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

This was one of Steve’s great secrets of success as a presenter. He practiced. A lot. He went over and over the material until he had the presentation honed, and he knew it cold.

Exactly how we collaborated mattered, and for us on the Purple project, it reduced to a basic idea: We showed demos to each other. Every major feature on the iPhone started as a demo, and for a demo to be useful to us, it had to be concrete and specific.

But if you’re expecting to read a handbook about the “Seven Elements That Made Apple Great,” I hope you’ll see that working in the Apple style is not a matter of following a checklist.

The substandard speed and accuracy of the Newton’s stylus-based text entry drowns out all other memories of the product.

As in Diplomacy, the whole software organization kept meetings and teams small to maintain efficiency and to reinforce the principle of doing the most with the least.

Steve used demo reviews to judge for himself whether features met this basic usability standard. When he gave me the specific feedback to remove one of the two keyboards from my iPad demo, it had a cascade effect toward greater simplicity.

He then made his shortcuts, and these simplifying choices defined a set of nongoals: Perfect font rendering would be cast aside, as would full integration with the Mac’s native graphics system, same for using only the minimum source code from KDE.

In the same way, software demos need to be convincing enough to explore an idea, to communicate a step toward making a product, even though the demo is not the product itself.

Our demos to Steve carried the promise that we could deliver, and since showing work to Steve implied this willingness to commit, very few demos shown for the first time in these earlier meetings proceeded to him without further refinement.