Ken Kocienda was one of the head Software engineers on the iPhone from 2001 to 2016 and has written an absorbing book on his time with the company called Creative Selection.
Kocienda looks back on his time with Apple fondly and goes through in detail the creative process Apple uses on selecting software features which is the Creative Selection he names the book after. It combines seven different elements that together can be called a success including collaboration, inspiration, diligence, craft, taste, decisiveness and most importantly empathy.
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Creative Selection is the overall strategy followed by Apple’s engineers with small teams focused on constant demos of their work that allow them to spread their ideas and designs, keeping the best bits, losing things that don’t quite translate and getting everything to the level of excellence associated with Apple final product releases.
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His first project for Apple was helping to develop the Safari browser for the Mac then went to work on bringing a WebKit-based rich email editing system to Apple’s Mail app and goes into detail on the lengths he had to go to to make an insertion point cursor placement respond correctly. It’s an example of how such a small detail can become an obsession for a programmer and how difficult it can be to perform such a basic task.
He then joined the top-secret team working on the iPhone called Project Purple and this is where Kocienda was happiest. His main contribution was to the development of the autocorrect keyboard and how it could work on such a small screen.
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The single most striking thing revelation here is that Kocienda hadn’t actually seen the design of the actual iPhone as hardware was kept entirely separate from software. He saw it for the first time when Steve Jobs showed it off at the Macworld Expo in 2006.
He then went onto continue his work on autocorrection and the keyboard of the iPad. Creative Selection is available now from Amazon, the iBooks Store, and other retailers.
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