The Black Dock

The Black Dock

In June 2006, Apple shipped the plastic MacBook, available in both black and white. I received a black model at work sometime that year.

It was plastic, but at the time I thought it was beautiful. Little did I know that, at around the same time, a redesign of the Dock was taking place.

Now, I actually don’t know for sure the Black Dock was inspired by the black MacBook, vice versa, developed in unison, or just a coincidence.

The look

Sadly, I don’t have great images showing the Black Dock, but here’s what I have.

If you ignore the overdone reflections, the look of the Black Dock is actually pretty nice. Sadly, I don’t have a movie, but imagine swiping over the icons and only having the icons moving, just dancing above the Dock.

The behavior

The best part of the Dock redesign was how it felt. The platform … READ THE REST

Flipboard interlude (2011-2013)

Flipboard interlude (2011-2013)

Other articles about my Apple career:

Seed planted

My good friend Evan Doll left Apple around 2010 to co-found Flipboard, a very popular iPad application that was essentially a better version of Apple News (sorry Apple) with deep social integration.

It seemed like every six months or so, Evan would ping me and try to entice me to try out Flipboard. But I was happy where I was, working on the Eye Candy team. I was getting a little itchy, though, so his offer was always in the back of my mind.

Departure from Apple

I left Apple on July 1st, 2011. My initial plan was to take a bunch of … READ THE REST

The Smart Torch™

The Smart Torch™

When I worked on the Mail Team, we had this gorgeous styrofoam and paper thing we called the Smart Torch. It had a realistic flame on the side made out of a sticker. Here’s what it looked like:

Smart Torch, appropriately displayed on a native Sycamore bench.

I have no recollection who made it. The important thing was what it represented. It was conceptually brilliant.

Here’s how it worked.

  1. Someone was always the current keeper of the Smart Torch. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg thing about who the original keeper was.
  2. Whenever the keeper of the Smart Torch observed another team member doing something really smart, they awarded them the Smart Torch.
  3. Then, the cycle repeated itself.

Having the Smart Torch was a great honor, and of course, how long you had it was also a matter of great pride. I mean look at it. It’s … READ THE REST

Eye Candy QA (2005-2011)

Eye Candy QA (2005-2011)

Other articles about my Apple career:

My longest job at Apple was about 7 years and there were many great reasons for it.

The unusual thing about my team is that my boss and other team members all worked out of home offices, while I worked out of Cupertino (and often at home).

How did I get on this team?

This is one of my favorite personal stories at Apple. When I first started on the Mail team, Scott Forstall was one level above the manager of the Mail team. Although we frequently butted heads, he was instrumental in my career.

I was wanting to flee the Aperture team. Most of my … READ THE REST

Aperture: Senior QA (2004-2005)

Aperture: Senior QA (2004-2005)

Other articles about my Apple career:

NOTE: This is just my experience on Aperture. Many hundreds of stories aren’t in here because I didn’t experience them myself.

This project is tricky to write about as there was so much positive and negative emotion involved — a real roller coaster.

Paul Marcos was an engineer on Mail with me and unofficially my mentor. He was a huge reason I joined the team in the first place. When I heard about him leaving Mail, it was like a punch in the gut. I asked where he was going, and he couldn’t say. That’s Apple for you.

Then he said ‘You could come with’. … READ THE REST

Searching for porn at work

Searching for porn at work

This is one of my favorite stories from doing internal support for Mail. If you’ve been around long enough, you may remember when macOS had a system-wide Find dialog for text. I couldn’t find exactly the right image, but it looked something like this:

Unless an application implemented their own UI for searching text, Command-F would bring up a dialog like this.

The twist is that whatever was in the Find field would be remembered between applications. So, if you search for something in TextEdit and then bring up Mail, it would display that same search term, but it would be highlighted so you could easily type over it.

So, I was in this unnamed engineer’s office. You probably know where this is going. In the course of troubleshooting Mail, I believe I was wanting to search the raw source of an email message.

I hit Command-F and up came … READ THE REST

macOS tips: Old Dock tips that are still useful

macOS tips: Old Dock tips that are still useful

I ran across a list of tips I wrote when Leopard shipped a million years ago. Most of them still work and are useful. And best of all, I’ve found that most people are unaware that they exist.

  1. Dock springing. If you drag a file and hover over Dock items, various useful things happen which are similar to Finder springing. Note you have to have springing ON in Finder Preferences (or use spacebar).
    • If it’s a window, the window un-minimizes from the Dock.
    • If it’s a folder/stack, the corresponding folder in the Finder opens.
    • If it’s the Finder, it brings the Finder to the foreground and opens a window if one doesn’t exist already.
    • The coolest springing trick is if you hover over an application while dragging a file The application comes to the foreground and then you can hover over the window you want and that springs to
… READ THE REST
How I almost worked for Pixar

How I almost worked for Pixar

A good pairing with my article about How I almost worked directly for Steve Jobs.

Prior to coming to Apple, I was browsing the Pixar jobs website. I would do this a couple times a year but I was honestly so unqualified for absolutely everything they had offered.

But in 1999, they had a job posted for someone to assist with migrating some of their traditional UNIX workstations to the Mac. Initially, it was more of an investigative role as Mac OS X had not yet shipped and they had no desire to switch the classic Mac OS.

At the time, I had a very scattered resume of support and consulting positions. However, this job was so right up my alley it almost made me laugh. It required experience in this eclectic mix of software that I either knew really well or I used the software of one of … READ THE REST

How I almost worked directly for Steve Jobs

How I almost worked directly for Steve Jobs

This isn’t a very exciting story but definitely an interesting what-could-have-been thought experiment.

The job

When I worked in AppleCare in 1999, I worked with an engineer named Robert Esker. Years later, he became the technical support person for Steve Jobs. At the time, Steve was CEO of both Apple and Pixar and also kept a home office.

Robert’s job was to keep everything running smoothly and travel between all three locations as needed. He wasn’t on his own as there were people across the company that were familiar with getting the occasional contact from him to help resolve an issue with Steve’s systems.

As the support person for Mail, I was one of those people that Robert would contact. Unsurprisingly, Steve was a very heavy Mail user and also used Address Book (which I worked on as well) to keep notes for every phone call he made. It was … READ THE REST

Steve Jobs: “What an asshole”

Steve Jobs: “What an asshole”

When I worked in AppleCare, I worked across the hall from a team of people called Executive Relations. Among their duties was to field complaints from “important people” about Apple products that ended up in in inbox of Steve Jobs.

Executive Relations was tasked with placating these people. I’m unsure whether this organization still exists, but in those days, Apple was in dire straights. There was a fear that any small thing could blow up into a big thing. Remember the G4 cube that started showing up cracked? Even though the lines were aesthetic, surface scratches and were corrected early on, this reputation sunk the product, damaged Apple, and led to a one-day 50% drop in the stock price.

So, complaints from influential people were taken seriously and the people in this group had some latitude to make people happy, including replacing hardware or even giving out freebies.

Whenever the … READ THE REST