12 ms·
Apple is run like a huge startup (and the remote app was written by 1 guy)
- wallflower 16y agoThe iBooks app, too, with all the sexy page turning animation was written by one guy (before it became big).
- Charuru 16y agoAm I the only person who hates that animation? This is about the only reason why I use Stanza, no animation to waste my time with.
- bradgessler 16y agoI can't stand it either and I think Kindle has a better e-Book reader than Apple. Amazon did a good job at thinking, "this is not a book... this is not a book" where-as Apple brought all of the physical things from a book into an electronic application.
- xenophanes 16y agoI bet a lot of the iPad target audience wants it to be close to a physical book. They aren't geeks.
- bradgessler 16y agoI always think its a mistake when unnecessary physical metaphors are copied directly into software. The page flip, and pages around the content, are all completely unnecessary for eReaders to work. If the Kindle has proven anything, its that people don't need to see pages and page flips to understand how to go to the next screen.
- irrelative 16y agoAs a UI developer with about 5 years of experience, that seems about right to me. I think I could have written that app given about 8 months. Heck, I suspect that the page turning animation was a relatively small part of the development. I don't consider myself a fantastic developer either. I'd be suspicious of any developer with a few years experience who couldn't write an application like that given the right amount of time and motivation. This isn't to belittle your comment, just that I'm thinking to myself "yeah, that sound correct".
- Maktab 16y agoI think more interesting than the fact that one guy wrote the entire application is that Apple gave one guy the time and space to create the application on his own.
- smackfu 16y agoI'm sure he had tons of notes from Steve Jobs on the details though.
- Revisor 16y ago“No, Apple didn’t license iBooks from me. They just copied me. Ah well,” http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/27/think-ibooks-looks-familiar-youre-not-the-only-one/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/27/think-ibooks-looks-familiar...
- wallflower 16y agoI don't remember the engineer's name. Mentioned at WWDC. Not the Delicious guy.
- lovskogen 16y agoBecause of the Remote App was written by one guy, Apple is a huge startup?
- chc 16y agoNo. Nobody said that. It's an example of how Apple works. Rather than having large teams with hordes of managers, Apple has a bunch of engineers who are trusted to be competent and work on whatever's needed. This way of working is more akin to a startup than a typical BigCo.
- lovskogen 16y agoBut is it so with everything, and not just the Remote App? Apple seems kinda far from bing a huge startup in many ways.
- tcdent 16y agoThis article does suggest Apple works this way with everything. Of course Apple isn't a startup; they're a multi-billion dollar 35-year-old company, but they do take a similar approach to organizing their teams.
- dagw 16y agoI've worked at several BigCo's and they all basically worked like that. Now admittedly non of these companies where pure software or computer companies, but still in my experience the whole "large teams with hordes of managers" seems to be very much the exception rather than the rule once you actually take a look at most companies from the inside. The only "hordes of managers" company I've actually worked at was a smallish company (around 50 employees)
- bradgessler 16y agoNo, that's just an interesting fact from the article. I assumed they assembled a crack-team of iPhone engineers to bang this out. I was surprised that one person put together such a high-quality app, especially in a company that could afford to throw lots of money/developers/teams to solve this problem.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- bmalicoat 16y agoThe question is from Giz, the author provides the answer.
- benologist 16y agoOops you're right.
- mcritz 16y agoYes. I read the article and I agree with the author. I still think I have a relevant point.
- commandar 16y ago"The engineers on the Mac OS and iOS teams move back and forth between the two projects based on release cycles and what's needs to ship next." As somebody who has been rather dismayed with the way the Macintosh platform has started to stagnate in the past couple of years, I don't really view this as a good thing.
- wriq 16y agoStagnate? Snow Leopard is just under a year old. I wouldn't expect a desktop OS to have a same release frequency as a mobile os.
- klauer 16y agoI would agree with the general point, but if we're talking about end-user features, even Apple admits 10.6 was under-the-hood, so we haven't seen any UI enhancements since 2007 (10.5's release).
- protomyth 16y ago10.6 was the setup that is needed for the future. All the under-the-hood stuff is going to make a huge difference once developers focus on it and start ignoring <= 10.5.
