RIP Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs died yesterday. I type this on a Macintosh, while listening to MP3's on Itunes. My Iphone goes to bed with me, sending music or the spoken word into my pillow speakers. I have a laptop Mac, and an Ipad has become my favorite portable device. Pixar has had the longest, unbroken string of lovely wonders in Hollywood history.

Apple popularized the idea that technology should be "warm" and easy to use. Should appeal to our visual and tactile aesthetics, at a time when many computer programmers I knew had the attitude "it was hard to write...it should be hard to use."

No. These tools aren't just for the few who understand the math. They are also for the rest of us. I'm one of those people who has the sense that Apple products feel different, and that that difference is almost like sitting down with an old friend, rather than a stranger, every time I relate to a new device.

You can see Apple's influence everywhere, and I think it is for the better. Jobs had a powerful hand in that. And fingers in many other pies. He died at fifty-six, a reminder that we haven't an eternity to finish our work in this world, to implement a dream and plant new crops for the next generation to harvest.

He will be sorely missed.