3 ms·

When I was at apple, we did this thing people called "keybote-driven development" where everything was made to look great in and keynote presentation to an exec

When I was at apple, we did this thing people called "keybote-driven development" where everything was made to look great in and keynote presentation to an exec. If it looked great you got the go ahead to finish it and ship it, and if not it got skipped. There are a lot of things to like about this approach. However, Time machine's UI to me feels like a quintessential blind spot of this incentive structure, where it looks visually striking and cool but actually using it for real use cases it often falls flat quickly. To update it you would need to fit the motivation and payoff in a keynote presentation and it's hard to do so.

loudthing 5y ago
Big yikes.
- rchaud 5y ago
  Remember that the 2007 iPhone demo had showed AT&T reception at full strength? That was hardcoded for the purpose of the Keynote. I recall iPhones having iffy phone reception for at least the first couple of years.
  - CharlesW 5y ago
    > Remember that the 2007 iPhone demo had showed AT&T reception at full strength? With the help of therapy and psilocybin I got over that in 2016.
  - jaywalk 5y ago
    Not AT&T, but Cingular. Although I believe that Cingular was gone by the time the iPhone actually launched.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > Although I believe that Cingular was gone by the time the iPhone actually launched. It was “gone” in the sense that it was renamed “AT&T Mobility”. (Cingular Wireless bought AT&T Wireless before the iPhone deal, but its parent company [SBC] later bought AT&T, adopted the AT&T name, and rebranded Cingular as AT&T Mobility.)
- throwvirtever 5y ago
  > When I was at apple, we did this thing people called "key[n]ote-driven development"... > Big yikes. If Apple's products are essentially sold via a "keynote", it makes sense to have a keynote presentation as the internal hurdle as well. If it can't be presented in way that looks like something people want to buy, there's no point in moving forward with the project.
  - skrtskrt 5y ago
    Yeah but this is the classic type of bureaucratic effort-justification hurdle that leads to tech debt or just general crappiness never getting improved.

loudthing 5y ago

Big yikes.

rchaud 5y ago
Remember that the 2007 iPhone demo had showed AT&T reception at full strength? That was hardcoded for the purpose of the Keynote. I recall iPhones having iffy phone reception for at least the first couple of years.
- CharlesW 5y ago
  > Remember that the 2007 iPhone demo had showed AT&T reception at full strength? With the help of therapy and psilocybin I got over that in 2016.
- jaywalk 5y ago
  Not AT&T, but Cingular. Although I believe that Cingular was gone by the time the iPhone actually launched.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Although I believe that Cingular was gone by the time the iPhone actually launched. It was “gone” in the sense that it was renamed “AT&T Mobility”. (Cingular Wireless bought AT&T Wireless before the iPhone deal, but its parent company [SBC] later bought AT&T, adopted the AT&T name, and rebranded Cingular as AT&T Mobility.)
throwvirtever 5y ago
> When I was at apple, we did this thing people called "key[n]ote-driven development"... > Big yikes. If Apple's products are essentially sold via a "keynote", it makes sense to have a keynote presentation as the internal hurdle as well. If it can't be presented in way that looks like something people want to buy, there's no point in moving forward with the project.
- skrtskrt 5y ago
  Yeah but this is the classic type of bureaucratic effort-justification hurdle that leads to tech debt or just general crappiness never getting improved.