- _delirium 16y agoOddly, Debian has about the same release cycle (once per 12-18 months), and ends up being the butt of lots of jokes about how they rarely ever release anything.
- Hates_ 16y agoVery similar in a way to what I read on this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1568395 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1568395 (7 Scaling Strategies Facebook Used To Grow To 500 Million Users) Small, Independent Teams. Small teams allow work to be done efficiently, quickly, and carefully. Only three people work on photos, for example, the largest photo site on the internet.
- blhack 16y agodownvoters: Sorry if this question was offensive; I'm asking about if the "apple is like a startup" trend continues into developers being able to choose what kind of tools they want to work with. My complaining about my MBP isn't meant as a critique of apple, I'm just saying that if it was me I would probably choose a linux machine, not a mac. I apologize for the off-topic question, but is anybody here a coder for apple (or has been in the past?)? Are you allowed to use a non-apple computer if you work at apple? I just got a macbook pro over the weekend (my first mac) and it seems like they've really gone out of their way to make this as difficult as possible to write code on. No page up/down keys...no dedicated delete key, no home/end keys...it seems like the UI is designed around the mouse. Alt-Tabbing seems really neutered in comparison to the gnome/kde/windows equivalents...and the solution that is offered is the expose' key (which works, but involves using the mouse). Is there just a steep learning curve? Don't get me wrong, the machine is very pretty, but it seems like the type of work that geeks do was ignored when they designed this laptop (like having no dedicated right click key?) Obviously they were talking about apple being run like a startup in that the teams are small...one of the things that I see advertised on some job postings for coding jobs is that there is a LOT of flexibility on what your workstation is...is it like this at apple?
- jacobolus 16y agohttp://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/cocoa-text.html http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/cocoa-text.html Also, in Exposé it's possible to tab between applications and use the arrow keys to select windows. As for right click: on an Apple trackpad, two finger click works much better for me than right click (either tap with two fingers or click with the thumb while two other fingers are on the trackpad) ever did on a windows laptop. YMMV. FWIW, I also prefer the Mac ⌘⇥ (command-tab) behavior. You can drag stuff in and out of command-tab, you can hide or quit applications from it (Q and H keys), you can use either keyboard or mouse (or scroll wheel) to select apps, etc. I think you’re mostly just unfamiliar with it... which is perfectly natural, but you might try phrasing your question in a less aggressive manner.
- blhack 16y agoHmm... Thank you. Honestly though, I was just generally curious about if apple devs are allowed to use non-apple computers.
- latortuga 16y agoTo be honest, I thought the remote app was great for about 5 minutes. Then it suddenly couldn't connect to my library until I went back and re set the code. It functions exactly as if one guy wrote it and never updated it.
- volski 16y agoMaybe that's the problem at Microsoft: they think they can solve problems by throwing lots of people at them. They put together large teams to build products. And large teams require managers. I didn't know Microsoft had a problem, they seem to be doing pretty well. They have some good products. Apple being successful doesn't necessarily translate to Microsoft sucking. They are both damn good companies.
- sandipagr 16y agoIf only everyone could use logic like you rather than just bashing around everywhere.
- Cabal 16y agoI didn't know Microsoft had a problem, they seem to be doing pretty well. In the mobile market? How about anything next-generation web? Social media? Microsoft doesn't seem to be doing well anywhere except the increasingly unimportant desktop and Office suite space.
- volski 16y agoWindows Live, Bing, Xbox, Servers, Cloud Services... It's easy to bash on them, but they make quality products in a diverse range of markets. Sure they fail and fail big, but who the hell doesn't? If you have made anything successful, you've probably failed 100s of times. It comes with the territory.
- Cabal 16y agoWindows Live, Bing, Xbox, Servers, Cloud Services Did you have any examples that contradicted me? All of the above are losing MS money in a BIG way.
