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The day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote (2010)
- 2Gkashmiri 5y agoi think i remebered an arstechnica article (was it that? i dont remember) that explained in simple terms how jobs does keynote better. they explained stuff like "just write in as few words as possible your topic and speak. if you wrote a paragraph on screen, why would anyone hear you repeat that?" and other stuff like using a plain background instead of fancy things. i would love to revisit that but sadly i have been unable to find it
- criddell 5y agoThere was an entire book on Jobs' presentations called Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs by Carmine Gallo. Perhaps Ars wrote a review and summarized some of the top points? Guy Kawasaki has also written quite a bit about effective presentations and has a 10/20/30 rule. Ten slides, twenty minutes, 30 point font. The idea of putting as few words as possible on a slide sounds like a Kawasaki thing.
- marginalia_nu 5y agoI once read somewhere that we only have one language center in the brain, and thus can't read and listen simultaneously, so those text-laden slides basically do nothing but provide a distraction; you're alternating between listening and reading, there is no such thing as doing them both at once. There may be some room for providing illustrations, but bullet point presentations really do far more harm than good.
- e-dt 5y agoOne benefit of slides that largely duplicate the same content that was in the talk is that if they are made publicly available, then you can go back over them if you forget/weren't there/learn better through reading/etc. Of course, the same is true for transcripts, but noone makes transcripts and everyone makes slides.
- Spooky23 5y agoIt depends on the purpose of the presentation. A marketing slide or a visual aide to a speech should be as light in prose as possible. But it is valid to use slides as primary information delivery mechanisms with the speech as a complement.
- marginalia_nu 5y agoRight, but since you can't actually listen to the speech as you read the slides (or read the slides as you listen to the speech), then the slides really should be a complementary booklet or some other written text intended to be read at a different time.
- Mezzie 5y agoShhh, if you point that out, people will start questioning whether they need a slide presentation at all. I tend to view 'no aids' as the default; unless I can come up with a specific use for a slide deck, why make one?
- longtimelistnr 5y agoSlides are perfectly fine and readable if you only talk about content on the slide. Just make simple bullet points that are reiterated in your speech and keep it on topic
- Mezzie 5y agoVery much so. I just designed a presentation for a Zoom talk I'm doing, and its intended use case is not only that I'll be going through it during the talk, but that printouts will be available, and the handout/resource will be available digitally perpetually. Since the presentation involves complex, easily confused topics (voting research), being very specific is necessary in this case. Marketing a product or making an argument require different types of presentations than teaching. Each can be done well or poorly.
- andrewaylett 5y ago
- TehShrike 5y agoI've met at least two people in my lifetime who had 2 or 3 language processors in their brain. They could type unrelated sentences while listening/speaking in a different conversation. That's not me, though - I can't even finish typing a word I've thought of if I'm trying to listen to someone talk or say something to them at the same time. I have 1 language processor at the best of times.
- thereddaikon 5y agoI remember a lesson from years ago about presentations, this was in a military context, that either you can do the talking or the slides can do the talking. Pick one, don't try to do both.
- xattt 5y agoWatching yesterday’s keynote, I couldn’t help but notice the “homogenized diversity” that’s become a mainstay of Apple’s post-COVID product announcements. Even though there were folks from all cultures (which is great), their hand gestures and word emphasis were unusually uniform. I’d love to see a glimpse of the presentation skills class they probably have through Apple University.
- bombcar 5y agohttps://mcdreeamiemusings.com/blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd7w2t2mtvfg81uhx https://mcdreeamiemusings.com/blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd... Is worth reading in a similar vein - Death by PowerPoint.
- jccalhoun 5y agoThe thing about writing as few words as possible on the slide isn't unique to Jobs. I've been teaching that to my students for 20 years or more. I got it from a book( well, more like a booklet. it is really thin with tons of pictures) called Save Our Slides.
- toyg 5y agoI remember sitting in a short session at a small UK university, about presenting, in 2002. The main message was to keep the audience's attention on you, not the screen. In many ways it was stating the obvious, but it's true that few people ever stop and reason about these things. To this day, the few tips I picked up in that silly little session still make me a much better presenter and slide-maker than 99% of my colleagues, hands down, and I'm really not bragging.
