Steve Jobs Helped Me Document the Life of My Friends, Family, Self and City

October, 06, 2011 , by Jedidiah

The products that Steve Jobs revolutionized have made documenting my life and its surroundings much easier. I learned how to type on a Macintosh in the early 90s and bought by first Apple in 1998 as I started college. Little did I know then that I would develop a multiple decade relationship with products that help me remember where I've been, design futuristic concepts in college and take document the childhood of my son Oliver.

I studied architecture in my undergraduate education but that didn't stop me from digging into iMovie to figure out how to make videos on the fast and cheap. I always wanted to create a film that didn't seem like it was made on a basic movie editing program like iMovie. I think I succeeded a few times and in the few years after college, I was enlisted by my friends to film their weddings and edit the tape. To this day, I know friends who still watch this wedding video on their anniversaries and without a free and simple movie application like iMovie, this couple of any of the others, may not have a moving record of that day.

Similarly, I waited for years to get a smartphone. Blackberries didn't entice me much because the internet browsing was worthless at the time, the screen size wasn't worth the eye squinting and the calendar application just didn't seem to do the trick. I was waiting for that one device that did it all. Along came the iPod Touch and the iPhone, both answering this question of how to get all of these things in one place and in-sync with your home computer. I bought an iPod Touch, but put off the iPhone until the Edge turned to 3G and until I was ready for the right moment. That right moment came a few weeks before my son Oliver was born in June of 2009. Taking photographs, playing music in the birth center, making and answering phone calls and text messages and more were all done in the palm of my hand, with one device. While I know I could have easily survived this event without an iPhone, it sure did make the event much smoother. I could instantly send photos and videos to friends and family in one of multiple ways from the phone. Since his birth, almost 90% of the 1,000s of photos I have taken of Oliver have been from my iPhone.

Documenting my city has always been a very important aspect of my education and professional life. For the past four years, I have written and edited articles on New Raleigh from one of multiple different Apple laptops or iMacs over the years. As well, the iPhone has made the social media aspect of keeping up with the City of Raleigh's pace and beat much easier. We at New Raleigh try to stay on top of the city beat but can only do that if we are on top of the technology beat. Apple seemed to be ahead of that beat and we were all just trying to keep up. I snap photos of Raleigh and send it around multiple social networks through New Raleigh's account. We tweet back and forth between other blogs, colleagues, politicians and more on our iPhones. We have conference calls on iChat. We pop open iTunes and put on some 'work music' to pump out and edit articles to on a daily basis. We play for goods at local markets on the Square app for iPhone. We have white wires, mice with apple logos and headphones spread out on our desks. Documenting the city we love has been an easy task with Jobs's products.

Oliver was diagnosed with cancer in February and since then, my iPhone has become even more important than ever to the documentation and pace of life. Looking at calendar scheduling, jotting down medical notes, documenting blood counts, making important phone calls, texting photos to and from concerned family members and updating Oliver's journal has all happened instantaneously from the palm of my hand. With the iPad, I've been able to look at Oliver's scans with his doctors and family members and make assessments on the spot. In downtime when Oliver is sleeping, we watch shows on the iPhone or iPad to decompress. One minute an escape, the next minute a resource. We watch photos of him stream down the screen of our home television which is hooked up to an Apple TV. These photos document Oliver's year and we get to relive many of those moments on a daily basis so easy.

I've learned that time is of the essence in situations like this and sometimes it helps when their are technologies and products that make our life details much smoother. Steve Jobs was the mastermind behind many of these products and without his visions, I wouldn't have been able to document life as easily and quickly as I have. Rest in Peace, Sir.