IPhone birth, part 1

Excerpts from a new book Linera Kani "Johnny Ive: the genius behind the scenes of the great Apple products" continue to delight us with amazing detail work of John Quince and apple throughout the entire company. This time, the author has shared the head of the book, which is dedicated to the creation of the very first iPhone. Many details of the design of Apple's breakthrough device until now remained unknown to the general public. And now we know where to start creating iPhone - a gadget that turned the mobile world upside down. We offer you a translation of chapter «The Birth of the iPhone» in Russian. This is a real must-read, friends.

2003. Eve of the iPod mini sales. That morning, Johnny Ive, Apple's senior vice president of design, and his team gathered for another brainstorming session, held every two weeks. As always, the team surrounded the kitchen table in the design studio. Duncan Kerr, one of the industrial designer, spoke to the audience in the format of "show and tell". Kerr, who joined the Apple design department in 1999 after several years at IDEO, has extensive experience in engineering and loved to tinker with new technologies.

Kerr worked with the «Input Engineering» group, whose task is to search for alternative methods of input information for the Mac. They hoped that they could invent something better than the keyboard and mouse, it has no alternative in the computer industry for more than 30 years. When Kerr spoke about his vision of the future input systems, his words literally stunned the audience.

Doug Satsger, shaking his head from the inability to believe in a speech, said:

"It was amazing. It was really amazing brainstorm. "

Around the table I was going to the core of the industrial design group: John, Richard Howard, Chris Stringer, Eugene Wong, Danny Coster, Danny De Yullis, Rico Zorkendorfer, Shin Nishibori, Bart Andre and Satsger:

"I remember, Duncan showed us how to use the multi-touch you can perform various actions by two or three fingers. He showed us the rotation and scaling of the image on the screen, and I was genuinely surprised that we can do such a thing. "

That morning, the team generally first heard about multitouch. Nowadays, it does not seem anything out of the ordinary, but then touch interfaces were still quite primitive. Most existing devices such as Palm Pilot and tablets on Windows, use the stylus. Screens, to respond to the touch of fingers, such as ATM screens, knew only a point contact with one point. There was no pinch and zoom, swipe was not.

Kerr explained to his colleagues that the new technology will allow people to use two or three fingers instead of one, and it will build a much more functional inetrfeysy than when using only one clicks finger.

Being inspired by the thoughts of the Kerr team members started thinking about devices that can be created using this technology.

The most obvious idea turned out to be a Mac with a touchscreen. Instead of a keyboard and a mouse, users can control the computer by touching its screen. One of the designers suggested the creation of so-controller as an alternative to the keyboard and mouse. It would have been some kind of virtual keyboard with soft keys. Satsger recalls:

"We asked ourselves how we can take the tablet that has been around for quite a long time, and do with it something else? Touchscreen - is one thing, but multi-touch has been something new. We were able to use the swipe to turn pages, instead of looking at the screen, buttons for moving to the next page. Instead of trying to find the key to the transaction, we could just turn the page, as if we in the hands of a real newspaper. "

John was always a supporter of the tactile nature in computer science, and personally had a hand in several of its early development to enhance the importance of touch when working with them. But now he was able to create absolute tactile device. No more keyboards, no mice, styluses and even the wheel - the user interface would work directly with your fingers.

The team has built a gigantic experimental system for testing multitouch. It was a huge capacitive display, about the size as a ping-pong table, a suspended over him projector. operating system interface was projected through a projector on a surface consisting of an array of wires. After Johnny saw this, he said:

"This will change everything."

According to the biography of Jobs, Walter Isaacson prepared, Johnny wanted to show the Jobs system, but afraid to hear from his boss's refusal to further develop the idea because of its brutality and nedorabotannost. Joni considered reasonable show Jobs work in the "tete-a-tete" format, without the presence of other people.

"Due to the fact that Steve hastily gave his opinion, I showed him the project to other people. He could just say "shit" and throw the idea. I feel the fragility of ideas, and you have to be very gentle with them at the time when they are developed. I realized that if he rejects it, it would be unbearably sad, because I knew how this idea was important. "

Johnny listened to intuition and showed Jobs the system personally. The tactic worked, and Jobs liked the idea.

"This is the future."

Having received the approval of Jobs, Johnny instructed Imran Chaudhry and Bas Ording, two talented design engineers to Apple's, to reduce the massive capacitive array to the size of the working prototype of a tablet. A week later, they came back with a 12-inch MacBook screen, suspended from the Power Mac, who cheated and interpret finger gestures for understanding their system.

They showed Johnny and designers to work on a prototype of Google Maps example. Once on the map appeared Apple headquarters in Cupertino, one of the engineers spread his fingers on the screen, thus changing the scale and showing a campus building. Designers were amazed:

"We were able to zoom in and out using finger gestures!".

