I should have known I was misunderstanding things after today’s familiar stock plummet, but my heart leapt. No, jobs are not coming back. Steve Jobs is! That’s good news, too.

I love him, an grateful for what he’s done for my life  — A foundation career in graphic design and now the gorgeous connectivity of the iPhone — and I feel personally invested in his health. But, even so, on a global level good news about Jobs’ health is not quite as uplifting as the possible reporting of the restoration of 2.6 million+ jobs shed in this country since this unprecedentedly vicious recession began.

Jobs’ continuing good health  might well create 2.6 million+ jobs, but that would take some time and I thought this headline was good news about things today…meaning, in June.

Silicon Alley Insider reports on new research from NPD Group that Apple’s Mac business — which was growing 50% year-over-year a year ago — is now shrinking.

According to the WSJ, the dollar value of Apple’s sales through U.S. retail channels fell 11% during the month, faster than the decline in unit sales. Its market share, measured in dollars, declined to 13.7% from 16.4% in January 2008, NPD said. An Apple spokesman declined comment.

What that means is people are buying lower-end Apple computers:

Consumers interested in low- to mid-range portables have been gravitating toward Apple’s $999 laptop, its least-expensive model. Demand for the high-end models over $1,500 has been virtually unchanged over the past several months.

The average price of Apple computers stood at $1,480 for its laptops and $1,500 for desktops in January — more than twice as high as computers based on Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system.

This is sad to me, because the thing that separated Apple buyers from PC buyers has been a belief in the quality-of-life factor and value over price;  spread over time, the upgrade to an Apple costs just a few cents a day worth of worthy enjoyment.

In a former job I declined to let an employer buy a computer for me because I felt a sense of pride and bonding with my Apple that made it worth it to me to use my personal machine unpaid as a work machine. And when the backlight element died, I bought a new Apple on my dime and repaired the old one to be a backup. Let’s just say I couldn’t do that now. Sad.

On the Huffington Post, used by top-tier writers and frequent commenters: Two hyphens together, posing as a long ("em") dash. Ugliness caused by Windows. If it's not that, it's the dreaded Underscore posing as an em dash.

I really try hard not to be an insufferable Mac snob, and I think I do quite well, considering by what an enormous margin I prefer Apple computers.

But I have to vent about two things that are effortless on a Mac and deeply annoying in Windows.

1. Screenshots.With a Mac Command-Shift-4 gets me marquee-dragging crosshairs adorned with the window dimensions. When I drag, the adorners read out how big the screenshot would be if I released the mouse button. When I do release the mouse, a auto-named png file is there on my desktop waiting for me to use whenever I feel like it.In Windows, I have to open a Snipping Tool app with dialogue, or I can use PrintScreen/Alt-PrintScreen key input, but then I have an image on the OS clipboard and I need to put it somewhere. I need to paste it into an Office doc, or into an image editing program document. That’s right, I need to have a program open either way I do it, with dialogue boxes, choices, etc.

   Grrrr.

2. The em dash. It looks like this: —. I use it a lot. It’s more than a comma, and sets things off nicely in a way that offers an alternative feel to parentheses. On my Apple machine, Command-Option-[hyphen] inserts a lovely em dash into my text wherever I want it.Contrast that experience with the Windows way: First, you have to have a keyboard with a 10-key pad on the right, or to turn on NumLock (I think). Then, you have to hold down Alt while typing 0151 into the 10-key pad.

There are two reasons why #2 is especially annoying:

1. It slows me down and is stoopid.
2. Other prople do not know how to get an em dash in Windows and have begun to use _ instead, as well as – and – -.Why should Windows’ shortcomings create new punctuation?! I find it kind of uncaring that they will ignore user needs to the point new punctuation is created out of frustration.

Steve Jobs heralds the real-time web age

I’m sure that Steve Jobs didn’t want his announcement to be one of the seminal events that ushers in the real-time web age, but what just happened today will be remembered for years to come.

What happened? While CNBC was reporting it on TV the real-time-web was going nuts. Passing along little tidbits. Stories. Links. Rumors. And all that. It was fun, interesting, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of it.

Not so different from the über-addictive Twitter Election Buzz Generator Map during the election. You saw memes and news of events develop real-time.

There were 40 Tweets coming in every three or four seconds on Twitter search. And it stayed up!

See above comment.

Friendfeed was going nuts (that’s where I saw the news first).

While I wrote this post, which only took about a minute or two, 191 new Tweets came in.

I am in obeisance if you can write a good post in 1-2 mins. Should I end it all now?!

But this points to some dangers and problems:

1. If you aren’t online there’s no “warning” system that something is happening. I wish I could tell Twitter to SMS me whenever a “high flow” event is underway.

Awesome idea re: SMS “big trends” alerts. Could close the digital divide a little, but also something that would enfranchise the already-at-least-partially enfranchised.

2. It’s hard to separate out the real facts, from the fiction. I have a better filter than most people. I know who is credible based on past experience with them. Quick, who is more credible, Allen Stern or Ralph Sanders. I am following both and know who Allen is. Ralph? Not so much and I’ve never seen him involved in a breaking news story.

Twitter truly is the wisdom of many; get just 15 tweets on a topic and you have a good read on what’s happening and where it places relative to rumors…and if you choose your followeds well, you get a REALLY good  feed of information analysis the likes of which you can’t get on TV or elsewhere.

Anyway, thank you to Steve Jobs for demonstrating to lots of people that real-time news is indeed important and that blogs are not the only way to go. Now you you understand why I invested so much time in friendfeed and twitter last year.

The thing I got out of the Jobs announcement besides the thought that Apple will be different for either awhile or “going forward” (a phrase born to describe the future after a bad event) is: Steve Jobs gave us just about everything beautiful in computing. His has been and will be a life lived for US. And I hope his days going forward are good.