TITLE: Work on Cool Hard Problems; It Pays Off Eventually AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: June 25, 2017 10:05 AM DESC: ----- BODY: In The Secret Origin Story of the iPhone, we hear about the day Steve Jobs told Bas Ording, one of Apple's UI "wizards", ...
... to make a demo of scrolling through a virtual address book with multitouch. "I was super-excited," Ording says. "I thought, Yeah, it seems kind of impossible, but it would be fun to just try it." He sat down, "moused off" a phone-size section of his Mac's screen, and used it to model the iPhone surface. He and a scant few other designers had spent years experimenting with touch-based user interfaces -- and those years in the touchscreen wilderness were paying off.
I'm guessing that a lot of programmers understand what Ording felt in that moment: "It seems kind of impossible, but it would be fun to just try it..." But he and his team were ready. Sometimes, you work in the wilderness a while, and suddenly it all pays off. -----