- baud147258 5y ago> writing as few words as possible on the slide that's something I learned at university, though I don't remember if it was explicitly told in class or something I picked up when preparing presentations
- city41 5y agoThis is also covered in Jobs's biography (which is a great read btw).
- mytailorisrich 5y agoThat's standard presentation skill, actually. Slides are not a text document, they are a visual aide.
- martopix 5y agoThis is how you do presentations if you're someone that spent some time learning how to do presentations. It doesn't take Steve Jobs. The better lecturers know that.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cossatot 5y agoI think this works effectively in many situations (particularly keynotes), but I frequently give presentations that are (1) meant to inform more than persuade or entertain, (2) are often given to an audience with a substantial fraction of non native English speakers, and (3) the slides are regularly distributed after the fact. This pretty much necessitates having texty slides that I have to read more or less verbatim, even if that makes the experience more dull.
- michaelhoffman 5y agoQuite a story and the kicker is the most amazing part.
- graderjs 5y agoI know!! That had me LOLing so hard. Why now? Hahaha. It's like Apple was playing some next level chess with this supplier. They'd angered them, and Apple didn't forget. My God :)
- trollied 5y agoThis needs a (2010) and a "was originally written for gizmodo" https://gizmodo.com/the-day-steve-jobs-dissed-me-in-a-keynote-5688044 https://gizmodo.com/the-day-steve-jobs-dissed-me-in-a-keynot...
- vishnugupta 5y ago(2010)
- boomboomsubban 5y agoSpinning fewer available songs as an advantage is some high level bullshitting. Particularly when you immediately go out and get all those "edited" tracks.
- voxadam 5y agoYou're talking about the company that publicly extolled their own "courage" when they removed the headphone jack from their phones.
- loudtieblahblah 5y ago
- falcolas 5y ago> Boycott slavery? I'd expect that of any company operating today, frankly. But what's that got to do with their marketing speech?
- krageon 5y ago> I'd expect that of any company operating today, frankly. Almost every company actively uses slave labour and can therefore be assumed to be entirely okay with it.
- HWR_14 5y agoWhich was sad. If they had said "this makes your phone last 5 minutes longer when it gets wet" even I would have been cautiously optimistic. But "courage" is a stupid argument. That said, the real reason is they decided bluetooth headphones were finally reliable enough
- gibolt 5y agoReliable enough AND that they were going to sell them.
- kuharich 5y agoPast comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1896189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1896189, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5879322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5879322
- dang 5y agoThanks! Macroexpanded: The day Steve Jobs dissed me hard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1896189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1896189 - Nov 2010 (122 comments) The day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5879322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5879322 - June 2013 (104 comments) Also this little one: The day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15208241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15208241 - Sept 2017 (1 comment)
- TheRealDunkirk 5y agoWell it's a good thing that Apple no longer does these kinds of crazy, passive-aggressive moves with suppliers and developers any more. Whew!
- wdurden 5y agoIf you liked this one, you might also like .. https://panic.com/extras/audionstory/ https://panic.com/extras/audionstory/
- andygcook 5y agoThat was a fun read. Thanks for sharing.
- creeble 5y ago>The name "Audion" simply popped into my head during a shower Not much of an electronics history buff, I guess. Also the name of (arguably) the most important electronics invention of the first half of the 20th century.
- wdurden 5y agodeForest .. a man out of time. Then there was Bones. And Forrest Mims guides at RadioShack! SoundJam definitely had the better name though.
- raverbashing 5y agoThis passive-agressive crap is unnerving. And the worse thing is that they only get away with it because the competition is worse. Also the "yes you have to use our software" BS. Sounds like someone thinks they're too important. Sure let me have someone using a desktop app all day just because you can't be bothered to "think differently"
- danuker 5y ago> And the worse thing is that they only get away with it because the competition is worse. youtube-dl is their competition, and using it is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. DRM sucks. Don't sponsor it.
- scarface74 5y agoApple hasn’t sold music with DRM since 2009
- danuker 5y agoOh. Well, that's unexpected news to me! They still DRM Apple Music (which you could argue is selling music, but as a service), and files which had DRM when you bought them, and movies, it seems.
