(2022-08-23) Chin The Iphone Keyboard Make It Or Break It

Cedric Chin case: The iPhone Keyboard - Make It or Break It. The first ever iPhone was unveiled by Apple CEO Steve Jobs in 2007,

A big part of Jobs’s presentation was a section about keyboards. At the time, most phones had physical keyboards

well, every application wants a slightly different user interface, a slightly optimised set of buttons just for it.

What most people don’t know is that the development of the touchscreen keyboard nearly tanked the iPhone. In Creative Selection, Apple software engineer Ken Kocienda tells the story of the iPhone keyboard — and what it took to build it when they were attempting to make the first modern smartphone.

At the time that Kocienda joined in July 2005, Project Purple’s software was nothing more than a handful of user interface demos

The stakes were also incredibly high. Jobs was watching Purple obsessively — the phone was to be a bet-the-company moment.

By around September 2005, a major problem had emerged. In a particularly difficult product demonstration for Purple’s keyboard, smartphone exec Scott Forstall (who reported directly to Steve Jobs) was unable to type anything intelligible.

What if we couldn’t? Would Purple be cancelled? Henri didn’t come out and say it that way, but he didn’t have to. In all my years at Apple, we’d never before halted a fifteen-person project to focus everyone on a single problem.

Nobody on the 15-engineer team quite knew what the ideal software keyboard would look like.

The next day, Lamiraux told Kocienda that the keyboard crisis was over. They would have him be the DRI to develop the phone keyboard going forward. Forstall didn’t even ask if he wanted the job. And Kocienda knew what it meant — at Apple, being a ‘Directly Responsible Individual’ meant that his butt was on the line. He had to do whatever it took to make the keyboard a success

This prototype would have two or three letters form a large clickable button. As users tapped them, a dictionary software would determine the most sensible word

Kocienda then decided that every letter of his keyboard should have its own button. And the dictionary assistance software would be fine-tuned so that it understood if you had tapped the wrong key nearby.