There's been so much written about Steve Jobs that there's not much to add.  Like millions of others, I remember the first time I ever used an Apple product.  It was to play Number Munchers and Oregon Trail.  My first Macintosh experience was on an LCII in one of the few airconditioned rooms in Taiwan - my elementary school's computer lab.  While I was too young to appreciate the differences between the (at the time) very outdated Apple II and our fairly outdated IBM compatible XT Turbo, the Macintosh was clearly completely different.  I managed to swing an editor job on our 5th grade newspaper which afforded me almost unlimited time to learn how it worked.  Everything was exciting on that machine, even word processing!

I bought my very first Apple product in college, the 2nd generation iBook with a 500Mhz G3 processor and OS X.  It was a little underpowered, but the hardware design was incredible and I remember being thrilled when I got several OpenGL school projects to run on Windows, Linux, and my new Mac.

To me, Steve Jobs embodies hope.  A college dropout becomes a billionare.  A man with limited technical skills becomes the an incredible driver of technology.  Fired from his company, failing at NEXT, he stakes almost all of his personal fortune and strikes gold with Pixar.  He affects industry after industry, despite many many setbacks along the way.  Sure, he was a jerk, but that's a hopeful story too - jerks can learn to movitate people and soften when they get older.  Of course, none of these thoughts are based on personal experience, but it's the perception I get.  Steve's life to me is a story of hope triumphing over reality.

I'm excited to read his biography, and I'm sad I never got the chance to meet Steve, except through his products, but here's to a legacy of hope.

My first app store experience was many years ago, before Apple, before iOS, before any of the other app stores you see today.  It was Redhat's Redcarpet subscription service which delivered a library of applications (packages) via the internet in an easy to use command line tool.  There was even a GUI if I remember correctly.  Then Debian/Ubuntu came around with their package repositories and it was such a major usability difference between Linux and Apple/Microsoft that it was only a matter of time before it caught on.  Of course, the ideals behind the Linux offerings of ease of use, reliability, and compatibility are supplanted somewhat by the key aims of profitability and control inherent in modern app stores, but who's counting? Things I wish the Apple App Store had (these are post-Lion upgrade thoughts)

• Some way to know what the schedule of app update notifications is - it's unclear to me if this is daily, whether I have to have the appstore application running all the time, etc.
• The App Store should intelligently close your application when updating an existing application.
• The App Store should be able to store your credentials, and not require credentials for doing an update if the app is in safe state (e.g. closed).
• There should be a compatibility layer in Lion that lets you run your iOS apps on your Mac.  I'm sure this is coming, but I wonder when.
• The App Store should offer to scan your hard drive and find applications that it can manage for you.
• On the Featured and other pages, you should be able to hide apps you've already installed.
• Somewhere down the line, it might be interesting to have a "lists" feature like Amazon.  Apple could even show what apps certain celebrities use in lists like the inflight magazines do for travel accessories.  Maybe that's too much on the pointless-marketing side.

I'm sure there are some other options that I'm missing, but overall I'm happy with the experience.  The App Store managed Lion install was incredibly painless, and so much nicer than having to mess with the Apple store, or a nasty CompUSA.