Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Years of Steve Jobs - Hardcover

Kocienda, Ken

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1250194466 ISBN 13: 9781250194466

Verlag: Macmillan US, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

An insider's tale of creativity and innovation at Apple, Creative Selection shows readers how a small group of people developed an evolutionary design model, and how they used this methodology to make groundbreaking and intuitive software which countless millions use every day.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ken Kocienda was a software engineer and designer at Apple for over fifteen years. After graduating from Yale, he fixed motorcycles, worked in the editorial library of a newspaper, taught English in Japan, and made fine art photographs. Eventually, he discovered the internet, taught himself computer programming, and made his way through a succession of dot-com-era startups, before landing at Apple in 2001, where he worked on the software teams that created the Safari web browser, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. Ken lives in San Francisco, California with his wife.

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Creative Selection

Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

By Ken Kocienda

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2018 Ken Kocienda
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-250-19446-6

Contents

Title Page, 
Dedication, 
Introduction, 
1. The Demo, 
2. The Crystal Ball, 
3. The Black Slab, 
4. One Simple Rule, 
5. The Hardest Problem, 
6. The Keyboard Derby, 
7. QWERTY, 
8. Convergence, 
9. The Intersection, 
10. At This Point, 
Epilogue, 
Acknowledgments, 
Notes, 
Index, 
About the Author, 
Copyright, 

CHAPTER 1

The Demo

"Bzzt." I looked down at my iPhone. I had been nervously turning it over in my hands for the last half hour. Now, finally, I got the text I had been expecting.

It said, "Any minute now."

I replied, "OK."

I had been sitting forward, elbows perched on my knees, fidgeting uncomfortably in an otherwise comfortable leather chair, one of a set arranged as a casual meeting area near the elevators of the second floor of Apple Headquarters, Infinite Loop Building 2, in Cupertino, California. Message received, I got up from my chair, returned my iPhone to my pocket, and walked a few steps down a quiet hallway until I stood outside of the conference room called Diplomacy. When the door opened, I would be invited in to give a demo to Steve Jobs.

It was the late summer of 2009, and I was making software prototypes for a new product, an as-yet-unnamed tablet computer. A little more than two years before, Apple had introduced the iPhone, which was then beginning to realize its vast potential in the marketplace, just as it had captured the fancy of the computing cognoscenti on the day it was released. Now it fell to people like me, a programmer on the iOS software team, to help create a fitting follow-up.

I'd worked on the iPhone as well, starting in 2005. Through twists and turns, which I'll describe in detail starting in chapter 6, "The Keyboard Derby," it became my job to write the software for the iPhone keyboard, with my main focus on the autocorrect feature, the code responsible for turning your acxuratw tyoinh into accurate typing.

Throughout the development of the iPhone, we referred to the keyboard, often quite nervously, as a "science project." When we started developing our touchscreen operating system, we didn't know if typing on a small touch-sensitive sheet of glass was technologically feasible or a fool's errand. As commonplace as virtual keyboards have become, in those days, the norm for smartphones was the BlackBerry, with its built-in hardware keyboard, its plastic chiclet keys, and its tactile thumb-typing. In contrast, the iPhone keyboard would offer tiny virtual keys that gave no feedback you could feel with your fingers.

An effective autocorrection feature would be essential, and I worked with the constant worry that my typing fix-up code might turn the iPhone into a punch line. Nobody at Apple wanted a repeat of the Newton, the handheld personal digital assistant the company marketed in the 1990s. Unreliable handwriting recognition gave the Newton a public relations black eye that never faded; the product never sold well, in large part due to its lackluster text entry; and the Newton never became the mass-market indispensable item it was intended to be.

My task was further complicated by Apple's pervasive secrecy. On Purple, the project code name for the in-development iPhone, every detail was protected with need-to-know confidentiality. Few people had been given the chance to see or try the Purple software before Steve announced it in a high-profile keynote presentation in January 2007, so it was out of the question to treat my keyboard work as a real science project and conduct extensive trials on a broad population. I got feedback on the autocorrect feature from just a few dozen people before the whole world got a crack at it. No wonder we were nervous.

Standing in the hallway outside of Diplomacy, I had no time to think about the stress of the iPhone keyboard development cycle. I was focused more on the stress of the moment — an imminent demo to Steve. This new tablet, which Apple would introduce many months later as the iPad, would use the same operating system as the iPhone but would have a larger screen. This brought a new set of keyboard challenges, and I was ready to present my solution for one of them. Demos like this were the foundation of the Apple software development process, as you'll see in the case of this iPad demo and as I'll describe in many other demos throughout this book.

I never demoed my keyboard to Steve while our Purple smartphone was in development — someone higher up in the organization had always done it for me. The success of the iPhone keyboard had, apparently, enhanced my standing. My managers didn't come right out and say so, but their invitation to meet with Steve, coming as it did only after I had proven myself by delivering iPhone autocorrection, showed me what it took to get direct access to the company's famous CEO.

This would be my second Steve demo — the first had happened a few weeks earlier, when I'd shown him font options for the high-resolution Retina display planned for the iPhone 4. That demo had gone well, and since I was being invited back, I began to feel that I had made it into the inner circle of people in Apple product development who would routinely demo software to Steve. I don't know exactly how many people were in this group, but there weren't many. Perhaps a few dozen. Of course, there were even more exclusive circles. I was still in the hallway waiting to be called in, while there were people already sitting with Steve inside Diplomacy.

Steve was at the center of all the circles. When he was in sufficiently good health — he had returned only a couple months earlier from his second health-related leave of absence in five years — he made all the important product decisions. He used these demo reviews as his chief means of deciding how Apple software should look and feel and function.

From my standpoint, as an individual programmer, demoing to Steve was like visiting the Oracle of Delphi. The demo was my question. Steve's response was the answer. While the pronouncements from the Greek Oracle often came in the form of confusing riddles, that wasn't true with Steve. He was always easy to understand. He would either approve a demo, or he would request to see something different next time. Nevertheless, some mystery remained. No matter how good your work was, or how smoothly it had sailed through the preliminary reviews leading up to him, you could never know how he would react. Sometimes he'd say he loved or hated something but then reverse himself in midsentence. Perhaps his change of heart might come a day or two later. Other times his opinions, once stated, held in place for years.

Then there were his moods. On any given day, he might give you a tongue-lashing during a demo if he didn't like the work you brought him. Nobody was exempt either — not top-level executives he worked with every day and not programmers like me whom he didn't know beyond a passing recognition. This was the price of admission to his demo room — either accept it, or don't demo to him. It could be difficult to hang on while riding this emotional workplace roller coaster, and some begged off. One exceptionally talented and experienced colleague told me flat out that he refused to demo his own work in Diplomacy ever again because of the way...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Macmillan US
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1250194466
• ISBN 13: 9781250194466
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar