I was never a fan of home computers and mobile phones; very late adopter and user of both. I picked up my first Windows PC in the mid-90s, mostly to see what this new internet was all about and to use a comic cataloguing program I’d inadvisedly bought from a comic shop. My first phone was quite advanced, but I only used it to call and text people, and to take the odd photograph. The problem with both devices being, I didn’t want to have to learn how the things worked in order to operate them. My attitude was the same as for playing video game consoles - shove the game in, play the game (my attempts at playing PC games did not last very long).

The first six issues of West were written in Word on a Windows laptop, and lettered and produced using Photoshop. I’m proud of them, and they’ve been well-received, but they are simple, insular tales of western adventure, and the notes I’d made to myself were in a separate Word document to which I had to constantly refer.

The thing is, about those pre-Apple devices (because, yes, this is a Steve Jobs memorial post) - the only time I had an emotional connection with them was because they didn’t work. When they crashed, or froze, or caught another damn virus. The only feelings I had towards them were anger and frustration.

Almost three years ago, my laptop caught its last virus. I went out and I bought a MacBook. When I turned it on it showed me a video of flying through the solar system that would have flat out killed my previous machine on its best day, located my wi-fi signal, and asked me what I wanted to do.

For the first time, I knew what I wanted to do - I wanted to do everything.

And I could.

I later upgraded my Archos MP3 player to an iPod, and today I have an iPhone, and making calls and sending texts is the least of what I use it for. It’s my Filofax and address book, calendar and scheduler, and social network interface; I have a bunch of cool games on it for whiling away spare moments and a couple of apps (Hipstamatic and Instagram) that actually turn the unsatisfactory camera into a strength by imbuing the photographs with the feeling of the time they were taken.

And that MacBook is still going strong, and hasn’t given me a second of frustration. Because on the very few occasions things weren’t proceeding as expected, I could figure out how to solve it myself. Not through technical knowledge, but through common sense.

And West is now written in a program called Scrivener (now in Windows beta, but a Mac-exclusive when I first bought it) that gives me multiple drafting windows, index card plotting, HTML and PDF research pages, audio and video panes - all in the same program in one window - that have made volume 2 of West a far more intricate and cohesive story than it ever was before.

There are a lot of tech people eulogising Steve Jobs on the net today. I didn’t teach myself BASIC as a kid, or go into I.T., graphic design or professional writing as a career. I just wanted to write the best comic I could, access the amazing things computers could do, without having to understand how they did it, or how to fix it when it went wrong.

Steve Jobs figured all that out, so that idiots like me wouldn’t have to.

Thank you, Steve.