- scarface74 5y agoYou can pay $25 a year for ITunes Match - once - and get all of your music that you ever bought DRM free. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204146 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204146 Movies have DRM. Blame that on the studios But Apple, Amazon, Google, Vudu and a couple of the other digital movie services participate in Movies Anywhere with most of the studios. You buy a movie from one place and it is automatically considered purchased from the other stores. Movies have always had copy protection - even back in the analog days with Macrovision.
- kmeisthax 5y ago
- palindrome818 5y agoThis book was actually totally worth reading (I mean not on 1x but 2x for sure)
- mahoho 5y agoIf I understand the article correctly, are (some/most) files for sale on the iTunes store taken from CD rips rather than made directly from the masters? That sounds impressively sketchy; anyone who has used AccurateRip can probably testify that CD ripping errors and manufacturing errors are surprisingly common.
- phkahler 5y ago>> anyone who has used AccurateRip can probably testify that CD ripping errors and manufacturing errors are surprisingly common. CDs have significant error correction codes so if it sounds right it IS right. Having said that, I have one song I always skip because it ripped badly and I've never got around to re-ripping it and replacing the bad one. But it's obvious that it's a bad rip to the point that I skip the song so I don't have to hear the glitch. In other words, if they checked each song before uploading it would be fine.
- toyg 5y agoI wonder if this is why there is a Dinosaur Jr song with a massive bad-rip hole about two-thirds in, on all the streaming platforms.
- garaetjjte 5y ago>so if it sounds right it IS right No, player will interpolate samples with detected but uncorretable errors. Uncorrectable error rate of CD-DA was deemed too high for CD-ROM, thus it uses additional layer of ECC data on top of it.
- Majromax 5y ago> CDs have significant error correction codes so if it sounds right it IS right. For data CD formats, yes. For audio CD formats, readers are allowed to interpolate over uncorrectable errors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C2_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C2_error), which would not necessarily result in an abrupt skip or pop.
- eyelidlessness 5y ago> Having said that, I have one song I always skip because it ripped badly and I've never got around to re-ripping it and replacing the bad one. Heh. I have one that has about five seconds of silence, at the end of an album, then about ten seconds of horrifically loud noise. It still catches me off guard every time, but it’s not in heavy rotation so I still haven’t gotten around to trimming it.
- ______-_-______ 5y ago> “Sorry, you need to use this software; there is no other way.” That's your cue to set up mitmproxy (or the 2003 equivalent?) and figure out how to talk to the service directly.
- duxup 5y ago>Whoa! Wow. Steve Jobs just dissed me hard! I didn't read that as a "dis". Put in a bad spot for sure.
- lelandfe 5y agoIt's at least a diss to his catalog of music
- letmeoknmmm 5y ago
- tiffanyh 5y ago> I flew home that night, posted my meeting notes on my website Learned lesson, don’t be publicly sharing a companies plans.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoIt sounds like an early example social network oversharing thing, like how some people needed to record and post everything trivial they or their kids did onto facebook, or people to post their breakfast onto instagram, or nowadays everyone's brainfart / shower thought / hot take onto twitter.
- robertlagrant 5y agoThat would make all industry press vanish overnight!
- yakorevivan 5y ago
- willbudd 5y agoCan you imagine having to manually insert 100000 CDs and all their metadata into some GUI, even though you have everything on file elsewhere already? And not just any GUI application, but the complete garbage that is iTunes. Because some dev/clown has the hubris to proclaim "there is no other way"? I'd not care if you're Steve Jobs himself. That's some just laugh and leave the room level of Kafkaesque ridiculousness. Glad I work in the era of public-facing APIs. Even if Apple still seems to be clinging on to their consume-only mentality.
- duxup 5y ago>even though you already have everything on file elsewhere already? Sounds like an opportunity to automate much of that...
- willbudd 5y agoYeah, no doubt. Everything can be automated. And I'm sure some dirty hack was cobbled together to work around the situation rather than turning some poor human into a zombie with both RSI and PTSD. I'd hope. But let's not turn the tables that way. My point is that "opportunity" should have been addressed _before_ Steve Jobs decided to fly in all those industry bigwigs to do his sales pitch. I mean, who was selling who here exactly? Different times I guess...
- duxup 5y agoI really don't have a problem with putting the onus on the owner to make sure their information is correct, let them prioritize and so on. It's not ideal, but in 2003 the idea that everything has an API was still very pie in the sky for A LOT of things.
