Today is a sad day.

I learned from a friend of mine on iChat while using my MacBook Pro while working on an iPad app that Steve Jobs had died today. It oddly enough didn't come as a shock, but still came as a surprise. I was fortunate enough to have seen him give his keynote presentation at WWDC this past June. I knew this might have been his last keynote, so it was imperative that I attend. After all, I had seen Steve's "Stevenotes" at nearly every WWDC since 1998, so I wasn't about to miss the last one.

Reading all the Twitter posts and news articles today about Steve brought tears to my eyes. They were so heartfelt and warm. There's a lot of love out there for Steve right now which is totally understandable because he changed everything. No matter what your opinion of Apple products are, Steve Jobs has had an impact on your life. He changed the world with the original Apple computers, the original Macs, the new iMacs, the PowerBooks and MacBooks, the iPods, the iPhones, the iPads, and he'll still be changing the world after he's gone with iCloud and who knows what else.

There's no doubt in my mind that Steve will continue to make positive contributions to society even in his absence. As some have said, Steve's greatest legacy is Apple itself. With Tim Cook at the helm running Apple like a well oiled machine, I have every confidence that Apple will continue with Steve's vision of producing the world's most exciting electronics products ever built.

My condolences to Steve's family inside and outside of Apple. In fact, I give my condolences to the world because we have just lost one of the greatest visionaries/inventors/perfectionists the world has ever seen.

Without Steve Jobs and his amazing team at Apple inventing the iPhone and the App Store, I may not have ever had the opportunity to realize one of my life's goals. It was always my dream to write and sell a product for the Mac. But Mac apps are large and complex and I didn't have the time to learn to write one. When the iPhone first came out and you could actually write apps for it, I thought this might be a great time to start on that dream of mine. iPhone apps were small and simple to understand. So it seemed like I could actually build one if I set my mind to it.

At the time the first iPhone came out, it had almost everything that you could possibly need in a phone. You could make calls, take notes, check your email, get the weather, check your stocks, watch movies, listen to music, send texts, and make appointments in your calendar. But the one app that never came on the iPhone that I thought was missing was a database app. I wanted to fill that gap by making the best database app that I could. Hence, Tap Forms was born. I worked on the first version of Tap Forms in the evenings and weekends for about 3 months before it was ready. In September, 2008 I released it to the App Store review team for approval. I think it took about 2 weeks at that time to get approved. The day I saw Tap Forms on the App Store was an amazing day for me. I ran around showing it to everyone I could. I was like a kid at Christmas :-)

Eventually someone at Apple saw Tap Forms and liked it enough to feature it on the home page of the App Store. Now that was really like Christmas! Since then I've released updates to Tap Forms regularly, built a lite version, an iPad version, and now I'm working on a Mac version. At the end of August this year, I finally made the decision to leave my full-time day job as a web developer in order to devote more time to Tap Forms and other iPhone app development. So eventually I will have a full suite of Tap Forms apps all syncing together. I think my dream of being an independent Mac developer will be fully realized the day I see Tap Forms Mac on the Mac App Store.

So I want to thank you Steve Jobs for helping me make Tap Forms possible. And thanks for helping me and my family earn a living making software for such a great platform.

"There may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented" - Barack Obama, 2011.

Steve, you will be missed, but never forgotten.

Thanks,

Brendan

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 5th, 2011 at 9:01 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.