5 Years ago today, I got this fun little message in my mailbox: Dear Mike Smithwick   The status for the following application has changed to Ready for Sale.   Application Name: Distant Suns Application Version Number: 1.0 Application SKU: 2001   I sold 8 copies that first day. It’s been a fun ride, most of the time. At the start it was pretty easy, in spite of the Appstore crossing the boundary into the unknown land of more than 10,000...

In what surely must be ranked as one of Apple’s most closely held secrets to date, word has leaked out that the rumored September 12 event has absolutely nothing to do with the iPhone 5, but instead will witness the introduction of the Cupertino company’s latest foray into a previously untapped market…

I never met him, but saw him twice in person (once while driving his black Mercedes with “NEXTINC” as the plates) and the other was at a Steve-note introducing the too-little-too-late NeXT Stations. Only a few months ago I figured out what made Apple’s equipment so good to use. Normally we think of performing a task on a computer as a  going from A to B. The in-between part is the time spent watching the computer work, or not work in some...

Some recent email demanding that I fix this and that. I know the feeling after getting some apps I had trouble with. Usually it may take only 10 minutes to fix a bug, but then I have to upload it to Apple for approval. Unfortunately, that’s the main bottleneck. Last year the reviews were taking up to 3 to 4 weeks (!). However, by this spring some folks were reporting reviews of less than a day, now that’s more like it. But it has since crept up...

In 1987, Steve Jobs introduced to the world the wonderful and somewhat puzzling NeXT “Cube.” It was designed as the computer for the college student who could also afford a $6000 machine with no floppy drive.  For all of the ridicule and head scratching the machine provoked, it pioneered a number of great technologies. Perhaps the most well known of these powers every Mac and iPhone now being made today: OS-X. One of the other less successful...