Creative Selection
by Ken Kocienda · first published 2018
68% recommend33% neutral
Why HN recommends it
A first-person, easy-reading account of how Apple built the first iPhone keyboard and Safari, stressing working demos over wireframes. Suits those curious about Apple's product process, told as a story.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Hundreds of millions of people use Apple products every day; several thousand work on Apple's campus in Cupertino, California; but only a handful sit at the drawing board. Creative Selection recounts the life of one of the few who worked behind the scenes, a highly-respected software engineer who worked in the final years of the Steve Jobs era: the Golden Age of Apple.
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…interface is terrible. So many things now take 3 taps as opposed to one. I wonder if Tesla made the mistake of using A/B testing instead of vision-driven design like Apple. (Side note, just finished reading "Creative Selection" by Ken Kocienda of Apple, an interesting read on Apple's approach to design and why it is so successful as opposed to Google's).
on “A UX designer walks into a Tesla Bar” ↗If you like this kind of behind the scenes, i highly recommend Ken Kocienda's book "Creative Selection" about the development of some parts of the first iPhone.
on “Secret iPad” ↗Reading the book Creative Selection [1], by an early iPhone software engineer describing the development of the software keyboard, cemented my existing belief in working demos over wireframes. A lot of what makes some UI great over others…
on “Validate product design ideas with wireframes” ↗Chromium embeds the Blink browser engine which is a fork of WebKit which is a fork of KHTML. You can read Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda to get the backstory on why they chose KHTML over Gecko. You can also Google for podcasts that Don Melton has been on.
on “Ask HN: Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?” ↗Also recommended: Creative Selection, by Apple engineer Ken Kocienda: https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Selection-Inside-Apples-Proc...
on “Failure Is the Mother of Invention” ↗I was reading “Creative Selection” by Ken Kocienda last week. Goes behind the scenes of him designing the iPhone keyboard early in its development (good read) In any case he mentioned there is a hate word dictionary specifically so that…
on “An OCR cliche: Into his/her anus (2009)” ↗1. Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda - Great insight into how Apple teams develop products, and creating a “demo culture” 2. Bad Blood by John Carreyrou - Gripping prose and an altogether incredible storyline 3. It Doesn’t…
on “Ask HN: Books you read in 2018?” ↗Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs by Ken Kocienda An amazing book full of great stories and lessons to learn from people who made incredible innovations like the first…
on “Ask HN: Favorite nonfiction books of 2018?” ↗Creative Selection - Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs https://www.audible.com/pd/Creative-Selection-Audiobook/B07D...
on “Ask HN: Do you know any good audio books for developers?” ↗Many designs does this implicitly. At least one, the original iPhone keyboard autocomplete/suggestion algorithm, did it explicitly. Ken Kocienda's book Creative Selection has a very good chapter on the algorithm being built piece by piece, but finding out words being created by surrounding keys was part of collecting all the candidates. They even used this in marketing.…
on “How to Write a Spelling Corrector (2007)” ↗Maybe a bit lighter than what you meant but entertaining: Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda (https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Ken-Kocienda-ebook/dp/B079DVT6VP). One anecdote I enjoyed was how Steve Jobs said the guiding principle for Safari was that it had to load pages faster than…
on “Software Engineering at Google (2020) [pdf]” ↗…hyperbolic here but a lot of people forget or don't realize how truly far behind the competition was. Software keyboards were considered a complete no-go, even by folks within Apple (Ken Kocienda's “Creative Selection” is a great read on the development of the keyboard). Dragging / flinging / pinch to zoom didn’t exist anywhere else or if it did, only in prototype or proof-of-concept form. The capacitive screen unlocked…
on “Show HN: I restored Palm's webOS App Catalog, SDK and online help system” ↗Ken Kocienda, “the first Safari engineer”, has a book called Creative Selection [1] released a few years ago. It has a fascinating behind the scene story on how Safari was developed and how KHTML was chosen. I don’t like the analogous story on sports though. [1]: http://creativeselection.io/
on “The Time when Safari was released to the world” ↗Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda is the closest, modern look inside Apple's product development that I've found. Focus is on the development of the software for the original iPhone and is a great book.
on “Notes on Vision Pro” ↗You might enjoy Ken Kocienda's "Creative Selection", which gives his first-person account of Apple's creative process.
on “Notes on Vision Pro” ↗