- willbudd 5y agoThat's fair, but there didn't even need to be an API. Just some feature to import WAV files and/or track listings would have gone a long way.
- 5y ago
- neya 5y ago> I flew home that night, posted my meeting notes on my website, emailed all of my clients to announce the news, and went to sleep. >When I woke, I had furious emails and voicemails from my contact at Apple. >“What the hell are you doing? That meeting was confidential! Take those notes off your site immediately! Our legal department is furious!” Wait, who the hell posts meeting notes on their website (and also emails all their clients without a written confirmation at the said meeting)? I would assume any meeting you'd have with a client/potential would be assumed to be confidential. I felt this particular move was very unprofessional on the OP's part.
- popctrl 5y agoI guess it depends whether OP made their service as startup looking for a great exit, or a passion project based on their hobby that got extended to their friends.
- zarzavat 5y agoPersonal or business it doesn’t matter. If you met your friend for coffee and they told you they are pregnant (for example) would you feel emboldened to post on Twitter congratulations without even asking her if she wants the world to know? I get that this was 2003 but if anything it would have seemed even more rude before social media made posting about your life online more acceptable.
- apetresc 5y agoBut to use your analogy, if my friend invited a few hundred people she knew and told us she was pregnant, then yes, I would feel fine posting about it on Instagram.
- downandout 5y agoThe difference is that the pregnancy doesn’t affect the lives of all the people on Twitter. This guy was communicating with his clients, who had to respond to the news by working to prepare their albums for upload to iTunes. He had a perfectly legitimate reason for posting this on his website.
- mariodiana 5y agotl;dr moral of the story: But I never again promised a customer that I could do something beyond my full control.
- irrational 5y ago12 years later, does anyone have any additional perspective on this? The story didn’t make much sense to me. Especially the end where they went ahead and uploaded the music to Apple anyway. Why would they do that? If someone treated me the way Apple treated CD Baby, I wouldn’t put up with that level of abuse.
- tinco 5y agoHis responsibility is primarily to enabling his clients (the musicians) to make money from selling their music. Regardless of his feelings Apple was offering a sales channel for his musicians.
- pr0zac 5y agoCD Baby was the biggest independent music distribution channel at the time (I have to image its been surpassed by Bandcamp now?) and iTunes was very clearly going to be one of the biggest markets available. Getting the hundreds of thousands artists that use your service banned from iTunes because someone was rude would've been a really terrible business decision.
- dundarious 5y agoI don't think the artists would be happy to miss the opportunity to be on iTunes just because Jobs was slow, involved in marketing spin, and specifically obnoxious to this one guy. People and companies (yes, major ones) behave far worse all the time. Boycotts can make sense, but relatively rarely compared to the number of times such bad behavior occurs.
- blihp 5y agoIt was an example of Steve being Steve: he wanted their back catalog but he also wanted to extract a pound of flesh for their perceived slight more. He had absolutely no problem doing or saying things that put partners (such as the Motorola Rokr presentation a couple years later) or even employees (the time he indirectly joked about getting rid of Tony Fadell on stage) in a bad light/spot. Not saying he didn't often have a point, but he did it in a way that often came off as petty and vindictive. In this case, he probably knew exactly where Apple was heading re: the music business and also probably viewed CD Baby as a competitor to be taken out, so there was that aspect to it as well. While I don't think they've been (as) vindictive at a corporate level since Steve, Apple as a company has been yanking 'partners' around like this whenever they had the power to for at least the last 15-20 years, depending on the industry.
- _1 5y agoHere's the notes he posted after the pitch from Apple: https://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=66729&cid=6133882 https://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=66729&cid=6133882
- sivers 5y agoWow! Thanks for finding this! I'm so glad someone saved it. (I'm the original author.)
