, Apple was preparing us, ever so subtly, to begin to touch our video.

After a week with the device, it’s becoming pretty clear that the interactions that Apple exposes via the iPad are just plain natural. Handing it off to my mother yesterday, she intuitively knew what to do. To me, that’s amazing.