Creative selection

Partiendo de la base de que soy un desarrollador de software, me parece refrescante que el libro se base en los proyectos en los que el autor participó tanto fuera como dentro de Apple. No habla del desarrollo de un producto en su conjunto, sino del desarrollo de pequeños componentes clave como pueden ser un navegador o el propio teclado de nuestro iPhone. Componentes pequeños pero indispensables y sin duda con una complejidad más que relevante, que además cuenta cómo fue desarrollando con más o menos detalle.

En comparación con justo el otro libro relacionado que leí hace poco, [b:The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone|32603496|The One Device The Secret History of the iPhone|Brian Merchant|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1481570357l/32603496.SY75.jpg|53184512], este es mucho más enfocado. Eso se agradece.

Me leí el libro de una sola tirada, con solo una pausa para ir al baño. Eso debería daros una pinta de lo que me enganchó y de lo fácil que se puede leer.

This contains some quite interesting glimpses into the software decision process at Apple during Jobs's tenure, which was - as you might expect - highly autocratic. Jobs called the shots, using gut instinct rather than any form of experience, training or knowledge. He seemed to ignore his employee's suggestions. It's to their credit that Apple's products turned out as well as they did, coming from the software equivalent of the North Korea dictatorship.

Kocienda treats Jobs as a god figure, breathlessly telling us every last word of The Great Leader on the few occasions when he was ushered in to demo his software in His presence. The Great Leader rewards Kocienda by not giving a shit who he is at a presentation. All hail The Great Leader.

The book is about twice as long as it needs be - going into microscopic detail about meetings and demos, and then retelling them straight afterwards to show how good and helpful this one sentence that The Great Leader uttered was, and how grateful he was to hear His Words, before The Great Leader rudely took another telephone call and shooed them out of the room.

That's not to take away from the interesting story of how the iPhone keyboard was built and the issues the team had at the time. The iPhone had a surprisingly small software team: and perhaps that's one reason why the original turned out as good as it did. It's an interesting comparison between producing something with "art", as Kocienda claims, as well as data. Until the past few years, Google has more obviously relied on data, rather than art.

As a glimpse into Apple's development practices at the time, then, this is a decent enough read - as long as you try to skip past The Veneration Of The Great Leader.