Why is my own data least important in search?

Why is my own data least important in search?

All across macOS and iOS, when you search for something, the ordering of results in most cases is:

  • A top hit (unclear how this is generated)
  • Suggestions (unclear how this is generated)
  • Your own data that you spent valuable time entering

Maps

I’ll provide several examples. First up, Maps. Let’s say I want to search for my doctor in Maps. She is in my Contacts.

Let’s start with a search for “se” just for grins. Note how we have a Top Hit, Suggestions, and then my own data at the bottom.

Let’s type two more letters, but this time in Contacts. Note that we have one hit, my doctor.

Maps has something different to say. First, we have 4 results for places, one of which is 35 miles away and an offer to search nearby for “serralheiros”—and my doctor at the bottom.

Just for fun, how about my entire doctor’s …

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How I ended up in California

How I ended up in California

  • Number of years of my life I wanted to live in California: 0
  • Number of years I lived in California: 24

Ancient history

One of my brothers went to Stanford and worked at Genentech, so I had a chance to visit the San Francisco quite a few times. Loved it. Nice climate. Foggy. Clean city. Clean transportation although inadequate. It was a place that seemed a lot nicer than Chicago at the time

College

In 1996, I lived in North Carolina. Racist. Homophobic. A mix of educated and highly ignorant people.

I always loved technology but was too poor to buy any of it. I remember seeing a NeXT machine at the university bookstore and the education price was $10,000—at that time I made $18,000 a year!

I didn’t want to be rich, but being poor felt like I was unable to do things that were very important to me.…

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The interim CEO (iCEO) scare

The interim CEO (iCEO) scare

An abbreviated Steve Jobs timeline as background

  • July 1985 – Forced out of Apple? (resigned)
  • February 1997 – Apple bought NeXT
  • July 1997 – Gil Amelio ousted, Steve becomes de-facto CEO
  • September 1997 – Steve named iCEO (interim CEO)
  • April 1999 – I joined Apple
  • January 2000 – Steve becomes CEO

So, why did I call it a scare. Well, at the very end of the 2+ hour Macworld San Francisco 2000 keynote, Steve said the following (my transcript, with the always enticing “One More Thing…” slide up on the giant screen.

As a backdrop, this is what he said about ever becoming CEO after the NeXT purchase:

“And you will absolutely not be the CEO of Apple?” I asked.

“My name is not in the hat to be CEO,” he said.

Steve Jobs, the perfect CEO—Wired—2011 Sep 10

Note that as this speech at the end of the keynote …

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Ultra high volume email workflow

Ultra high volume email workflow

In my last years at Apple, if I had no workflow in place, it was not impossible to get over a thousand emails a day. When I would visit people’s offices, I would see two main workflows:

  • An inbox with 50,000+ emails in it, mostly unread
  • A hundred or more mailboxes, one for each mailing list, also with high unread counts

Sure, there is a ton of garbage emails, such as automated emails or irrelevant mailing lists you can’t subscribe from. But I developed a system that worked for me and I was able to never have an unread message and was able to always find the most important ones.

The very simplest version of it looked like this. For a smaller flow of email, it could work well, but I ended up beefing it up a bit.

The decision process I would go through was this:

  • Is the message
…

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EyeCandy QA (2018-2019)

EyeCandy QA (2018-2019)

All in-depth articles about my Apple career:

This was the last job in my Apple career. However, I worked on the Eye Candy team before for 6 1/2 years, the longest job I held at Apple.

After the disaster of the Watch Hardware team, I really needed an anti-dote. I called up my old manager, John Louch, and asked him if there was a spot on the team. As incredible luck would have it, the person that replaced me 6 years earlier had just been fired.

I was back on the team!

There were two new members, both of whom I liked and respected greatly. They were working on …

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Watch Hardware (2016-2017)

Watch Hardware (2016-2017)

All in-depth articles about my Apple career:

Whenever someone that doesn’t work at Apple asks me what it’s like, I always say “it depends on the team”—and it’s one of the truest things I could say. Some are amazing and wonderful and, in my case, one turned out to be a nightmare, starting with the very first week.

After being separated from the SwiftUI team, I was desperate to find a job and it took me six weeks to find one. It was my first job in Hardware Engineering and it was primarily responsible for Watch hardware.

The team

What this team did was utterly fascinating to me and …

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SwiftUI (2015-2016)

SwiftUI (2015-2016)

All in-depth articles about my Apple career:

This was not only a challenging and intense project, but it was also very exciting new technology. For reasons I’ll explain later, I only worked on it at the very beginning of assembling the core team.

SwiftUI was entirely new UI framework, written entirely in Swift. It ran on every Apple platform. This was hugely beneficial because developers typically use UIKit for iOS, AppKit for macOS, WatchKit for watchOS, and so on. What a pain if you want to write a cross-platform app.

Applications written with SwiftUI not surprisingly were also written in Swift. I won’t go too much into the technical …

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Calendar and Contacts (2013-2015)

Calendar and Contacts (2013-2015)

All in-depth articles about my Apple career:

Returning to Apple

I interviewed for two teams upon returning to Apple: The Calendar/Contacts team and the Siri team. In retrospect, I dodged a very large bullet by avoiding Siri!

The team I jointed actually had four apps: Calendar, Contacts, Notes, and Reminders. The final two got shortchanged due to the importance of the first two. And it showed.

As an aside, Notes and Reminders have recently moved to a new group and have both become quite nice applications. But it was a lesson in how hard it is to have important, critical apps worked on by the same engineers as less …

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Magic Mailboxes

Magic Mailboxes

I worked on the Mail team from just before Public Beta thru Tiger. One of my proudest achievements on the team (and at Apple) was brainstorming with my team members and pushing an idea we internally called Magic Mailboxes and eventually became called Combined Mailboxes.

Some of the ideas came from my unique job which partly consisted of supporting everyone in Software Engineering on using Mail. And not everyone was an uber-geek engineer so I got to see what all sorts of users struggled with.

This feature was being developed in 2002 and shipped with Jaguar. I have to give my colleague Paul Marcos a lot of credit for brainstorming and being a strong supporter of the concept.

If you’ve ever worked on software that must be used by everyone from the most novice user to the most advanced, this may resonate with you. With Mail, it was …

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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 …

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