Ok. Time to come clean. I am a long-time Apple fanboi.
Way back in the early ’90′s I was a big-time Apple Macintosh fan.
I was an eager (and even somewhat evangelistic) Mac developer.
I was quite active in the Hong-Kong Mac User group and at one point I ended up ‘singing’ on stage at Hong Kong MacWorld in a vain and ultimately futile attempt to keep an audience entertained while trying to buy a recalcitrant Mac time to connect to the new-fangled and still cantankerous ‘Internet’-thingy. I hereby apologise to any members of that audience that may come across this post for what I put you through…it all worked beautifully a few minutes earlier, honest!
I even wrote a few articles for the local MacChooser magazine (at the time, the largest such publication in Asia).
The following might give you a chuckle…
I must be “moving back to my ‘roots’” because I am now the proud owner of a spanking new Apple iPad.
Got to say that so far I am quite enjoying the experience!
The first draft of this post was written on the aforesaid iPad. Took me a while to get the hang of the on-screen keyboard, but I am getting up to a fairly good typing speed. The key, it seems, is to keep one’s fingers away from the screen and not rest them as one normally would…once I got that idea into my “muscle memory”, it all went swimmingly.
I have already boosted the bank balances of a few developers, small and large. That’s the nature of the platform: I am walking into a most-definitely-for-profit zone with my eyes wide open in this regard and I don’t begrudge the developers their dollars.
There are a couple of game-changers, notably Pocket Universe. I found it amazing to pick up the iPad, point it at the sky and see what is “out there” right now.
I am having fun imagining various other situations where this sort of application could be very useful: think of a car mechanic or a plant maintenance engineer picking up an iPad and getting a ‘virtual’ overview of the equipment that they are working on.
There is a glimpse of the future here, I think.
Bring it on!
