And then Apple filed a lawsuit...

I was, for the longest time, one of the larger nay-sayers when it came to, well, everything to do with Apple. I didn't like their file system, I didn't like their computer design, I didn't like their iPods, or even their name. How dare they sour the good word "apple." And what is the deal with e-ver-y-thing being prefixed with a lowercase I?

Then, I started actually using an eMac (the downscaled, economy, eggshell-shaped style of desktop introduced after OS X came out) for my high school journalism class, and found out that Apple wasn't the red-eyed demon I had always thought it was. As a matter of fact, it was more than just usable. It was, dare I say it, intuitive.

And so college rolled around, and I found myself in possession of a pretty large sum of money, which I used to buy a replacement for my laptop. It was deathly slow, you see. Having dealt with both PCs and Macs, and with the advent of the Intel processor under the hood of every new Mac, which allowed for the installation of Windows on Macs, I decided that I could get a Mac and then have the best of both operating systems (which is to say, I could have intuitive stuff on the Mac side, and computer games on the Windows side).

And for a while, I was a fan of Mac. Apple made some darn fine computers, even if their iPod was nowhere near as useful or fully-featured as other MP3 players on the market. And sure, my Zen Vision:M couldn't exactly interface with my new computer, but I had ways of working around that as long as I was near people with a Windows computer.

Then Apple announced the iPhone, and it was sweet, but it was highly unaffordable, and came with a mandatory plan with AT&T, which makes the whole thing even more unaffordable.

Then Apple came out with the iPod Touch, which was like the iPhone, only stripped of the phone plan and, for some reason, several of the really handy applications that weren't phone-centric, like email, Google Maps, and Notes.

Still, I bought an iPod Touch on the grounds that it finally had something that no other MP3 player could replicate: Internet. And it was a good buy, especially because it interfaced with my iMac. But it still couldn't do everything I wanted it to as easily as I wanted it to. Case in point: email, Google Maps, and Notes.

Enter the countless number of people who have worked to hack the iPhone (and concordantly, the iPod Touch), which brings us to this point...



This will only last until Apple releases their first-party SDK and people can install Apple-approved applications on their iPhones/Pod Touches, but I love it. I'm quite giddy at this point, but soon that should evaporate into recognizing the usefulness of these applications for everything they're worth.