Amaya Toman Former Apple software engineer Ken Kocienda is currently publishing his book Creative Selection. Kocienda's work allows readers to see under the hood of the design processes in the Cupertino company and presents several key moments in the field of apple design.
Kocienda joined Apple in 2001 and spent the next fifteen years working primarily in software development. In the book Creative Selection describes the seven most important elements important to Apple's software success. These elements are inspiration, collaboration, craft, effort, determination, taste and empathy.
The creative selection process is a strategy handled by small teams of engineers. These teams are fully focused on rapidly creating demo versions of their work, allowing other responsible employees to quickly formulate their ideas and suggestions. The best elements of each iteration are saved to quickly achieve the level of refinement needed for the final release of Apple products.
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Ken Kocienda first joined the Eazel team in 2001. It was founded by ex-Apple engineer Andy Hertzfeld, but the company ceased operations. After Eazel quit, Kocienda, along with Don Melton, was hired by Apple to help develop the Safari web browser for the Mac. Other former Eazel employees eventually joined the project. In the book Creative Selection, Kocienda, among other things, describes in several chapters the difficulty of the first steps in the development of Safari. His inspiration was supposed to be the not very well-known Konqueror browser. The team responsible for the development of Safari has made an almost tireless effort to create a working browser with an emphasis on speed. Kocienda describes that the development of the web browser was by no means easy, but he had a professional support in Don Melton. Gradually, the whole team managed to program a faster and faster browser.
Once Safari was released, Kocienda was reassigned to a project to improve the native Mail app. Here, too, it was very precise and detailed work, the results of which may seem banal to the uninitiated, but the process that leads to them is quite complicated. But Safari and Mail weren't the only projects Kocienda worked on during his time at Apple. One of the most important areas of Kocienda's competence was the once super-secret Project Purple, i.e. the development of the first iPhone. Here, Kocienda was in charge of creating automatic corrections for the keyboard of the first Apple smartphone. One of the problems that the responsible team had to solve was how to place the keyboard on the small screen of the phone and how to achieve the greatest possible user comfort and at the same time the functionality of the software keyboard. In a way, the mutual separation of the individual teams did not make the work much easier - for example, Kocienda never saw the design of the phone for which he was developing the keyboard.
MacRumors lists Kociend's Creative Selection as a must-read. There's no shortage of interesting behind-the-scenes stories, and given his time at Apple, Kocienda certainly knows what he's talking about. The book is available on the website Amazon, you can purchase its electronic version at iBooks.
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