Creative Selection
Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs
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4.2 • 359 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
* WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER *
An insider's account of Apple's creative process during the golden years of Steve Jobs.
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.
Ken Kocienda offers an inside look at Apple’s creative process. For fifteen years, he was on the ground floor of the company as a specialist, directly responsible for experimenting with novel user interface concepts and writing powerful, easy-to-use software for products including the iPhone, the iPad, and the Safari web browser. His stories explain the symbiotic relationship between software and product development for those who have never dreamed of programming a computer, and reveal what it was like to work on the cutting edge of technology at one of the world's most admired companies.
Kocienda shares moments of struggle and success, crisis and collaboration, illuminating each with lessons learned over his Apple career. He introduces the essential elements of innovation—inspiration, collaboration, craft, diligence, decisiveness, taste, and empathy—and uses these as a lens through which to understand productive work culture.
An insider's tale of creativity and innovation at Apple, Creative Selection shows readers how a small group of people developed an evolutionary design model, and how they used this methodology to make groundbreaking and intuitive software which countless millions use every day.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
Customer Reviews
Nice balance of technical detail and interesting anecdotes
Whilst the purpose of this book (at least from my perspective) is to teach you about the author’s 3 key tips to great product development: (1) Creative Selection, (2) Apple’s 7 Essential Elements, (3) Strong Culture / Motivated people, I found it more helpful as an intro to what work is like a high-paced cutting edge software team. I also loved the historical Apple anecdotes.
I don’t plan to use the 3 step playbook directly in my work, but will no doubt retell these stories to friends and colleagues.
Great insight into the tech world
This book puts you right in the front seat of making a revolutionary product!
A wonderful read
This book is for a lot of different people. Apple fans of course, software enthusiasts, and tech-heads are the most obvious. But I also recommend this book to anyone interested in how to fuse two seemingly different elements to make a synergistic whole - in this case Ken elaborates on how Apple was able to intersect technology and the liberal arts but beyond that this book makes a case that all elements of life should be done with humanity, empathy, and a focus on who it is we’re trying to help. Such a wonderful book!