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

Anyone curious about the roots of Apple’s status as the first trillion-dollar company would be well advised to pick up this book. Kocienda, former principal engineer of iPhone software for Apple, ably explains the company’s development philosophy through a series of vignettes covering the creation of the Safari web browser and the design of the on-screen keyboards for the iPhone and iPad. Starting by listing “seven essential elements to Apple’s software success” (including collaboration, decisiveness, and taste), Kocienda immediately cautions the reader that “there weren’t any signs affixed to the walls of our Cupertino campus exhorting us to ‘Collaborate!’ On the contrary, we felt, on an instinctive level, that a fixed methodology might snuff out the innovation we were seeking.” This flexible approach, Kocienda shows, was key to the success of Apple’s tightly integrated combination of hardware and software. He also emphasizes Steve Jobs’s insistence that the company “make extremely advanced products from a technology point of view, but also have them be intuitive, easy to use, fun to use, so that they really fit the users.” Kocienda’s account of how, painstakingly, this goal was achieved will be of deep interest to software engineers as well as the casual computer buff keen on gaining insight into Apple’s unprecedented success. [em](Sept.) [/em]