Creative Selection

A great, fun read

I really enjoyed reading this book both as an engineer, a product designer and a CEO. This is a great “view from below” of how an engineer's day was at Apple working on the next great thing and this has some great lessons. One striking thing about the way Apple worked (and maybe still does) was by assigning vast amounts of time and ownership to a feature. Ken worked on the iOS keyboard for years, same with the Safari browser. That kind of luxury is largely gone in the internet-time world where sprints are 2-weeks long, there's a major launch every quarter and so on. But this is only how you can create really deep, well-thought our products. There's a great lesson here about that, and I highly recommend you read it.

A wonderful insight into the creative process at Apple - I particularly enjoyed the anecdotes about internal demonstrations and the iterative design process in place.

I enjoyed the stories Ken told from the history of Apple. He had interesting insight into what made his projects successful. Some of his insight is helpful for others to learn from to make their projects successful, but mostly the book is an interesting glimpse into what made WebKit and iPhone so successful.