One of the fundamental questions that we had was, well, how big should the icons be? And so one of the engineers on the hallway had an idea his name was scott hers. He was doing work on spring board, the icon launching programme himself. The game went like this: You would launch the game, and there was a minimul user inter pace. All it was was a rectangle on the screen that was a random size and a random position. It didn't tell you if you did, if you if you succeeded or failed because the idea was just go, tap the rectangle as quickly as possible.
In this wide-ranging conversation from April 2019, a16z’s Frank Chen sits down with Ken Kocienda, a longtime software engineer and designer at Apple from 2001 to 2017, who wrote a book about his career there, called Creative Selection.
They discuss Ken’s unconventional path from freelance photographer to software engineer at Apple, his work on many core products from Safari web browser to iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch and features like Autocorrect, what it was like to demo new products for Steve Jobs, and more.