Disaster Area

RIP Steve Jobs

My first expericence with a Mac was in 1985 when my work group at Boeing Helicopters got a Mac II. Color! 13" monitor! Next to the monochrome early PCs it was a piece of beautiful genius. It took a few years before I got my own Mac at home - a Macintosh LC, and I was a Mac diehard for all of the nineties. It was in 2002 that I was due to replace my five year old Power Mac 6400 and just couldn't see the Apple product that was going to get me what I wanted for less than twice the price of a top end PC. I ended up buying a Sony desktop machine and that started a 7 year hiatus from Apple products.

Well, not entirely true, because I did buy several iPods over that time. Oh, and an iPhone 3GS eventually. It was when I decided to dabble with writing iOS apps that I got back into Apple computing hardware, as that's kind of necessary the way Apple works. I ended up buying a Mac Mini, which is possibly one of the most underrated and understated pieces of hardware around. I bought the slick bluetooth keyboard and the magic trackpad and that is just a beautiful system.

Then, when the old Dell laptop was due for replacement last year I ended up buying a 2nd generation Macbook Air, which is just amazingly beautiful and oh so functional.

Steve Jobs was brilliant. He had a knack for figuring out ways to get a hand in your wallet and your pocket no matter what and make you enjoy the experience. iPods? Sell 'em for we premium and keep milking it with iTunes. iOS - sell the iPhones/iPods/iPads for a premium and cream 30% off the app store revenue.

He was no saint - he did kill off all the corporate philanthropy programs at Apple when he came back in the 90's (then again, I'm not a big fan of corporations playing fairy godmother anyway, so it would be interesting to discover his motives for that). He was a bit of a tyrant by all accounts, but he did lead an insanely great company to dizzying heights.

I think all the hand-wringing about the future of Apple is misplaced - Jobs needed lots of talent around him to do what he did, and that is still in place. Just don't screw it up...

Virtual Wood Carving = Virtual Shooting?

If only John Williams had been doing virtual woodcarving on an iPod, Officer Ian Birk would have only had to virtually kill him...

iPhone App - Standard Atmosphere

The last few weeks I've been dabbling with iOS (the iPhone/iPod operating system) and building an iOS application. Well, it's just about done. It's a simple utility program that calculates standard atmospheric parameters (temperature, pressure, density, speed of sound) at any altitude. The numbers can be toggled between metric and Imperial (or English) units, and there's a nice little flipside view for additional information.

I've had it working on the iPhone simulator for a couple of weeks now, but I finally ponied up the cash to be an official developer and so I can load it on development devices, i.e. my own iPhone, iPad and iPod. So far it's just on the iPhone, but it works as I hoped and looks reasonably slick...

So there's a quick look at the icon, the front view and the flipside view (accessed by touching the little "i" button on the bottom right of the main view.

I'll let you know if and when it hits the app store (free!)

Meanwhile I'll be playing around with a few more ideas.