marginalia 🌿

Creative Selection: Book Review

March 25, 2019
Categories: books

(Spoilers ahead.)

(goodreads)

Reading Apple books and following people who talk about Apple is interesting for me because I don’t own or use many Apple products. Even though their products generally don’t appeal to me, I find their design and product decisions interesting, and compared to other companies they seem to do things with care and intention. (By this I mean design decisions seem to be made intentionally, rather than things falling together haphazardly as a result of compromises and accidents and historical decisions.)

I found out about this book from the Accidental Tech Podcast (<3) where they reviewed it. As John mentioned on ATP, demoing briefly to a god-like figure and them making a snap decision based on the limited information they have sounds like an anti-pattern, and doesn’t seem like a design practice that would be pulled off successfully in most places. It seemed like it worked for Apple in large part because Steve Jobs and other influential figures had good taste, which Kocienda does list as one of the requirements for success.

Every time I read accounts of people who worked at Apple, I am always struck by how badly Steve Jobs comes across, even though most of these people seem to have a positive opinion of him. In this account, he sounded emotionally abusive to the point of needling a handler (Henri Lamiraux, VP of iOS software engineering, being one example) to protect engineers: “He was a source of coolness that prevented us from constantly getting burned by Steve’s searing heat.” (p. 13)

One anecdote I enjoyed was the development of the iPad keyboard layout: they experimented with a minimal keyboard with bigger keys and a keyboard with a full-sized layout, and a toggle button complete with a bespoke morph animation to switch between them. Steve Jobs realized that only one keyboard layout was necessary, and asked Kocienda which keyboard they should go with:

Ken: “Well, I’ve been using these demos for the past few days, and I’ve started to like the keyboard layout with the bigger keys. I think I could learn to touch type on it, and I think other people could too. Autocorrection has been a big help.”

Steve continued looking at me as he thought about my answer. He never moved his eyes to anyone or anything else. He was completely present. There he was, seriously considering my idea about the next big Apple product. It was thrilling. He thought for a few seconds about what I had just said and what he had seen on the iPad. Then he announced the demo verdict.

“OK. We’ll go with the bigger keys.” (p. 30)

What I particularly liked about this anecdote was the trust and respect and conviction they showed in decision-making, and accepting that making the “best” decision was the highest priority: “Bas never expressed any disappointment over his zoom animation getting deleted either. Seeing good work wind up on the cutting room floor was part of the job.” (p. 36)

There is a care in craftsmanship that shows in small details – an example is inertial scrolling, the bounce that occurs when scrolling to the end of a page or list. Another example is the following passage regarding the iOS autocorrection dictionary:

“As everyone on the Purple [iPhone code name] hallway used the software day in and day out, we made surprising discoveries about what the autocorrection dictionary should contain. We found we had to add a complete collection of hate speech to the dictionary and explicitly mark those words to prevent the software from ever offering them as autocorrections — imagine trying to type ‘nugget’ but narrowly mistyping the first vowel or the last consonant. We didn’t want to offer racial epithets as a ‘helpful’ aid, and we resolved that we would never provide software assistance for attempts to slur or demean.” (p. 196)

Finally, in a recent ATP interview with Phil Schiller, he talks about striving to do the “best”, not the most, the cheapest, the fastest, etc. Even if their products aren’t always objectively the “best” or most suitable for everyone, this is what makes them interesting to follow as a company.