Creative Selection [Book]

The full title of the book is Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs. Amazon^

started : 7-May-2020 finished: 14-May-2020

• Book starts with a memory of the writer with Steve Jobs, a demo, about IPad keyboard. He prepares two types of keyboard and a transition feature that allows user to switch between keyboards. After Steve saw this, he asks: "We will go with one of this right?". This is a good point about product design. Take the decisions on behalf of the user and lower the mental load for user.
• Then a memory about the secret development of Safari browser for Mac desktop. As a professional software developer, what they achieved porting the Konqueror browser from KDE to mac with a small team is also very inspiring. The job alone was hard enough to port the browser to a very different platform, on top of that, Steve wanted it to be fast. Faster than Microsoft Internet Explorer which was the default browser for mac back at the time. The team came up with the idea to measure the average page load times in each iteration. Whenever a pull request created, the effect of these changes got measured and merged only if there was no speed penalty. This is also very pragmatic and efficient way of making the software faster, by being sure that it is not getting slower. You cannot improve withouth measuring.
• The climax of the book is where the original iPhone development starts. The struggles for a usable sofware keyboard were amazing, makes you realize that how hard it is to achieve even if we take it granted today.

The biggest take away from this book for me is: be diligent if you want to achieve something remarkable. Never choose a half measure, you need to go down all the way.