The man who pioneered the idea of a personal microcomputer in the late 70th, refining it by introducing the graphical user interface to "… the rest of us" in the early 80th — who these days, ironically, works quite successfully on making the very same concept of the PC obsolete — has resigned his post as CEO of Apple.

Jobs in 1996, the year he returned to Apple:

• "The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased. Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. That’s over. Apple lost. The desktop market has entered the dark ages, and it’s going to be in the dark ages for the next 10 years, or certainly for the rest of this decade."

In 2007, Apple introduces the iPhone, in 2010 the iPad. These days, we certainly live in interesting times again. Steve Jobs hands over the now most valuable company in the world in terms of market capitalization to his successor, Tim Cook. Steve Jobs remains at Apple, taking the position of Chairman of the Board.

Steve Jobs on creating products:

• "Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. … To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that."
• "Focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple."
• "People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully."
• "There's an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love: 'I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.' And we've always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very, very beginning. And we always will."

Lot’s of „obituaries“ are starting to show up on the internet. If you want to read one, read this one on Infoworld. Written by someone personally screwed over by Steve Jobs, I think the respect that article shows can’t be argued with by simply insinuating „fandom“.

Tags: Apple

Within Munich, we just moved from Schwabing/Maxvorstadt to Neuhausen/Nymphenburg, now living right at the northeastern edge of Munich’s „Hirschgarten“. Wikipedia about this park area: „Best known for the largest beer-garden in the town is the former royal Hirschgarten, founded in 1780 for deer which still live there.“

The Hirschgarten park is great for running, barbecue, drinking beer and for shooting deer… (photos, that is).

Tags: Munich

The public discussion about the iPad has been marred by hype, hyperbole, hate and hope — opinions ranging from ‘epic fail’ to ‘savior of the publishing industry’ could be found next to each other even in the same print or web publication. For the informed reader however, more often than not it became apparent that the respective authors had never “touched” an iPad to begin with. Lately, the discussion about iPad became more tamed — public vigilance concerning Apple first found its new target in Antennagate and nowadays seems to subside further with people expecting Apple to crumble under the advent of a flurry of iPad knock-offs powered by Android (though Google itself thinks using the current version of Android for tablets is a bit premature).

The one thing no one can deny any more: The iPad is a runaway success. Why is that?

Three months have passed since my dear wife got me an iPad. Enough time for the iPad to find its niche within my daily routine. Novelty has worn off but still I find myself using the iPad on a daily basis in areas where once my laptop has been indispensable. Reflecting on my usage patterns, I would like to try for myself to solve that enigma puzzling people since the beginning of 2010: What is iPad?

Surprising to me, I don’t use my MacBook Pro that often any more. At home, that is — at work, I still need that truck. With my personal computing requirements, however, I find only few tasks that remain predestined for running them on my laptop.

Those would be more or less the following: my digital RAW image processing workflow, re-encoding video, and writing this blog… The critical prerequisite for the first two tasks is just processing power: fast CPUs crunching numbers, and large amounts of RAM. However, writing this blog only depends on the web design software I had chosen initially, and that does not run on iPad yet. Wouldn’t that be nice, though? RapidWeaver is written using Cocoa, after all… There have been good examples of complex Mac OS X software that quickly found its way on to the iPad.

For now leaving behind the stuff iPad can’t help with yet, I would like to take a closer look at typical use cases in everyday personal computing. Surfing the web, reading, occasional gaming, writing emails and much more of the tasks I used to do on my laptop computer I now do solely with the iPad. Sometimes it took some re-thinking the ways I used to do stuff, but with a bit of flexibility you may find the benefits of iPad clearly outweigh “old school” computing.

When I started to summarize my experiences with the iPad, I thought that I might be able to write a short, comprehensive overview and be done with it. Turns out there is much to tell, even though I promised myself to keep it short. So, I decided to publish a number of short installments, each focussing on a particular usage scenario. The first one will focus on using the iPad as a tool for digital photography and will be published right after this blog entry:

• What is iPad? — The iPad is for Photographers…

Tags: iPad, MacBook, RapidWeaver, Desktop

I still remember a review of both the Newton MessagePad from Apple and the Palm Pilot in a then popular german TV show, WDR Computerclub. Technologically, the Newton won — but their recommendation in the end was the Palm Pilot. It was affordable and almost as good as the Newton. But, I wanted a Newton. That was 1997, if I remember correctly… Steve Jobs axed the Newton a year later, and in the year 2000 I got my first Palm-like device, the Handspring Visor Deluxe. Actually, I owned two — my first Visor got stolen, and the second died because its batteries leaked. Until Apple released the iPhone, I stopped using PDAs and their descendants, the smartphones. Those “merged” devices, combining a stylus-driven PDA with a phone, always seemed clumsy to me. The iPhone was a revelation, at last.

Now the iPad is here. I pre-ordered mine on Monday, a gift from my wife. Apple sold its first shipment pretty fast here in Germany, those who pre-ordered yesterday will have to wait for another week until their iPad will ship.

Looking at the iPad, a lot reminds of the Newton. Apple sees that as well, just compare the old Newton ad below with the new iPad ad from Apple (thanks to Arnold Kim for discovering the resemblance of both ads).

One thing neither Newton, Palm Pilot, nor the iPhone, was particularly good at was to provide an interactive canvas for photo editing. Though the iPhone has its fair share of image editing apps, its screen size just isn’t sufficient. The iPad changes this. At least, the iPad comes with Apples raw converter infrastructure known from the Mac. How this translates into something a photographer can use remains to be seen… Apple may never release an Aperture “touch” version (who knows?), but there are others that have experience in leveraging Apples raw converter. The iPad hardware may not be powerful enough yet, but eventually this will change with future versions.

Tags: Apple, iPad, Newton, iPhone, Palm, Handspring, Aperture

This is it. My first blog post!

I want to keep it simple, and short… Though my first website went online in 1998, I have not used it for any other purpose as some sort of electronic CV or “business card”. Well, I want to change that…

Photography is a long-time hobby of mine. Shooting film for 25+ years, I finally went all digital just last year. Actually, a long time ago I started to postpone any further investment into my now 17 years old analog Minolta Dynax/Maxxum 9xi-based system. That was in 2001, when I bought my first digital snapshot camera. I quickly realized it wasn’t just a toy, but “the future”. In 2009, I finally bought a Nikon D300. The time in between was essentially waiting for digital getting mature, and waiting for the heirs of Minolta Photography getting their act together. Reluctantly, I realized I don’t trust Sony with anything going beyond “consumer” — eventually I switched to Nikon (maybe I underestimated Sony, their current DSLR lineup doesn’t look too bad).

I read a number of blogs. I regularly read, e.g., John Grubers “Daring Fireball” (I am an Apple enthusiast, you guessed correctly), a number of photography-related blogs and, of course, those blogs put online by friends. In general, I quite enjoy blogs voicing an opinion, engaging in some kind of discussion. In addition, blogs sharing tips & tricks, tutorials and problem solutions have become an important resource I turn to for first level support if I need help with, e.g., specific software.

So, that’s what I want my blog to become. Mostly, I want to share my photos — those I deem worthy, anyway — and, sometimes, my opinion on more or less relevant topics. Maybe I can contribute help every once in a while by providing tips and trick on software and IT related issues.

That is it. Enjoy!

Tags: Minolta, Dynax 9xi, Maxxum 9xi, Sony, Nikon, D300