Oral History of Kenneth Kocienda and Richard Williamson Part 2

Interviewed by Hansen Hsu and Marc Weber on 2017-11-13 in Mountain View, CA X8367.2018
© Computer History Museum
Williamson and Kocienda continue the discussion of working on the first iPhone project, discussing the pressure and work-life balance, motivations driving the team, secrecy, lack of diversity, working with AT&T, and memories of the keynote. They also discuss the decision to release a native instead of web-based iPhone SDK for third party developers, implementing cut/copy/paste in iOS 3, and changes necessary in the iOS keyboard to support the iPad, opening up iOS to support third party keyboards, and resistance to making the iPhone replicate PC features. Williamson discusses the creation of, and difficulties in rolling out, Apple Maps, resulting in his departure from Apple. Williamson and Kocienda also discuss Siri. Kocienda discusses his work on multi-tasking gestures for iPad in iOS 5, the UI overhaul in iOS 7, and the Apple Watch.
* Note: Transcripts represent what was said in the interview. However, to enhance meaning or add clarification, interviewees have the opportunity to modify this text afterward. This may result in discrepancies between the transcript and the video. Please refer to the transcript for further information - www.computerhis...
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Lot number: X8367.2018
Catalog number:102738583

[@BenRangel]

19:37 Great teaser for the later talk about AppleMaps bad launch and how little QA it had.
Having a low amount of QA is something you can totally get away with if you have very passionate engineers who happen to catch most issues, and a bit of luck. But sometimes you're not so lucky.

[@AndreasRudolph]

No matter what, its obvious how these two are living legends of engineering. This coming from an Android developer ;)

[@atomicorang]

I wonder if a completely different group of people could have ended up with a completely same outcome of what I’m using now.

[@AxViki]

nice

[@pistol3333]

I was super creeped out when Richard Williamson argued for app censorship.