# As today is the 10th anniversary of the launch of the first iPhone I was thinking back about the phones I've had and the route I took to get where I am now.
I didn't get actually get an iPhone until the 4S.
Having been heavily immersed in Microsoft tech (Exchange, SharePoint, Tablet PCs) it seemed natural to go with Windows Mobile - the direct Exchange support was the main draw seeing as I was hosting my own server at home.
I went through a few Windows Mobile devices and got involved with building custom ROMs. When the original iPhone came out I was in the market for a new device but stuck with MS despite the best efforts of the guy in the phone shop.
I was too used to the way I could mess about with system files, skinning and do whatever I wanted to the device.
When one particular Windows device died (possibly from over flashing ROMs) I went through a few other phones but ended up on Symbian with a Nokia XM5800 - the XM stood for 'Xpress Music' and it was the first device to use the touch-centric version of Symbian.
It was actually a pretty decent phone and, thanks to the huge Symbian community, could be tweaked and modded, but it was only ever a stop gap. I knew I wanted to move on to something more modern.
And that's when I first went Android. This was in 2009 and I still didn't want to be within the closed Apple environment at the time as I again wanted to experiment with custom ROMs.
Over the next couple of years, both Android and iOS ecosystems evolved but I grew increasingly frustrated over certain apps being iOS only or the Android versions being inferior to their iOS cousins.
Android was also improving so I no longer felt so much need to keep tweaking and trying custom ROMs - a move away wouldn't then be so jarring. When I was due for an upgrade I finally opted to get an iPhone. The 4S.
Two years later I switched back to Android with the Nexus 5 because I wanted a larger screen. Apple had moved to a 4 inch screen with the iPhone 5 but this just wasn't enough.
By this time the app situation had improved somewhat. There were a couple of apps I used that were iOS only but I found alternatives that almost gave me what I needed so made do. I was also very heavily engaged with Google Plus so it made sense at the time.
The Nexus 5 was a great phone and the improvements in Android meant that I didn't even consider messing about with custom ROMs. Still, as soon as my contract was up and Apple was on the second year of offering larger screen devices, I knew it was time to switch back getting the 6S Plus which has been my workhorse ever since.
The only time I absolutely have to use my laptop over the phone is for complex CSS design work or gaming.
Despite being largely platform agnostic in the past I know that I now couldn't move away from iOS and be completely happy with my experience. Although I would be able to adapt I have established such an effective workflow that I don't think I could replicate elsewhere.
My next phone will, therefore, be the iPhone 8.
# Interesting! Anchor can now be used to publish a podcast.
The jump from v1 to v2 was huge and left a number of folks in the lurch. Sounds like they're listening. (Pun intended ?)
# With the blog now structured the way it is, with chronological posts organised by day, I am adding titles to far fewer items than I ever expected.
Each day is designed to read down the page and can often be taken as a whole; titles only serve to break that up and ruin the flow.
Some days this works better than others, when the posts are more a stream of related comments. Some things, however, need to retain their titles such as the microcast episodes.
It's fascinating seeing how the approach to blogging has organically developed and continues to change in response to a few design decisions. It's not always a conscious choice, things just seem to happen automatically as they become the best fit based on what's already there.
# All items without titles are posted as statuses, regardless of length, and published from Drafts using Workflow. Poor Ulysses isn't getting much of a look in.
