Tag : Steve Jobs

Yesterday I listened to a very inspirational talk on TED by Steve Jobs ’How to live before you die‘. By telling 3 stories from his life Steve is urging people to pursue their dreams and trust their intuition.

Connecting the dots

Steve always followed his intuition. He never graduated from the university. He didn’t know what he wanted to do in his life and didn’t think that college would help him figure it out. He dropped out of Reed College just after 6 months. By dropping out he could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest him and join the ones that looked interesting. For example he took calligraphy class to learn about typefaces, about what makes great typography great. 10 years later when designing the first Macintosh computer he used his knowledge and skills to design the first computer with beautiful typography. Much of what he stumbled into by following his curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Key learning points:

Hidden among the details of Apple’s announcement of the next version of the iPhone operating system last week was a nasty, snide little addition to the terms and conditions that iPhone app developers must agree to in order to get their apps into the App Store.

In effect, it says that you must use Apple’s developer tools and preferred programming language to develop iPhone apps. Which, on the face of it, is uncontroversial. It’s Apple’s platform, so you use Apple tools and languages. The problem is that there are significant efforts from other companies and projects to make it easier to transition to iPhone app development from other platforms, such as Microsoft’s .NET and Adobe’s Flash, as well as to make it easier to write apps that run on multiple mobile platforms. Apple’s devotees have had problems with these alternative platforms before, as I wrote a few months ago, but now Apple have taken the extraordinary step of embedding their own language preference in the terms and conditions of even being an iPhone developer at all.

Working alongside advertising people, you hear the phrase “oh, that’s executional” a fair bit. Granted, ‘executional’ is a revolting neologism, but that’s not my big problem with the phrase.

There are a number of trigger phrases that people use to try to prevent you focusing on the detail of a project and back to nice, sweeping, high-level thinking, and ‘that’s executional’ is one of them. I think it is supposed to mean that the particular detail you’re focusing on is not central to the service under discussion and is something that can be worked out at a later date.