Phase Two - Love
The day that I knew I’d found the one was July 12, 2008. The 3G and the OS 2.0 software update had come out the day before. I’d updated as soon as I could, playing my part in the server issues that Apple had that day. I was fascinated by the prospect of adding apps, though I didn’t really know what I would want to add to the thing that wasn’t already there.
Had a nice loooong road trip down I-81 to contemplate such matters. I spent most of the ride and all of the battery perusing the app store. By the time I got to wherever we were going, my life was changed forever. “My God, this is going to change everything! RRE needs an app! Everybody needs an app!, if for no other reason that to format the information that’s already on our website for the mobile screen. Everybody in the future is going to be carrying these things around, so if you’re not with it, you’re a friggin Dinosaur! I wonder how you write these things? It must not be that hard - the experience is so smooth, it must be really easy! I need to do some research.”
So I’ll spare the details of what I found about programming iPhone apps, since that’s basically the theme of this entire blog, but let’s just say it’s a bit more involved than I thought.
My involvement with Facebook only really began after the installation of their iPhone app. Same with Twitter. Or Wordpress. Or jogging. Or blogging. And on and on. So in a way, you could say that everything I’ve gotten interested in, or re-interested in, over the last year and a half - programming, design, marketing, my band - has been because of that little doo-hicky. Thanks Steve! On the other hand, the recent dearth of LiveDownloads is also partially attributable to that thing, also, since engineering and production have kinda lost a bit of their luster as a serious career path for me. Sorry, guys. Net positive, though, to be sure.
Phase Three - Seperation and reunion
I lost my original iPhone. I won’t go into where, or when, or how, but it was a major bummer. I’d already bought a Mac by that point, since iPhone and Mac development doesn’t happen on a Windows machine. Oh well, twist my arm. Besides, in the year that I’d been an iPhoner, my life had slowly but surely realigned itself around being in touch and on top of things, so even if I hadn’t decided on development as a future career path I was certainly not going back to the “old way”.
Luckily, at the Rockaway Mall Apple store, they gave me the AT&T subsidy, so that my 3G didn’t cost me a million bucks. Only half a million. The 3G, of course, has GPS, which I didn’t think was really going to be that big a deal. I was already a good navigator and always had a map in my pocket. I was wrong.
GPS went hand in hand with a cool app that I’d gotten just after that called iMapMyRun, which tracks your runs, your training progress, and just happens to run on that little doo-hicky that you already had in your hand since you like to listen to tunes while you jog, which, by the way, neither did you jog nor did you listen to tunes a year prior to that. Goodness. So you could definitely say that loosing my original phone turned out to be a blessing in disguise.