My own random Apple-connected moment of delight. In 2005, when they announced Dashboard widgets, I was running a data-visualization site built off Google News called Buzztracker [0]. It was a really simple idea and hackneyed execution, but it worked and was quite popular: it mapped the news from 1000s of sources onto a map, allowing you to navigate via geography into the day's events.

I took an afternoon and knocked out a widget edition of the site. If I remember correctly, you submitted your widgets to Apple.com and they had a little gallery. Well, I came home a few days later and my server was melting: thousands of hits/second from apple.com. It turned out they decided to make the entire homepage of apple.com a hot-link to my widget. [1] It stayed that way for about 24 hours — June 17 - 18, 2005.

I love this era of the 'net — when apple.com would just link to a dev's or designer's project. I almost fell out of my chair. Printed the screenshot out. I still remember the bar I went to that night, who I had a celebratory drink with in Kagurazaka, Tokyo, sort of marveling at the absurdity of it all.

The exposure didn't have any marked direct effect on my career or work, but it did boost my confidence in that maybe I wasn't working on such useless stuff in isolation on the other side of the world.

[0] http://buzztracker.org — the maps don't work because the SSIs are broken; but we often forget, Google News was one of the first times world-wide news was consolidated into a somewhat homogenous format (most sites weren't using RSS when it launched in 2001/2), certainly not one you could easily scrape and process global news patterns.

[1] https://craigmod.com/images/misc/buzztracker_apple.jpg

edit: grammar