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

by Ken Kocienda

he closed the loop on my demo.

Really? I guess I did think that back then too. Free as in freedom, and beer.

Audiobook says “browser”

When did ThunderBird launch?

Have I seen him on any of the WebKit mailing lists/fora?

When software behavior is mysterious, get more organized.

omg shush

What are those like?

These are what I wish I could read.

Making demos is hard. It involves overcoming apprehensions about committing time and effort to an idea that you aren’t sure is right.

Difficult not because of required skill or effort, but because of apprehension. Fear of wasting time.

psychological hurdle

on the Purple project. We rarely had brainstorming sessions.

If brainstorms run longer than an hour or so, or if there are more than a handful of people in attendance, or if they’re a common occurrence, they can devolve into a form of sneaky procrastination.

Think of a cute puppy.

The most subtle you’ve ever been.

Geez.

Is Scott trying to win Tony and Phil over, or trying to say something to Ken?

Good team awareness to report this as a design consideration/bug and not a personal shortcoming.

No breadcrumbing

Living on the beta?

overlapping pseudokeys

always hit the right key,

When did they decide you could slide over to cprrect your target mid-tap? Is the target always where the touch ends, or only when the touch lasts longer tghan a threshold?

If this is an early prototype, those signal dots came back in iOS 11!

solving

Skipped in audio

space.

Or any letter? It's cconstantly calculating.

the opposite of the garbage in, garbage out way computers were supposed to work.

UX Design goal?

when it comes to making products, philosophical discourse is the wrong tool for the job when practical decisions are needed.

That doesn’t give product designers the license to ignore philosophy.

product designer === product maker ?

finding the self-confidence to form opinions with your gut you can also justify with your head.

until

felt this, thought it, and then

Interesting order but I guess that's the point.

It unequivocally says “keyboard,”

if you have experience in keyboard culture

His deft touch always made everything better.

So the logic is: Detect raw input of what user typed. If in dictionary, keep it. If not, use neighboring keys and word frequency values to find most likely autocorrection.

switching your typing to the word that seemed most likely given your taps—what you might have meant—or keeping the exact succession of letters you tapped and saw pop up in the user interface—what you actually did.

The keyboard had to make a what you meant versus what you did choice whenever you tapped the space bar at the end of a word.

Logic confirmed.

He reads this as “value.”

we would never provide software assistance for attempts to slur or demean.

Ethics of design? Opinionated design?

Even more thorough logic.

I built the direction of these misses into my algorithm.

Larger groupings and dynamically larger keys were two separate innovations.

it didn’t take too long to see that letter-by-letter grading didn’t produce better results than just looking at the usage frequency values.

autocorrection became a process of building a pattern from the user’s taps and searching the dictionary for the closest-matching pattern from the ideal set.

Not actually really dynamically larger keys. Huh.

reciprocal

Algorithm confirmed!

I handled it by keeping reasonable and regular work hours.

when I walked into the Moscone Center on keynote day, I still didn’t know what Purple would be called.

a company eventually runs out of reasons for design decisions

Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data.