Thank you Steve!

Steve Jobs is dead. Apple is alive and is still the best. I feel sad and I feel guilty about being sad because, who am I to have the right to be sad? I’m just one of all the uncountable Apple-fans. I didn’t know Steve as a person and he didn’t for sure know anything about me. A Swedish woman living on Gotland, an island in the Baltic Sea.

I have lost some loved ones. Death is not a friend of mine. I know that sorrow is a private thing and that a lot of ”outsiders” can claim their ”ownership” to the ”right image” of the dead person. Like if they want to tell the dead person’s family the true story of how he or she really was. We can read a lot of those stories about Steve in papers and on internet today. How was he? What was his secret as an inventor or leader? Who was he as a private person?

I hope that his family and closest friends can neglect all these shallow assumptions about Steve and get the needed peace for mourning.

Why am I an Apple-fan?
If you would have asked me about my interests and my vision of the future around 1980 I would probably have told you that I was interested in art, music, dance, psychology and that I maybe saw a future in the advertising business. I had an idea of becoming an Art Director. Would I mention computers? Absolutely NO! Computers seemed just like some nerdish, weird version of calculators for freaks back then. Okay, I understood that they could do some interesting things with computers, but that part of the universe didn’t interest me that much. I was more into human beings than into strange, calculating machines, boring code and uninteresting nerds.

My first contact with computers was at the gymnasium when we had a couple of math lessons in the computer room. Boring. Typing code for performing simple things that I easy could perform all by myself – so, what was the point in doing it in the complicated way with a computer? I didn’t get the motivation.

My second contact was probably 1987. By that time I was an instructor for leisure and recreation working with refugee children in several schools in Uppsala. In the school where I had my room they offered the teachers a course in word-processing with MS/DOS and they asked me to join them. So I learned how to copy and paste and sure, I understood the point in being able to make changes in text – but it still seemed like a lot of fuss in order to write text. No, I preferred a good typewriter.

My third contact with computers was at Linneaus Univeristy in Växjö the autumn 1988. I studied market communication and marketing and they taught us how to use computers to process our results from surveys. We even used that in a report we wrote but it still felt very awkward to use MS/DOS. We started to talk about Macintosh…

The Mac is in da house!
On April 7th 1989 our first Macintosh moved in to our home. A Mac Plus with an external disk drive for 800K disks and an ImageWriter. We had to borrow money to buy it. We also bought MacWrite and MacPaint. I remember when we booted our Mac Plus and everything just worked. Worked? We expected computers to be difficult, so my reaction was that it felt like something had to be wrong, because it worked…

From this day we have never considered to buy a PC. We love Apple. I can still remember the joy when I felt how the doors to my creativity were opened. Now I could write and work with my texts. I could draw pictures. We could lay out our reports.

We loved Macintosh because it cared about design. We loved Macintosh because it was easy and fun to use. But one of the most important things was that the user interface was so good. I heard that the creators studied children and how they intuitively touched, gripped and dragged things or symbols on a screen. I knew about children, psychology and learning which probably made me understand the depth of the user interface a bit better than average. I was very impressed.

I understood the difference in creating a user interface from watching children like the Mac developers did or to create a user interface from watching the Mac… like the Windows developer did. Windows could never become more than a poor copy with that strategy and I wanted the original: Apple’s Macintosh computer. The best.

We started our company, Stenströms
As time went by we decided to start a company in November 1992. First as an advertising agency but one year later we changed to become a publishing house for tutorials, DesktopSchool (DesktopSkolan in Swedish), about typography, layout and PageMaker. Our goal was to teach smart ways to use Aldus PageMaker in contrast to all the tutorials that were only about going through all the menus, but not really giving any valuable knowledge to the reader. We sold our tutorial books until March 1998 when another publishing house took over the publishing rights to our tutorials. We changed to be an advertising agency again, but now with more than print, because internet interested us and we created websites from start.

During the years with DesktopSchool we had to be up to date with all the latest software versions. This was when I found my favorite software: Fractal Design Painter (today Corel Painter) and Wacom tablet. This was another door to possibilities that was opened and I have written a blogpost about it before.

In the autumn 2000 we moved from Växjö to Gotland where we still live. We work with computers as our most important tools all the time. We produce printwork and websites, yes. But we also give lectures about, for example, Social Media when we use Keynote for the presentation. I use MindNode to create mindmaps over projects. I use Evernote, Dropbox, Wunderlist – a lot of good productivity apps. I use iWork and Aperture. Well, there’s no point in writing down a list of all the software and apps we use a lot – because there are so many of them.

My dear devices
I have a new MacBook Pro, an iPhone 3G (will change to iPhone 4S as soon as possible), an iPad 2 and a new iPod Touch – actually I have an older, green iPod as well… I am 49 years old and I’m known to be an Apple-fan and a Social Media specialist. I think I live in the best of times. I can’t imagine a life without all my dear devices. They give me joy, both in work and in my social life. During September I have got two jobs over Twitter and two over Facebook. This is new to me, even though I have used Twitter and Facebook for a couple of years.

Since 1989 I have seen what’s happening on ”the other side” as well, the PC-side. I know there are competent pc-users that know how to get the best out of their machines, but my image of PC-users is of all the average users and the ones who know even less… They don’t seem to understand what’s going on in their computer. They expect faults and viruses. They set their standards very low. They are angry at their computers. They need a lot of support.

I love my MacBook and all the other Apple devices I have. They are my friendly, helpful tools and possibilitymakers. They have a beautiful soul. They are something more than just ”dumb machines”. They have been created to live up to the standards of Steve Jobs.

I am so grateful that he has been so devoted, so stubborn and so enthusiastic about Apple’s achievements because that means I can benefit from it.