- MarcoZavala 5y ago
- matthewdgreen 5y agoI worked at AT&T in the late 1990s on an early music sales (not streaming) service called a2b Music. It sounds ridiculous now (why would AT&T think they could succeed in consumer-facing music sales!) but at the time they were a co-owner of the AAC patents and wanted to commercialize them. They also had lots of bandwidth and thought this made sense. Being "responsible" folks (and also having no choice in the matter) AT&T bent over backward to accommodate the labels. Half the product was proprietary DRM that made everything constantly unusable. Despite this, the labels still strangled us by limiting what we could sell. Apple quite correctly ignored all of this and solved the problem by first launching the iPod, waiting until it had critical mass (much of which involved tons of unpaid MP3 downloading) and then launching the iTunes Store in 2003 when they had an installed base full of piracy - and the major labels had no choice but to join on their terms. (Obviously I pity the small labels who got screwed in the dynamic.) I think about this a lot when people complain about cryptocurrency or Uber/Lyft evading regulations or destroying legacy businesses. Often this kind of behavior is bad, often the little guy gets crushed. But at the end of the day, legacy businesses really are poison and much of the awfulness could be avoided if they weren't trying to hold on to things so tightly.
- jancsika 5y ago
- CityOfThrowaway 5y agoYou are quite viciously arguing a point the OP didn't make and doesn't even seem to hold. Chill.
- toolz 5y agoI suspect you mean speed/bandwidth when you say scale, but that isn't the entirety of what scale means. try being in russia right now and buying products like netflix or similar sold in USD. With crypto you have free (as in freedom) money that enables consenting people to trade without the permission of oppressive governments. As for bandwidth and speed there are _plenty_ of crypto solutions that match or beat SWIFT, which as of last year was probably peaking somewhere around 150k (very generous assumption based on 40 million messages a day) FIN messages a second. It takes many FIN messages to complete a transaction of exchanging money and there are numerous blockchains which do in excess of 50k tx/sec
- ffhhj 5y agoCD Baby's email unsubscribe doesn't work.
- pnut 5y agoSivers sold the company ages ago
- junon 5y agoI worked at Uber corporate for a year and this is how I kind of see things too. The medallion system is ridiculous when you dig into it, the taxi lobbies are toxic and anti-capitalist and wrong really no matter how you look at it (aside from the union aspect I suppose, but they definitely use it as a weapon, not as a tool). I'm happy to see Uber and Lyft and whatnot upend them. Not so happy it had to be done through shady practices.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- stemlord 5y agoNyc yellow cabs are far cheaper than uber/lyft. They also tend to know the city better. Rideshares wiped out yellow cabs then drove up the price.
- hollosi 5y agoKnowing the price in advance vs hoping for the best is worth a lot, even if on average the latter was cheaper.
- mring33621 5y agoIf this is true, it simply means that Uber/Lyft outcompeted the yellow cabs in some other set of attributes, rather than price. I'm guessing availability and ease of use.
- jaster 5y agoOr that they used VC money to outcompete companies using artificially low prices, and then raised the prices to make some profit once they got a hold on the market
- simonswords82 5y agoSays a lot that a man who has been dead for over a decade still generates content worthy of the HN front page.
- dstroot 5y ago> "Whatever. Fucking Apple." Should have ended right there and dropped the mic. Refunding the $40 was the right move and in keeping with CD Baby's ethos of the artist comes first.
- BonoboIO 5y agoSteve Jobs was not the nice humble guy everybody wants to believe in.
- jaywalk 5y agoWho believes Steve Jobs was a nice, humble guy?
- oh_sigh 5y agoI wonder if it would have been possible at that point to create a virtual drive, and just present the wavs as the CD content to the ripping software.
- bag_boy 5y agoHe dissed him and used it as an opportunity to glorify the labels. At the time Jobs was trying to cozy up to them. Smart but a dick move nonetheless.
- paulpauper 5y agothat whole period from mid to late 90s to early 2000s had so many easy and cheap entrepreneurial opportunities. You didn't need to spend millions to reinvent the wheel to make a product or exit.
- jonny_eh 5y ago> cryptocurrency I don't see the analogy.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- davidgerard 5y agoGreen has been casually dropping mentions of the concept of cryptocurrency in irrelevant situations quite a bit lately.
- OrlandoHakim 5y ago[Deleted]
- njwi332 5y agoI'm pretty sure he was talking about the person at the root of this thread, with the name 'matthewdgreen'
- kag0 5y agocryptocurrency is to banks/paypal as itunes was to traditional music buying/licensing I'm not saying I agree (or disagree) but the analogy is fairly clear to me
- evanextreme 5y agoI wouldnt say thats a correct analogy though, a traditional bank / cryptocurrency provide similar user experiences these days with how their mobile apps work. At the end of the day even in crypto an overwhelming majority of users interact with blockchains from centralized bank like platforms that function in an incredibly similar way, especially with the advent of neo banks like Chime. Downloading a song was a completely different experience from driving to a store to get a CD.
