Today we lost one of the most inspirational and influential people of our time and our profession. Steve Jobs passed away today due to the cancer he had so valiantly fought over the past years. He died at the age of 56.

He had recently stepped down as CEO of Apple, something we all knew would happen since his condition was getting worse. Apple decided to dedicate their homepage to him with a full page image saying "Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011". Below, you can see a screenshot of the Apple website soon after it was announced that Steve Jobs had passed away.

Even though I do not own an Apple product, I respect the hell out of this man and what he had accomplished. He was a great influence on the tech community and has continually raised the bar with his products and company. Steve Jobs was a great thinker, a great motivator, and a great influencer. His influence and vision will live on for a very long time to come. RIP Steve Jobs and as a user, my hat is off to you for creating one of the greatest brands in tech history and creating one of the most diverse community of supporters that every entrepreneur can only hope to obtain.

Need A Shot of Inspiration? Here are some of Steve Jobs' greatest quotes

• Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. Stay hungry. Stay foolish.
• Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it.
• Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?
• I'm the only person I know that's lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year.... It's very character-building.
• Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me ... Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful... that's what matters to me.
• That's been one of my mantras -- focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.
• You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something -- your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
• It takes these very simple-minded instructions—‘Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it’s greater than this other number’––but executes them at a rate of, let’s say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic.
• I’ll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I’ll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I’m not there, but I’ll always come back.
• You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.

Well, Steve, you put a ding in the universe. I hope Apple continues to produce the quality that only you can expect from them. You were a great man that built a great company from the ground up. You are an inspiration to designers, developers, and tech geek alike. Once again, RIP Steve Jobs.

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