Solutions Reality

… you’d think I’d have learnt by now.  There are just some phrases that you should never utter.  Like: 

“We’ll never develop anything for the iPhone!”

or even:

“I’ll never have an iPhone!”

OK, well both of these statements are now false - and added to a long list of other such lines over the years!

But then I should have known really.  It’s not like the first time I’d ever said “never” only to later change my mind.

I mean back in the Sinclair days (yes I have been programming that long) with my ZX81 (back then, a whole 1K to work with!) and later the Spectrum - “I’d never have a Commodore!”  Yes, the VIC-20 was ‘interesting’ but it was never going to get me to replace my trusty ZX81 or the Spectrum I upgrade too.  OK, then the C-64 came out and I was tempted but I stuck to my principles, remembered “never” and stayed with… Atari!

Well, the logical step across in those days, if you didn’t want/like Commodore, was the Atari ST.  Eventually, however, with the release of the Amiga 500 and then the 1200 - I finally bought a Commodore and had my new favourite!  I did run them in parallel for a while but eventually I released that I wasn’t really using the ST anymore and so got rid of it… (it actually paid for the upgrade to the 1200).

These were the days when the ST, Amiga and even that thing from Apple blew the PC out of the water for just about everything.  They had huge amounts of colours (up to 4096 on the Amiga vs 16 at the time on the PC!), full sound and it was all in the same box - they all just worked!

“Give up my Amiga?  I’d never have a PC…”

I actually kept to this for a long time until the late hours working to complete software, on the work PC’s, was becoming ridiculous.  Staying until 4 in the morning to be back at work for 8(ish) just so that I could complete a block of code or 3.  It would make much more sense to buy one for home.  I could then leave work at a sensible time, go home, eat and still do work - but in the comfort of my own home.  So yes, I finally bought a PC and slowly but surely stopped with the Amiga and replaced everything onto the PC…

In parallel with this I had various iterations of Psion mobile computers from the 3a through to the, at the time, sublime series 5.  (You can probably guess by now the next “NEVER”…)

“I’ll never have a Windows CE device!”

and, to be fair, I don’t think that I ever did, technically!  But, again due to work, there came a time where having one made more sense than not.  With .net development, wifi capabilities and more, there was a lot that you could do and could make some pretty cool functionality.  By now they were called Pocket PC’s, a misnomer to many but, when you compared the power to some of my earlier devices, kind of fair in some ways.  I’ve stuck with these devices since those days through the evolution to the smartphone devices upto and including Windows Mobile 6.1 on my current HTC Touch Dual.

So when the iPhone came out, you can guess my response!

“I’ll never get an iPhone!”

Again, technically that’s true as my wife has the iPhone 3G that I keep ‘borrowing’ to test things out and test websites and web apps and dashcode and the odd game or two…

So, once again, I think that the never may end up being a little premature!

Filed under: General, Solutions Reality, iPhone by Matt
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