As a kid going through elementary school, the Apple 2E was as much a staple of public education as were the little white cartons of milk. At home people used Commodores and IBM PCs, but Apples ruled the academic environment. Apple was never really cool to me as a kid. Maybe it was because they offered so many educational games, and I just wanted regular games. Man, I played educational games on the Apple in elementary school, then I played similar games on the Apple in Jr. High. In high school I remember the weird kids started to own "Macs" that had graphical interfaces, but for some reason the kids who had them were the same kids whose parents drove Volvos and that enough was reason to avoid them.
In the years after the Mac it seemed like Apple sort of went down a spiral of death. They didn't offer any compelling products and it seemed like you could have bought the whole company for the same price as a bag of chips and a soda pop. Yes, Steve Jobs was out at that time.
Eventually Apple came back. The iPod seemed to give them mind share in the consumer realm, but for me the Nano is what sealed it. That was seriously the coolest thing since the Sony Walkman or the portable compact disk player. I still use my same 1st edition Nano every week. Steve Jobs was back, Apple was relevant, and I felt happy for them and genuinely rooted for them to be successful. This was probably the pinnacle of my appreciation for Apple.
In recent years I've tried to play in the garden that is Apple, and as of today I'm getting really sick of getting stuck with all the thorns. After hearing how cool the iPhone was for years, I bought an iPod touch a year or two ago. Seemed like an ideal video and gaming device. The problem was, I bought a first generation touch. The first time I updated it's software, all of the old software that was on it was no longer available in a compatible version online. I had a bunch of money ready to spend in their app market, but every time an app maker made any change to their app, they had to re-release it in only the latest software compatibility. This meant that every day all the good apps were being changed from compatible to non-compatible. My only real choice would be to spend several hundred dollars to have the exact same device that I already have, something that I'm not very fond of. It smacks of a way to squeeze me for money, and I don't like that. On a side note, I have found the conversion process from regular videos to Apple device video format to be cumbersome and annoying.
In recent years the iPad has become all the rage, and admittedly it is a very cool device. As a contract software developer and as a college instructor, I have felt some motivation to brush up on my skills. A few months ago I jumped online figuring I could just download a free software development kit for a Windows computer. Nope. And so I waited until the opportunity came up for me to acquire a Mac, something I had never owned before. Everybody and their dog has one, so it seemed kind of cool to join the crowd. Also, I love the fact that Unix underlies their current system and I've long been a user of Unix-based systems as a software developer.
At this point, let me remind you that all I want to do is make a little sample application to see how it works. For almost any platform on earth, this is usually about an hour or two of time invested. Well, I got a Mac from my sister with a dead hard drive. The system is about 5 years old. Replacing a hard drive in a PowerBook is nothing like replacing a hard drive in Windows laptops. In a windows laptop, I pop two screws, pop in a new drive as if it were a VHS tape and I'm done. The PowerBook process was a pain. Had to disassemble the entire thing, as if I were needing to work on the motherboard itself. One thing I will say is I like how they have everything packed in in there to keep things quiet when the system runs and is moved around. On the downside, I had to get a special hard drive.
So once the hard drive was in, I used the system restore disk. No matter how many times I went through the menu to format the hard drive, the installation software said the drive wasn't usable. Thankfully I saw a post online that says that once you format the drive and see that the drive isn't usable, reboot the computer and start again (oh man, after all my years as a developer I should have seen that one coming). Sure enough, after nearly freaking out it worked.
So then I go online to get the software that I expect to be free and it says "join the developer program for $100 for the year and get access to the developer tools." Fortunately I found another option that said for $5.00 or something I can get just the development kit.
Before plunking down the dough, however, I decide to check out the tutorials. Except, I can't see the tutorials. In fact, I can't see most of the relevant content in the developer website. I can see it from my Windows PC, but not from my Mac running Safari. So I do some digging and it turns out my operating system won't run a newer version of Safari (which I'm guessing will solve my page view problems). It also turns out that I can't use the iPod/iPad software with my current version of OS X. What this means is that I have to spend 30 dollars, so they can send me a box in the mail, so I can install a never version of OS X, and then I can see if I can view pages on their website with a new version of their web browser and then I can download and install the mobile development kit. One thing that makes me uneasy is that their next version of their operating system is already being advertised but isn't available yet. I already feel like I'm up against that outdated device/software issue that I ran into with the iPod touch.
If I go outside of my desire to just write a test application for me to play with, and consider how I could ever teach this in a computer lab at school, I don't know what I'd do. I mean, I'm at one of the largest universities in the United States and there are only three published places on campus that you can even get access to Macs. Add to that the fact that Objective-C (which nobody teaches) is the language of choice for their platform, and I feel that they really aren't doing anything to help fans develop for their platforms.
In contrast, I did a Google search and within a minute saw that Android apps can be developed by using Eclipse. So basically, I can be up and running within 20 minutes on all major operating systems. Add to that the fact that the development language is Java (and everyone learns Java or its child C#) and you have something really easy to get into. Add to that the fact that more phones run Android than anything else, and I think I see a vision of the future starting to unfold. We shall see.
