Creative Selection

280 Pages·2018·18.41 MB·English

by  Ken Kocienda

CREATIVE SELECTION
Inside Apple’s Design Process During
the Golden Age of Steve Jobs Ken
Kocienda
St. Martin’s Press
New York
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Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
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For CDK and JGK
Introduction
This book is about my fifteen years at Apple, my efforts to make great software
while I was there, and the stories and observations I want to relate about those
times. If you want to know what it was like to give a demo to Steve Jobs, or why
the iPhone touchscreen keyboard turned out the way it did, or what made
Apple’s product culture special, read on.
I’ll tell you what it was like to be an Apple software engineer, the pressures
and pleasures of working at such a demanding company, and the rush of
excitement we coders feel when we make a computer do something new using
nothing more than solitude, brain power, and typing.
I’ll tell you about the Apple programmer community I became a part of, and
how a small group of geeky introverts created a web browser and a touchscreen
smartphone operating system starting with only dreams, goals, and ideas.
I’ll tell you about how programmers fit into the larger Apple software
development system, the joys of collaborating with designers who could bring
refinement and elegance to the look and feel of our apps, and the stress of
presenting work to colleagues, managers, and executives who always pressed for
improvements that seemed just out of reach.
There are many aspects to making products in the Apple way—industrial
design, hardware engineering, marketing, legal, and managing a vast
international supply chain, to name just a few—but to understand what makes
Apple what it is, its essence, you need to understand software, and I’ll introduce
you to the world programmers inhabit, how software gets made from scratch,
and how we tried to imbue this software with spirit. While other companies
design beautiful hardware, excel at marketing, hire good lawyers, and
manufacture gadgets at scale, no other company makes software as intuitive,
carefully crafted, or just plain fun. If there’s a unique magic in Apple’s products,
it’s in the software, and I’ll tell you how we created some of the most important
software in the company’s history.
When I joined Apple in 2001, desktop and laptop computers were still the
company’s main products, and while the colorful iMac had been a notable
success in reestablishing Apple as a design leader in high technology—Steve
Jobs had been back for four years following his eleven-year exile—the company
still sat below 5 percent share in a market dominated by Microsoft Windows.
Apple certainly had its core enthusiasts at that time, and they were passionate
about its products, but to everyone else, the Mac was a computer they might
have used in college but forgot about when they became adults and got jobs.
Four months after I started at Apple, things started to change. The release of
the iPod was as much a surprise to me as it was to everyone else, and this
portable music player kick-started Apple’s shift from computers to personal
technology. The iPod also provided the money and the confidence that would
lead to the development of the wildly successful devices that followed. This
culminated with the iPhone, the product that transformed Apple from a
technology bit player into one of the world’s most profitable enterprises.
I was a witness and a contributor to these times and these changes. I started
programming for the iPhone when the number of software engineers and
designers on the secretive project could fit in a small conference room. If you
ask me about the first iPad, I might refer to it as K48, the internal code name we
developers used before Steve Jobs and the marketing department picked a real
product name. Today, on the day I’m writing this introduction, hundreds of
millions of people will use these Apple products, and if you count the browsers
on Windows and Google Android that use code based on the Safari browser I
helped develop, then the number of daily users runs to well over a billion,
perhaps it’s closer to two.
Yet we never thought about such big numbers. We were too busy focusing on
small details. Every day at Apple was like going to school, a design-focused,
high-tech, product-creation university, an immersion program where the next
exam was always around the corner. With that intensity came an insistence on
doing things right, and, without explicitly trying to do so, we developed an
approach to work that proved particularly effective for creating great software.
My goal is to share our approach with you—to explain the way we worked. To
begin this discussion, I have identified seven elements essential to Apple’s
software success:
1. Inspiration: Thinking big ideas and imagining what might be possible
2. Collaboration: Working together well with other people and seeking to
combine your complementary strengths
3. Craft: Applying skill to achieve high-quality results and always striving
to do better
4. Diligence: Doing the necessary grunt work and never resorting to
shortcuts or half measures
5. Decisiveness: Making tough choices and refusing to delay or
procrastinate
6. Taste: Developing a refined sense of judgment and finding the balance
that produces a pleasing and integrated whole
7. Empathy: Trying to see the world from other people’s perspectives and
creating work that fits into their lives and adapts to their needs
There weren’t any company handbooks describing these elements. Nobody
outlined this list in a new-employee orientation. There weren’t any signs affixed
to the walls of our Cupertino campus exhorting us to “Collaborate!” On the
contrary, we felt, on an instinctive level, that imposing a fixed methodology
might snuff out the innovation we were seeking. Therefore, our approach flowed
from the work. This happened from the top down, stemming from the
unquestioned authority and uncompromising vision of Steve Jobs, and it
happened from the ground up, through the daily efforts of designers and
programmers you’ve never heard of, people like me and my colleagues, some of
whom I’ll tell you about.
You may have come to this book for a number of reasons, among them to find
a from-the-trenches perspective on how an iconic American company worked, to
hear the back story on some of your favorite Apple products, or to learn
something about the arcane craft of software development. But if you’re
expecting to read a handbook about the “Seven Elements That Made Apple
Great,” I hope you’ll see that working in the Apple style is not a matter of
following a checklist.
While the seven essential elements are a distillation of what we did on an
everyday basis, they represent long-term discovery too. An important aspect of
this book is the way we built our creative methods as a by-product of the work as
we were doing it. As all of us pitched in to make our products, we developed our
approach to creating great software. This was an evolution, an outgrowth of our
deliberate attention to the task at hand while keeping our end goal in mind. We
never waited around for brilliant flashes of insight that might solve problems in
one swoop, and we had few actual Eureka! moments. Even in the two instances
in my Apple career when I did experience a breakthrough—more about these
later—there certainly was no nude streaking across the Apple campus like
Archimedes supposedly did. Instead, we moved forward, as a group, in stepwise
fashion, from problem to design to demo to shipping product, taking each
promising concept and trying to come up with ways to make it better. We mixed
together our seven essential elements, and we formulated “molecules” out of
them, like mixing inspiration and decisiveness to create initial prototypes, or by
combining collaboration, craft, and taste to give detailed feedback to a
teammate, or when we blended diligence and empathy in our constant effort to
make software people could use without pulling their hair out. As we did all this
mixing and combining of our seven essential elements, we always added in a
personal touch, a little piece of ourselves, an octessence, and by putting together
our goals and ideas and efforts and elements and molecules and personal
touches, we formed our approach, an approach I call creative selection.