Creating a managed fingers tablet began to seem real. This will not happen on the same night, and thanks including market forces, primarily Apple will release another revolutionary product.

model 035

Multitouch could be a novelty for the design team Jony, but itself has been known in the scientific community for a long time. The origins of this technology go back to the distant 60th, when researchers have already developed the first prototypes for touch interfaces. Systems that were able to detect multiple touches at once, were first created in 1982 at the University of Toronto, and the first working multitouch displays appeared in 1984 - the same year when Steve Jobs launched the sale Macintosh. However, the market did not see the multi-product up to the late 90s. The first representatives of this technology has become sharpened by finger gestures tablets for computers and sensor sets the keyboard and mouse from a small company FingerWorks from Delaware.

In early 2005, Apple quietly bought FingerWorks and immediately withdrew its products from the market. News of the purchase does not pop up over a year, until the founding FingerWorks, Wayne Westerman and John Elias, not started filing new patents are for Apple.

Once the layout of Chaudhry and Ordig showed the possibility of the existence of the control pin plate, Joni team started to create more and better of completed prototypes. Led process Bart Andre and Danny Coster. One of the prototypes created by them, known internally as the "Model 035", laid the foundations of the patent, filed March 17, 2004.

The model 035 was a large white plate-like lid white plastic iBook of those times. Even though the lack of a keyboard prototype is based on the iBook components. The model 035 was not «Home» button, and the case was much wider and thicker than presented in 2010, the iPad. However, the resemblance is already felt - the same rounded corners and a black frame around the screen. The prototype was working on a modified version of Mac OS X (prior to the emergence of iOS had a few more years).

At that time, while John and the team is working on a prototype tablet, Apple management was more worried about the iPod. The product has been on the ball: 2 million units sold in 2003, 10 million in 2004 and 40 million in 2005. However, it became clear one - ever mobile phone will replace the iPod. At that time, people were forced to carry both a phone and the player as the phone can accommodate only a few tracks. But sooner or later, someone, possibly a competitor will be able to combine two devices in one.

In 2005, Apple released in conjunction with Motorola «iTunes phone" called ROKR E1. It was a one-piece unit, which is able to play music, acquired in iTunes. Playback is through the iPod-like music app, but even with all of this device was doomed to failure since its inception - a limit of 100 tracks to download, very slow data transfer from the computer and terrible interface. Jobs was barely able to hide his contempt for this hand-made article.

On the other hand, the emergence of ROKR made it clear to all involved in the topic of one simple fact - Apple need to make their own phone. Members want a full iPod into the phone, but knowing the requirements of Jobs to the company's standards, he would never have entrusted the development of third-party phone.

History is silent about how there was a transition from a model of the project to create 035 phone. During the All Things Digital conference in 2010, Jobs told a little about the history of the phone with a touchscreen:

"I'll tell you a secret. It all began with the tablet. I had thought of a glass display, multi-touch display, which can be printed with your fingers. I asked about our people, but after 6 months they showed this delightful display. I handed it to one of our best specialists in interfaces. He realized the display scrolling and other things, and I thought, 'Oh my God, such a thing, we can make the phone! ". So we postponed the tablet aside, and began to work on the iPhone ».

Other Apple representatives have different stories about the iPhone create a path. They say that the idea was born during one of the meetings management. Scott Forstall, who was then executive director of the software, says it this way:

"We all hated their phones. We've all had those clamshells, and we asked ourselves about whether we can use we created sensor technology to develop a phone that would be placed in a pocket, but had at the same power Tablet "?

After the meeting, Jobs, Tony Fedell, John Rubenstein and Phil Schiller went into the studio Joni to look at the prototype 035. Demonstration impressed them, but there were also doubts about the appropriateness of such technology in the phone.

The decisive factor in this regard was the creation of a small test application, use only a portion of the tablet screen 035. Forstall describes the process:

"We have created a small skrollyaschiysya list. We wanted to make it the size of the screen is such that he could fit in a pocket. It was used by part of the screen, and it was built a list of contacts. You can scroll through the list of contacts and Tapa. In this case, the screen displays information about the selected contact, including its number. And you could tapnut to this number, and the screen displays "Call". Of course, the call actually was not, but in theory it could be carried out in this way. It was awesome. We realized that a touchscreen, fits in your pocket, perfect to cope with the functions of the phone. "

Over the years, Apple attorney Harold MakElhinni describe the enormous amount of work that was required for the project.

"He demanded a completely new hardware, a completely new user interface, and this interface must be completely intuitive."

He also mentioned about the faith with which Apple created a whole new class of products.

"Think about the risk. They have been successful manufacturing company computers. They were successful music company. And they were going to enter the market, which was dominated by industry giants. Apple has not there been any reputation or credibility. "

If the project iPhone something went wrong, it would destroy the whole company.

To be continued…

Birth iPhone (Part 2)

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