Sublime

Demos like this were the foundation of the Apple software development process, as you’ll see in the case of this iPad demo and as I’ll describe in many other demos throughout this book.

We always started small, with some inspiration. We made demos. We mixed in feedback. We listened to guidance from smart colleagues. We blended in variations. We honed our vision. We followed the initial demo with another and then another. We improved our demos in incremental steps. We evolved our work by slowly converging on better versions of the

Convergence was the term we used to describe the final phase of making an Apple product, after the features had been locked down and the programming and design teams spent the last three or four months fixing bugs and polishing details.

These problems illustrate a common product development quandary. People who love tech gadgets want new products that do cool new things. This creates the customer demand that gives product developers like me incentive to add new features. Yet none of us wants these products and features to be confusing, to lead us astray, to drive us down a softwar

It may seem like a stretch to draw a comparison between winning football games in Green Bay and developing web browser software in Cupertino, but a significant part of attaining excellence in any field is closing the gap between the accidental and intentional, to achieve not just a something or even an everything but a specific and well-chosen thin

In our final design, we made punctuation and numbers available under a separate layout accessible by tapping a .?123 key. We worried there would be howls and complaints about the inconvenience of this arrangement, but it turned out to be one of those things that people adapted to readily and accepted without much fuss.