Steve Jobs Mandated Software Keyboard to Free Screen Space for Apps
Ken Kocienda · Inside the Apple Factory: Software Design in the Age of Steve Jobs · Feb 24, 2019 · at 35:46
Ken Kocienda, former principal software engineer at Apple, details Steve Jobs' product rationale for eliminating physical keyboards on the original iPhone.
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“His idea was that We want, we need a keyboard some of the time, but we certainly don't need it all of the time, and so the idea of the keyboard being in software is that it could get out of the way, it could go off the screen, and which would then turn, make the rest of that screen real estate available for a customized user interface that was great, that was optimized for either the phone app, or if it's the calendar you can see, More of your appointments, or see more of a month view for the calendar, so it was absolutely essential that the keyboard could get out of the way when you weren't using it, so that the device could be opened up for these other, better, richer experiences in, in the apps that we were going to be shipping.”
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