“It was like, ‘Oh, this is going to be real?’” Ording says. “‘Now, how do you actually go through all your photos? How does mail really work? How does the keyboard work exactly?’ So you have a ton of stuff to figure out.” HI had established the basics of what the phone was going to look and feel like—a powerful enough vision to supplant the less risky, but less cool, iPod phone.
“From the beginning, it was all about trust,” Chaudhri says. “People thought computers were too complicated, even Macs. So I was really designing interfaces that my father could use. We were trying to create systems that people could use intuitively, that they could trust.” So far, they had succeeded.
“It was totally logical,” says Henri Lamiraux, the man who led the software-engineering effort under Forstall. “The HI team did a good job of creating a mock-up of the UI. We had a good idea of what it was going to look like and how it was going to interact.”
Lamiraux is one of the most universally respected engineers on the iPhone team—his calm, even-keeled style often helped steady others when crises hit. He’s the opposite of a stereotypical Apple boss; he speaks in a lilting French accent, boasts a stubble-white beard, and seems more like an abstract-art sculptor than an engineer. Then again, abstract sculpting was a big part of the job. “This thing evolved quite a bit compared to what we thought, but the spirit was already there,” he says.
“What you see as the Springboard with all the icons, that was there from day one,” Lamiraux says. “And the dock, that was there from day zero.” Lamiraux and his team figured out how to code the ideas that had been cast on a lumbering prototype, translated to a tablet, and, now, downsized again for smaller devices.
The P2 crew called those tethered units “wallabies,” and they were the go-to tool for experimentation in the Purple Dorm.
There’s a reason that all those software engineers had migrated to the interface designers’ home base—the iPhone was built on intense collaboration between the two camps. Designers could pop over to an engineer to see if a new idea was workable. The engineer could tell them which elements needed to be adjusted. It was unusual, even for Apple, for teams to be so tightly integrated.
“One of the important things to note about the iPhone team was there was a spirit of ‘We’re all in this together,’” Richard Williamson says. “There was a ton of collaboration across the whole stack, all the way from Bas Ording doing innovative UI mock-ups down to the OS team with John Wright doing modifications to the kernel. And we could do this because we were all actually in this lockdown area. It was maybe just forty people at the max, but we had this hub right above Jony Ive’s design studio. In Infinite Loop Two, you had to have a second access key to get in there. We pretty much lived there for a couple of years.”
A feature called Jetsam, he says, is a good example of what could happen as a result. They needed to come up with new ways to parcel out the device’s precious memory if they hoped to make the iPhone as fluid as Bas and Imran’s demos. Williamson proposed the Jetsam concept, which would terminate unused applications that were draining too much memory. An OS engineer named John Wright took it on.
“Because everyone was right there, I could take a crazy idea like Jetsam, I could go talk to John and say, ‘Look, is this crazy or can we actually do it?’ And he’d say, ‘Yeah, it’s crazy, but we can probably do it.’ And then Bas would come by and say, ‘I want to do this crazy animation, could we do that?’ And we’d say, ‘No.’ And then John Harper would say, ‘Well, we could probably do that.’ That’s one of the things that was special. Everybody there was brilliant.”
“That project broke all the rules of product management,” a member of the original iPhone group recalls. “It was the all-star team—it was clear they were picking the top people out of the org. We were just going full force. None of us had built a phone before; we were figuring it out as we went along. It was the one time it felt like design and engineering were working together to solve these problems. We’d sit together and figure it out. It’s the most influence over a product I’ve ever had or ever will have.”
That tight-knit team wasn’t just packed in—they were sealed off. This was Apple’s version of Fight Club, after all. “This is one of the things that Steve has done brilliantly,” Williamson says, “this idea of building what really is a start-up inside a larger company and insulating it from everything else that’s going on in the company. And giving them essentially infinite resources to do what they need to do.”
Here is what the iPhone software start-up’s org chart would look like: Steve Jobs is CEO of iPhone Inc. Reporting directly to him is Scott Forstall, the head of iPhone software. Under him there’s Henri Lamiraux, who oversees Richard Williamson and Nitin Ganatra, each of whom manage small teams of their own—Williamson did Safari and web apps, and Ganatra did mail, the phone, and so on. Also under Forstall is Greg Christie, the head of the Human Interface group, which includes Bas Ording, Imran Chaudhri, Stephen LeMay, Marcel van Os, Freddy Anzures, and Mike Matas. Also reporting to Forstall is Kim Vorrath, the product manager who will come to oversee the quality assurance department and who will be one of the only women on the iPhone’s software team.
All told, between design and software engineering, there were twenty to twenty-five people working on the iPhone in its early stages—a paltry number, given the known stakes and the ultimate impact of the device. Forstall was a constant presence, and Jobs was given regular demos of the progress. “It was the most complex fun I’ve ever had,” Jobs said. “It was like being the one evolving the variations on ‘Sgt. Pepper.’”
“The main process was very interactive,” Lamiraux says. “There was a weekly meeting with Steve, so we had a list of features, a list of things we had to get approved. So half of it was the HI team showing some mock-up of what they thought our feature should look like, so Steve was approving, so Steve would say, ‘Ah, I like A,’ so my goal was to take A and make it happen. And the next meeting, we’d say, ‘A is implemented, what do you think?’ And he’d say, ‘Oh, it sucks, let’s try B.’”
