Photo Gallery: Steve Jobs 1955-2011

Hawaii residents and tourists joined the rest of the world in paying a tribute to Steve Jobs, the visionary inventor and corporate leader who changed the way many of us use the phone, listen to music, and work and play on computers.

At the Apple store on Kalakaua Avenue in Waikiki, people left lei and condolence messages, some written in Japanese and Korean.

McCully resident Aleeh Nunn paused during an early-morning run through Waikiki to take photos with her iPhone of the makeshift memorial.

"It’s nice to see that people here care," she said.

The death of Apple’s co-founder and former chief executive sparked an outpouring of grief around the world from Apple fans and competitors, as well as heads of state. In a sign of how pervasive the gadgets he spearheaded have become, much of the mourning was done on Apple gadgets: People held up pictures of candles on their iPads, reviewed his life on Macintosh computers and tapped out tributes on iPhones.

“I was so saddened. For me it was like Michael Jackson or Princess Diana — that magnitude,” Stephen Jarjoura said at the Apple Store in Sydney. His said Jobs left a legacy to rival Edison and Albert Einstein.

In the Ginza shopping district of Tokyo, people held up iPhones and iPads, their screens facing outward and displaying sharply defined, touchable graphics of flickering candles.

At an Apple Store in Hong Kong, old and new means of grief came together: People scribbled “RIP” and “We miss Steve” and longer notes of condolence on Post-It notes, and stuck them to an iPad display.

And at the 24-hour Apple Store in midtown Manhattan, the remembrances were more traditional. Passersby left flowers and candles, actual ones. Even there, people snapped pictures of the memorial with their iPhones.

Apple gave its home page over as a tribute to Jobs, and visitors who clicked through were shown an email address — rememberingsteve@apple.com — to share thoughts or memories about Jobs.

Jobs had battled cancer in 2004 and underwent a liver transplant in 2009 after taking a leave of absence for unspecified health problems. He took another leave in January — his third since his health problems began — and officially resigned as CEO in August. Jobs became Apple’s chairman and handed the helm to his hand-picked successor, Tim Cook.

Apple announced Jobs’ death Wednesday without specifying a cause. Jobs was 56.

Apple has sold 129 million iPhones and 29 million iPads. And in the decade since it revolutionized the music industry by offering “1,000 songs in your pocket,” it has sold 300 million iPods, or roughly enough to outfit every person in the United States.

Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, a company that Apple once treated as Goliath to its David, then blew past in market value, said it was “an insanely great honor” to have known Jobs. A statement of grief came from Sony, whose Walkman and Discman were buried by the iPod.

Google added a link to the Apple site on its famously minimalist search page. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, thanked him for changing the world.

On Twitter, where the most popular “trending” topics change by the hour, “ThankYouSteve” and “iSad” were still high on the list a day after his death.

On Facebook, people posted revisions of the Apple logo, a stylized apple with a detached leaf and a half-moon bite taken out. One added a frown and tears to the apple. Another replaced the bite with a silhouette of Jobs himself.

Heads of state around the world added their thoughts. President Barack Obama said Jobs exemplified American ingenuity. Mexico’s President Felipe Calderon bemoaned the loss of “one of the most visionary minds of our times.” India’s Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, said he was “deeply saddened.”

In a tweet sent separately from his statement, Obama said, in his words, “There may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented.”