- Locke1689 16y agoUm, not to get all defensive, but we at STB are making quite a bit of money. It's probably over a million a quarter per developer. I don't know many people who can say that. ;)
- larsberg 16y agoThis article, like many others, seems to overestimate how large the actual numbers of developers is at Microsoft, as opposed to full teams with Test and mgmt and their associated marketing, sales, etc. organizations. The .NET GC was roughly 1 person (sometimes a little less, sometimes a little more). Most of the base class libraries were one person. Even larger things, like the text editor, were usually a senior person and one or two very junior ones. And this is software that has to run on a not-at-all-fixed set of hardware platforms :-) In my time there, I never saw or heard anyone "think they can solve problems by throwing lots of people at them." Uniformly, the decisions made to get things shipped were to either cut the features that were the combination of the furthest behind and least value to the market or to pull over extremely senior talent that had already gotten their parts shipped. Of course, it was a big company, so YMMV. Can't speak for much more than dev tools, office, and windows.
- refulgentis 16y agoNot to be obtuse, or maybe miss the joke, but how can you sometimes have a little less than 1 person working on one of the most important parts of your runtime? Sounds like a bug more than a feature to me. :)
- Samuel_Michon 16y ago"Full-time equivalent (FTE) is a way to measure a worker's involvement in a project, or a student's enrollment at an educational institution. An FTE of 1.0 means that the person is equivalent to a full-time worker, while an FTE of 0.5 signals that the worker is only half-time. Typically, different scales are used to calibrate this number, depending on the type of institution (schools, industry, research) and scope of the report (personnel cost, productivity)." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-time_equivalent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-time_equivalent
- Locke1689 16y agoIt's a perfectly valid question, no need to downvote the guy.
- andreyf 16y ago
- mcritz 16y agoMaybe if Apple had more people they could make Mobile Me work like it should, release a new Mac Pro more frequently than once every two years, have a 64bit completely multithreaded Final Cut Pro written in Cocoa APIs, or something something antenna something…
- Setsuna 16y agoJust because something can be done doesn't necessarily mean it has to be done.
- blacksquare 16y agoI'm really not sure how this is relevant to a company that has over 15,000 employees (non retail). If you've done any work for apple or their HR department you would most certainly know it's not run like a startup.
- betterlabs 16y agoIts indeed awesome for a company as large as Apple to keep things this way. I have several friends at Cisco and Oracle and the teams there are just bloated beyond belief. I think a lot of this flows top down and the management needs to get it. Once you work at a well-run startup, you know that the only way to get things done is with small teams and a core team of star engineers who move around and get things done.
- lushootseed 16y agoI commented on the original article as well and see if mine comment gets moderated or not. Here is the full text with some spelling correction <<<Wow! you bring out A example and make a blanket statement about msft!! Perhaps I should (or someone) also bring "A" example (or a few) from Msft to disprove your POV??? So the example I can think of is the Windows Mobile virtual earth app which was built by A employee. So does msft think like startup? I hate blogs because they are just "opinions">>>
- stcredzero 16y agoI am reminded of one of the companies from Neuromancer. Was it Maas-Neotek? Gibson described most large companies as being composed mostly of flab, with a few hard bits of "edge." But there was this one large company that was all edge. It was a predator amongst its peers. For awhile Apple was just eating everyone's lunch because they were the only ones who understood end-to-end User Experience. Apple's stated strategy for quite awhile was having the computer as the "digital hub." The target was clearly a merging of all media with the computing experience. Can you imagine what Microsoft could've done with XBox if they had UX and vision in the same league as Apple? It was like they already had troops dug in place in the key strategic spot. Apple would've been crushed. Instead, Apple walked all over them.
- palish 16y agoMaybe that's the problem at Microsoft: they think they can solve problems by throwing lots of people at them. No they don't.
- Setsuna 16y ago"Maybe that's the problem at Microsoft: they think they can solve problems by throwing lots of people at them." Does the author provide anything to support this claim? and seriously, I wonder why every pro-apple author couldn't resist the urge to belittle other companies. No company is "perfect".
- rythie 16y agoIs this really that surprising? It doesn't seem that complicated a project. Big companies surely don't have a team for every little project. Wasn't the Facebook app written by one guy. Also TweetDeck was originally by one guy. Wasn't Reddit built by 4 people and Posterous basically by 2 or 3 people? And all for those apps the same people did all the business and marketing too.