You’ve Got Mail
Nitin Ganatra was among the first to receive one of Scott Forstall’s famous recruitment visits.
Ganatra was born in 1969 in Vancouver. Like many of his iPhone peers, he proved adept at computers early on, and he learned to code while still in elementary school; he wrote a program to help him learn Spanish. He’d been at Apple since the early 1990s, had weathered the dark years, and was leading the team behind Apple’s mail client.
“Scott came into my office and said, ‘There’s this effort taking place,’” Nitin Ganatra says. “We’re actually going to work on a phone. We have some designs that are done, and we need to start prototyping and figuring out how we’re actually going to ship this thing.” In other words, it was go time.
“Email was a big function of these phones,” Ganatra says. “We saw that from the BlackBerry. So we knew that we had to nail email. I think that was something that was big on Scott and Steve’s minds: We can’t come out with a smartphone and try to take on the king of email and not have a great client ourselves.”
After accepting the project, he was led into the dank, windowless room that housed the touchscreen prototype. “The very first reaction was amazement,” he says. “It was probably similar to what a lot of people felt when they first saw the phone. Just, ‘Yes, this is what I want. I want this in my pocket right now; how can I get this in my pocket right now?’” The glee would be short-lived, however. “That very quickly turned into ‘Holy shit, how are we going to make this run all day?’” Ganatra says. He pauses. “I guess maybe as an engineer that tends to happen. You have more questions than answers almost all the time.”
The iPhonic Ingredients
One former iPhone engineer, Evan Doll, reckons there are two unique components that helped the iPhone excel.
There were “these two pieces of tech, which were each basically created by one person.” One was Wayne Westerman
’s FingerWorks. “And that single-handedly was the genesis of multitouch.” And then there was John Harper, an engineer whom Doll describes as “a pretty hard-core introvert,” who created Core Animation. “Which was the foundation for doing these really fluid, animated user interfaces that Google, still, however many years later, with Android has not really caught up with.”
It’s a compelling case—multitouch, of course, was the innovation that Jobs seized on in the keynote demonstration. But Core Animation is the framework that allowed developers to bring multitouch to life—touch an icon, and it immediately dances below your finger.
Core Animation works by “handing most of the actual drawing work off to the onboard graphics hardware to accelerate the rendering,” according to Apple. It’s an ultra-efficient way to ensure that apps can run attractive animations, and it would let developers tackle lively apps with ease. “John Harper is the genius behind that,” Williamson says. “It’s one of the things that made the first iPhone, which had very little computing power, perform well.”
On the back of Core Animation, the Purple team was in the process of enshrining the interactions that would rise to cultural dominance. Some had already been imagined, inside Apple and out, and needed to be executed. Some needed to be dreamed up altogether. For instance, the P2ers needed a way for users to signal they wanted to activate the device, without relying on hard switches, which Steve Jobs despised. Once it was turned on, the screen would have to go dark, so the phone could be ready to receive calls without the battery draining away. Tapping the Home button would wake up the phone, but that could accidentally happen in a user’s pocket—again, risking serious battery drain. So the designers needed to come up with a software hack that would be simple for users to do—with one hand, ideally—yet complex enough to prevent accidental activations.
Imran Chaudhri had an idea to rotate your fingers over the screen like turning a knob, but it felt a bit too complicated. Chewing over the problem, the UI designer Freddy Anzures, who’d been working on the unlock concept with Imran, took a flight out to New York from San Francisco. The team had been thinking about how to open the phone, and, well, there he was: He stepped into the airplane bathroom stall and slid to lock. Then, of course, he slid to unlock. That, he thought, would be a great design hack. It was a smart way to activate a touchscreen whose sensors always needed to be on.
Later, Chaudhri had an idea to test the concept out. He had a baby daughter at home, and he placed a prototype in front of her. When even she was able to slide to unlock, he knew it’d be universal. Ideas like that were spilling forward from the design team and the software engineers. The process was open and multifaceted; just look at the patents.
“Those patents, you see a lot of names on them… it was a very small team, and we were all working together. So we were having a lot of discussion,” Lamiraux says. “It’s not like someone went to his office one morning and says, ‘Okay, I’m going to have an idea today, hmmm, let’s do visual voicemail.’”
Some features were simply mandatory. As much freedom as the carrier was willing to give Apple, the iPhone would have to abide by certain requirements. “Cingular had a list of features we had to have,” Lamiraux says. “So we had to have voicemail, because that’s what a phone was supposed to do. So we said, ‘Okay, voicemail, but you know, we want to do something better—so how can we make it better? Well, what if voicemail was like email?’”
Ideas bled through the group, and the members seized on them, implemented them, tested them, discarded them, embraced them. They emerged in brainstorming sessions, in late-night coding sprees. In fact, Lamiraux says that he can identify only one design idea as his own among them: “I don’t know if you notice, on the iPhone when you open a window, you see the scroll bar flashing, the scroll bar on the side flashes to show that you can scroll. And I will always remember the day when I came up with that, because we are in a meeting, and it was, ‘Okay, how can we show people that there is something to scroll?’ I said, ‘Why don’t we flash it?’ They said, ‘Okay!’ That was it.”