- 5y ago
- trasz 5y agoOnly tangentially related, but last year I’ve tried ripping some CDs with iTunes^wMusic.app and it’s still unable to do it right - there was a lot of skipping. Which is frankly pathetic when compared with cdparanoia, which had that working some 30 years ago.
- acd10j 5y agoHearing this story makes my heart boil in rage. Is only way to achieve true success is by being ass Like Jobs ? If you have read anything about him by accounts of people who know him, You will know that he prepared that speech to spite on Sivers. Once his ego was satisfied after Sivers had to refund the money he then gave a go ahead for deal. There is no benefit of doubt about it.
- AitchEmArsey 5y ago1. Be a sociopath 2. Move to Silicon Valley 3. ??? 4. Profit
- walrus01 5y agoI'm immediately suspicious of anyone I meet in the tech industry who doesn't think Steve Jobs was a raging asshole. The number of people who've given first hand accounts of him screaming in meetings or going into full rage meltdown mode at the slightest provocation is in the hundreds. Any time from 1977 up until very near his death. I'm literally typing this on a late model macbook air right now, and I use MacOS because of its NeXT and BSD-like heritage, but he was not not a nice person.
- captainredbeard 5y agoAgreed. Maybe assholes are still worthwhile human beings?
- walrus01 5y agoI guess the pertinent question is what set of people consider assholes to be worthwhile role models to be emulated, or not.
- BLKNSLVR 5y agoThat's an eternal conundrum, and one that eats away at me on a regular basis. Long story short: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” ― George Bernard Shaw Long story long: I'm a nice person, I'm passive, I like letting people do their thing and letting them learn on their own timeline because, in my experience, 'forcing it' can result in an opposite reaction. I'm happy to provide guidance when asked and gentle suggestions and nudges in the right direction, delivered non-threateningly. On the flipside, my opinions are relatively strongly held because I 'do the work' to research and understand the issues that I either care about, or am tasked to solve in my work. I get internally "Jobsian" at the dismissal of my solution for another, but rarely let my internal "Jobs" out of his box. In my earlier years I've been told (by my wife) that I'm scary when in disagreement; my voice, tone, and body language is apparently threatening. I don't want to impose this beast, I don't want my influence to be threatening, I want it to be intellectual; the actual right answer or best path forwards. Quiet intellectualism, however, appears to be the easiest thing in the world to ignore and / or dismiss. Or maybe I'm just wrong, and living in my own reality distortion field.
- abejfehr 5y agoI found the actual keynote in case anyone's curious to hear the quote: https://youtu.be/MvCJ613HORA?t=566 https://youtu.be/MvCJ613HORA?t=566
- FiniteLooper 5y agoI was also once dissed by Steve Jobs at a keynote! Back when widgets first came out for OS X I was in college and was beginning to learn programming. I was sill very bad, but these widgets interested me because they were essentially just little HTML/CSS/JS webpages. I looked around and saw there was no widget for CNN news. CNN had RSS feeds of their news, I found some other widget that displayed an RSS feed and basically just plugged this new data source in and it worked! Next I just restyled it to look like it the CNN website which at the time was light blue and pretty ugly, but I made this widget to match. I released it, and it got some downloads! Months later at the WWDC keynote, I was watching live and I saw Steve sit down at the demo computer and show off some widgets on the big screen. The CNN widget I made was there on screen at the keynote! I didn't believe it at first, I was in shock. Next though, when he showed my widget his only comment was that "it's not as nice looking as [some other news widget] but it gets the job done." Ouch! Not only was Steve Jobs personally aware of a piece of software I (kind of) wrote but he demoed it at WWDC! But he also said it looked pretty bad... And he was right, it did. Shortly after this I restyled the widget to look nice on its own, regardless of what the CNN website actually looked like. While this stung, it was a good design lesson to learn. Thanks Steve!
- dwighttk 5y agoSort of praising with faint damnation
- randyrand 5y agoAnd now he's dead in large part due to his own arrogance. Looks like you got the last laugh! Steve Jobs sure was an asshole.
- batorgil000 5y ago
- batorgil000 5y ago
- throwaway874653 5y agoThe most over rated manager ever