RIP Steve Jobs

In 2001, I bought my first Mac, a blue and white G3, to run OS X 10.1. At the time, I thought it wasted an awful lot of cycles on eye candy, but was a pretty nice machine, and anyway it was Unix underneath. It took a long time for me to come around, grudgingly, and admit that how my computer's desktop /looks/, how it behaves when I click on things, does actually matter, and in all those things with OS X, IOS, AppleTV, iPod, Airport; in the look and feel of the hardware as my systems became more and more apple-centric, the esthetic sense of Steve Jobs and his team could and can be felt. At times, it's been maddening, because some simple thing that I should be able to do ran afoul of what Steve's esthetic said I needed to do. Other times it's as though he read my mind beforehand, and the solution to a given problem was literally at my fingertips when the need occurred.

So on this sad occasion of his death, let me send my condolences to everyone who actually knew him in person, but also to all of us who knew him only through his work. May the wind be at your back, Steve Jobs. You made technology exciting, even after the excitement had mostly died down and the suits had taken over.

-JRS