As the ideas came forward, one thing was fast becoming clear: as promised, this was going to be a colossal amount of work.
“Take the email client, for example. Oh, yeah, here’s the list of your messages and you tap and see how it opens, and it’s cool,” Ording says. “But, oh, wait, how do you reply and how do you forward and how do you get multiple mailboxes, and all of a sudden there’s a ton of stuff you have to resolve to make it really work as a full mail client. And the same for voicemail. It expands really fast. And you discover just how much you have to resolve to make it work properly.”
Yes, the iPhone Was Inspired by Minority Report
The touch-based phone, which was originally supposed to be nothing but screen, was going to need at least one button. We all know it well today—the Home button. But Steve Jobs wanted it to have two; he felt they’d need a back button for navigation. Chaudhri argued that it was all about generating trust and predictability. One button that does the same thing every time you press it: it shows you your stuff.
The story of the Home button is actually linked to both a feature on the Mac and everyone’s favorite science-fictional user interface—the gesture controls in Minority Report. The Tom Cruise sci-fi film, based on a Philip K. Dick story, was released in 2002, right when the ENRI talks were beginning. Ever since, the film has become shorthand for futuristic user interface—the characters wave their hands around in the air to manipulate virtual objects and swipe elements away. It’s also an ancestor of some of the core user-interface elements of the iPhone.
“Minority Report was very cool stuff, very inspiring,” Ording says. “You know the Exposé feature?” Exposé is a feature Ording wrote for the Mac that’s still a core part of the UI today—it allows you to zoom out on all your open windows so you can take stock of everything you have open at once. “I was staring at my screen with a whole pile of windows, and I’m like, ‘I wish I could somehow, just like they do in the movie, go through, in between those windows and somehow get through all your stuff.’ That became the Exposé thing, but it was inspired by Minority Report.” And Exposé, in turn, would inspire a core functionality of the iPhone.
“I remember for the Home button, Imran, he worked on some early ideas for that, like, that there was a button, and he originally called it ‘Exposé for the iPhone.’ So that you have one button to see all of your apps. And then you tap one and it zooms in on that app, just like you choose a window in Exposé. And then later, that became Menu, or Home.”
“Again, that came down to a trust issue,” Chaudhri says, “that people could trust the device to do what they wanted it to do. Part of the problem with other phones was the features were buried in menus, they were too complex.” A back button could complicate matters too, he told Jobs.
“I won that argument,” Chaudhri says.
Creating features was one major task. Refining the experience of using them was another.
“There were these known truths that we discussed,” Ganatra says, “and [that] we knew couldn’t be violated.”
1. Home button always takes you back home.
2. Everything has to respond instantly to a user’s touch.
3. Everything has to run at least sixty frames per second. All operations.
On top of all that, the experience itself had to be fine-tuned in every arena. For instance: “There was an awful lot of work that went into the acceleration and deceleration curves for scrolling,” in nailing the physics of swiping through lists. Jobs and Forstall drove the team hard on that point. “The goal had always been to make the iPhone feel like you were touching something real. Steve and Scott really wanted the interaction to be, you push something and it moves. No delay,” Lamiraux says. “You felt like you were touching a piece of paper, and it was scrolling under your fingers.”
That natural physicality extended to the design of the apps. “There was a lot of work that went into mimicking physical and f
amiliar things that people were already used to interacting with,” he says. And that’s where the iPhone’s infamous skeuomorphism—the designing of digital objects to resemble versions of real ones—came in.
“Early on, skeuomorphism was one of the things that made it so that people actually understood how to use an iPhone when they picked it up—there were already physical things in their life that they could model their interactions after, and that gave them clues as to how to use the device,” Ganatra says. “It really did start as, ‘Let’s try to model these things after things people already know how to do.’ And that was already happening on Mac OS X. In fact the previous apps I was managing, Mail, it had a postage stamp for the icon, and there was an address book, and it was a book, and so on. We knew we didn’t want to have anything like a user manual. If you ship one of those, you’ve already kind of failed.”
Carrier Me Home
The iPhone would be billed as three devices in one—a phone, a touch music player, and an internet communicator. So it was important that the internet portion was well accounted for. “I had this belief that the web was fundamental to how we were going to be interacting with mobile devices, so my perspective was that the web was important too, in addition to the phone and the music player—in fact, probably more important than the other two,” says Williamson, who was in charge of porting the Safari web browser to iOS.
At the time, the standard protocol for the mobile web was WAP, or wireless application protocol. In order to limit the use of wireless data, WAP allowed users to access stripped-down versions of websites, often text-only or with only low-resolution images.
“We called it the baby web—you got these dumbed-down web pages,” Williamson says. “We thought that it was maybe possible to take full-on web content to display in one place.” At the time, few if any smartphones or mobile devices allowed users to browse the proper web. Carriers saw data plans as their future but pushed restrictive pay-as-you-go data plans that were prohibitively expensive and ignored by the public.
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