Creative Selection, Ken Kocienda
Creative Selection, Ken Kocienda
8 Rating(s)
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Creative Selection
Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

Author: Ken Kocienda

Narrator: Ken Kocienda

Unabridged: 7 hr 28 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/04/2018

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included


Synopsis

This program is read by the author.

An insider's account of Apple's creative process during the golden years of Steve Jobs.

Hundreds of millions of people use Apple products every day; several thousand work on Apple's campus in Cupertino, California; but only a handful sit at the drawing board. Creative Selection recounts the life of one of the few who worked behind the scenes, a highly-respected software engineer who worked in the final years of the Steve Jobs era—the Golden Age of Apple.

Ken Kocienda offers an inside look at Apple’s creative process. For fifteen years, he was on the ground floor of the company as a specialist, directly responsible for experimenting with novel user interface concepts and writing powerful, easy-to-use software for products including the iPhone, the iPad, and the Safari web browser. His stories explain the symbiotic relationship between software and product development for those who have never dreamed of programming a computer, and reveal what it was like to work on the cutting edge of technology at one of the world's most admired companies.

Kocienda shares moments of struggle and success, crisis and collaboration, illuminating each with lessons learned over his Apple career. He introduces the essential elements of innovation—inspiration, collaboration, craft, diligence, decisiveness, taste, and empathy—and uses these as a lens through which to understand productive work culture.

An insider's tale of creativity and innovation at Apple, Creative Selection shows listeners how a small group of people developed an evolutionary design model, and how they used this methodology to make groundbreaking and intuitive software which countless millions use every day.

Praise for Creative Selection:

"Kocienda reveals the real secret of Steve Jobs's leadership and Apple's magic: the ability to push people to think for themselves, and to empower them to turn their best thinking into reality. It is a story about the intersection of technology and humanity." — Kim Scott, author of Radical Candor

“I’ve literally been waiting a decade for this book. Ken Kocienda takes you inside Apple in way only a true insider, a veteran software developer, could. Creative Selection is the answer to the prayer uttered by anyone who wants to truly understand how Apple works. I couldn’t put it down.” — Adam Lashinsky, New York Times bestselling author of Inside Apple

About Ken Kocienda

Ken Kocienda was a principal engineer of iPhone software at Apple for over fifteen years. After graduating from Yale, he fixed motorcycles, worked in the editorial library of a newspaper, taught English in Japan, and made fine art photographs. Eventually, he discovered the internet, taught himself computer programming, and made his way through a succession of dot-com-era startups, before landing at Apple in 2001, where he worked on the software teams that created the Safari web browser, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. Ken lives in San Jose, California with his wife. Creative Selection is his first book.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Hots on September 08, 2018

Overall, not bad. I loved the Intersections chapter, in which Ken Kocienda discusses design principles in detail. The keyboard constellation-matching algorithm, iteration from prototype to prototype, and SpringBoard touch size all provided detailed insight into Apple's design thinking and what made......more

Goodreads review by Chris on October 02, 2018

I'd been hoping for a book like this about Apple. I've been working in product design for almost thirty years, and this just confirms that writing about the "user experience" field has unfortunately been dominated by agency types: Kocienda's experience reflects what it's actually like to design a pr......more

Goodreads review by Artjoms on March 02, 2019

Today I learned that I can write a book easily. Here is what I can include there: * How I worked on a feature in one of my previous companies and then I made a DEMO of that feature to someone important * How I had to participate in a huge project and then we had to make a quick prototype, then spend a......more

Goodreads review by Michael on September 09, 2018

To-do full review: i The technical story of and by one of the many coders working at Apple in the glory days of the early 2000s, the days of iPhone changing the computer industry and, likely, the way we perceive technology. A book missing the bigger picture, and thus of interest to those directly inv......more

Goodreads review by Greg on September 30, 2018

In "Creative Selection", Ken Kocienda lets us peek into the software development process for the original iPhone. With a conversational style, he describes what it was like to develop the Safari web browser and the iPhone keyboard. In the process, he ends up talking about what the software developme......more