My keyboard would be a part of the overall impression, and Phil was confused rather than convinced.

In this collaboration, some of these roles could be fluid. Bas sometimes wrote bits of code, and often his demos went directly to Steve without the help of a programmer like me. In the case of this keyboard demo, I contributed some design thinking by adding a second keyboard with bigger keys. Bas edited my choice of using the globe key to switch be

From my standpoint, as an individual programmer, demoing to Steve was like visiting the Oracle of Delphi. The demo was my question. Steve’s response was the answer. While the pronouncements from the Greek Oracle often came in the form of confusing riddles, that wasn’t true with Steve. He was always easy to understand. He would either approve a demo

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. Like the movie, demos should be specifically choreographed, so it’s clear what must be included and what can be left out. Those things that aren’t the main focus of a demo, b

he decided to make the closest possible approximation of a real browser that was feasible on his short schedule.

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.

That doesn’t give product designers the license to ignore philosophy. Rather, in my case, I recognized I’m not a philosopher myself; I’m closer to a carpenter. As a maker of products, I always turned less to the theoretical and more to the applied. I have my own definition of taste, and while it isn’t as profound as Kant’s, it’s a useful tool, like

Touchscreen keyboard autocorrection was born in that moment, and Richard and I stood there in my office together, giggling like little kids.

We needed concrete and specific demos to guide our work, since even an unsophisticated idea is hard to discuss constructively without an artifact to illustrate it. Here’s an example: