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I hear rumors that Apple periodically staffs teams in charge of most of these applications rather than continuously staffing them. Applications get periods of a

I hear rumors that Apple periodically staffs teams in charge of most of these applications rather than continuously staffing them. Applications get periods of activity and periods of maintenance. (I didn't hear these rumors from any kind of reliable source, so I'm a bit skeptical, but it would explain things.)

JKCalhoun 4y ago
I worked on this team for a bit, years ago. It was absolutely a full-time team then — I have no reason to believe that has changed. As the stable of apps owned by the team is (was, at least) fairly large (Pages, Numbers, Keynote, iBooks, iBooks Author) it was of course possible that some apps could get more love for a release cycle than others. I was there near the beginning when new versions of the "iWork Apps" were created for the cloud — some of the re-design that had to be done for the web-based versions of the apps moved back to the desktop version in the name of consistent UI. (Multiple windows was an obvious one — you couldn't have a floating "inspector" window in a browser environment, so instead a split-view was adopted where the inspected properties were displayed in a gutter-like column along the right edge of the content.) I was not on the team, only a "customer", for this more recent transition to our Catalyst-present. Using iBooks on Monterey I was saddened by how slow jumping through content in iBooks has become. Clearly when you engage in a unifying strategy (either unifying the user-interface across platforms or using cross-platform libraries) we lose some things in the fire. As a user I would love to declare that every platform should have its own code-base, optimized for that platform. But the pragmatist in me understands why companies don't have the resources to do this. Hopefully iBooks, Apple Books, will get fast page navigation back....
- klodolph 4y ago
  Ah, okay... I'm remembering more of what I heard. With one team in charge of several apps, it's natural that you'd focus on certain objectives during each planning period, right? So some apps or app/platform combinations would sometimes not get as much focus for a year or two? As opposed to what would happen if you had a "Pages" team, because that team would always be prioritizing work on Pages during every planning period.
  - JKCalhoun 4y ago
    Yes, that is correct.

JKCalhoun 4y ago

I worked on this team for a bit, years ago. It was absolutely a full-time team then — I have no reason to believe that has changed. As the stable of apps owned by the team is (was, at least) fairly large (Pages, Numbers, Keynote, iBooks, iBooks Author) it was of course possible that some apps could get more love for a release cycle than others. I was there near the beginning when new versions of the "iWork Apps" were created for the cloud — some of the re-design that had to be done for the web-based versions of the apps moved back to the desktop version in the name of consistent UI. (Multiple windows was an obvious one — you couldn't have a floating "inspector" window in a browser environment, so instead a split-view was adopted where the inspected properties were displayed in a gutter-like column along the right edge of the content.) I was not on the team, only a "customer", for this more recent transition to our Catalyst-present. Using iBooks on Monterey I was saddened by how slow jumping through content in iBooks has become. Clearly when you engage in a unifying strategy (either unifying the user-interface across platforms or using cross-platform libraries) we lose some things in the fire. As a user I would love to declare that every platform should have its own code-base, optimized for that platform. But the pragmatist in me understands why companies don't have the resources to do this. Hopefully iBooks, Apple Books, will get fast page navigation back....

klodolph 4y ago
Ah, okay... I'm remembering more of what I heard. With one team in charge of several apps, it's natural that you'd focus on certain objectives during each planning period, right? So some apps or app/platform combinations would sometimes not get as much focus for a year or two? As opposed to what would happen if you had a "Pages" team, because that team would always be prioritizing work on Pages during every planning period.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  Yes, that is correct.