RIP, Steve Jobs

  I'm not a starry-eyed Apple fan, but I've always loved Apple's products.  An Apple IIe got me through dozens of essays and term papers during my middle school, high school, and half of my college years.
 I edited my first Knob Creek YouTube video on an iMac.
 The iPod Touch I bought last year has an amazing crisp screen that's perfectly adequate for TV show and movie watching on long plane flights.  It is easier to take out, use and stow than any of my laptops, with far better battery life.
 Apple has amazing momentum right now.  All the company has to do now is not screw up - or does it?
 It's very likely that Mr. Jobs did some sort of "brain dumping" with Tim Cook, outlining some of his ideas for future products.  But once those run out, Apple could easily fall into a sort of "maintenance mode," releasing increasingly refined versions of existing products.
 It's glib and easy to talk about Jobs as a "visionary" but in this case it's very true.  The man had an incredible, intuitive grasp of what needed to come next, but just as importantly, what form it should take.  He sensed a "need" for a portable digital music playback device, and we got the iPod, rather than the far clunkier products Archos, Creative Labs and Microsoft released.
  People like him are such a rarity - those that with such an apparent economy of thought and word and deed add so much value to the world.  When they're gone, we feel it, and we cast about, asking ourselves who else is out there radiating such light.