What Apple means to me

I used my first Apple computer before I could remember. My mom was a professor and would bring home her computers for work. One of my earliest core memories is sitting on her lap, playing games and clicking around.

I instantly felt an affinity to Apple.

My mom would end up bringing home or buying an LC “pizza box,” a Macintosh TV (I still have it!), a Performa 6300CD, a PowerBook G3 Lombard, a G3 Blue & White, a TiBook, and on and on.

The most anticipated event of each month was a new issue of MacAddict arriving in my mailbox and I was particularly impacted by issue #54 with the cover story “Build Your Own Apps.”

I fired up the included demo of RealBASIC. I was reading about cryptography at the time and made a simple letter frequency analysis app. On my computer! I made it! It worked exactly the way I wanted it to work.

I was hooked. I was also interested in exploring the other option in the magazine: Cocoa. This turned out to be a pretty important article for my future career. Thank you to the writer, Ian Sammis!

I wanted to build an app for everything. I made a chat app, I made a music guessing game, I made a screensaver that would simulate a kernel panic for April Fools’ Day. I took classes in high school, but had to do programming on Windows with C++. It was an awful experience, but I knew I wanted to do this for a living. And I knew what platform I wanted to do it on.

I went into college knowing exactly what major I wanted: Computer Science. And that meant Java at that time. So I did Java at school and then kept learning Objective-C to fuel my need to build native, beautiful apps for the computer I loved.

Then came the iPhone, running iPhone OS 1.0, and it was incredible.

I wanted to build apps for it! But the “sweet solution” wasn’t so enticing. I eventually found a group of hackers out there who found a way to get their Objective-C code running on-device. All I had to do was perform this thing called a "jailbreak," install Cydia, install OpenSSH, get an ARM cross-compilation setup, run some Makefiles, and BOOM! I built an app I called MobileBeat, a rudimentary step sequencer.

I was running the same code that Apple was running. And I could poke around at how they built things using the same tools I had used on the Mac to dump all the classes of Apple’s built-in apps. I was learning to build for this new Apple platform.

Then came the SDK with iPhone OS 2.0. I wanted to ship something to the App Store, but I was more interested in shipping something that wasn't possible with the official APIs. I wanted copy and paste, which surprisingly didn't come in 2.0, so I built a library to do it. I also wanted a system-wide search of Contacts, calendar events, Safari history, etc. That didn't come in 2.0... or 3.0, or 4.0, or 5.0, or 6.0. So I built an app called "Searcher" to do that. I also wanted drag and drop between apps, so I built a library to do that. Everything I could dream of with this new platform, I could build.

I lived in Xcode. I loved building out my UI in Interface Builder. These free tools were incredible and unlocked a whole career for me.

I received a WWDC scholarship in 2006, 2007, and 2008. In 2008, I spoke with a mobile agency doing J2ME/Brew work that wanted to take a flyer on this new platform and a young kid (almost) out of college to build their first iPhone app. I moved to SF and started making a living doing what I always wanted to do: building apps for the platforms from a company whose products I had loved since I was a kid.

And I've stuck with it. I left that agency with a few others about 15 years ago and started my own agency. We focused on mobile apps, but my focus was fully on the Apple platforms. As Apple made new platforms, I built for them: tvOS, watchOS, iPadOS, visionOS, heck, we even built an iMessage app! Apple created the ecosystem and community, and I built my business around it.

Apple's impact on me continues today. The tools are changing, and the way I'm writing software is changing rapidly, but I’m still building, and I’m excited for the next platform (glasses? HomePod with a screen? pendant?). I am a user, developer, and just plain fan of Apple, and here's to another 50 years for them, and another 30 years of their impact on me 🎉