Tom Conrad: evaluation

Transcript context

…Sure. Let's see. I was 15 years old when the Macintosh came out. I remember really clearly my entire teenage years. All I wanted to do was to move from Columbus, Ohio to Cupertino and work for Apple. My heroes were that team of people that had written their signatures on the inside of the Macintosh. We cracked open the first Macintosh case. You would find the signatures of the 20 people or so who worked on the Mac. That was my only ambition, truly. This was a period where no one wanted to work for Apple. That wasn't a thing. It seems like maybe a little obvious today, but it wasn't an obvious ambition at all back then. Anyway, I went to college. It's all I wanted to do. Studied computer engineering at University of Michigan, and as we talk about my career, it is just over and over and over. I'm going to say an incredibly lucky thing happened. The first incredibly lucky thing that happened for me in my career probably was that University of Michigan happened to be a place that Apple recruited from. I didn't know that when I chose the school, but it made it reasonably easy to connect to a hiring manager at Apple. I wrote an actual letter and put it in an actual envelope and put it in the mail and got an internship and drove out in my dad's Pontiac from the Midwest to California. Spent a summer interning and my last day of the internship, I was thinking about really what I wanted to do when I came back. Hopefully came back to Apple after I graduated. I had worked on a product that became shipped. It was called the QuickDraw GX. It was earlier second generation rendering system for the Mac. I'd been that team's intern for the summer. But what I really wanted to do is I wanted to work on the Finder. This is the only thing in the whole world I really wanted to do. I went and found Ron Lichty, who is the manager of the Finder team and said, "I graduate in 10 months. I'd love to be a part of your team." I think he was like, why are you coming and talking to me now? You're literally going back to Michigan tomorrow. I go back to Michigan in May, the phone rings and Ron says, "The college recruiting department just told me that I have a college hiring rep and if I don't use it by tomorrow, I lose it." He's like, "I can't even interview you, you can't meet the team, but you're basically a freebie for me. Do you want this job?" Just insanely lucky moment, got this job. I get to Apple in the summer of 1992 and I have a laundry list of things that I would like to do to make the Finder more usable. I remember sitting in Ron's office and saying, "At the grocery store, when you're carrying bags of groceries out, the door's automatically open for you? I think the Finder should do the same thing. When you're dragging an icon around and you want to put it in a folder, you should be able to hover maybe over the folder icons and drill down into the file system to get to where you're going. thing. When you're dragging an icon around and you want to put it in a folder, you should be able to hover maybe over the folder icons and drill down into the file system to get to where you're going. Then when you drop the file, all of the folders that opened up between you and your source and your destination would close for you." Ron thought that was a fine idea, so that was the way Apple worked in those days. I just went off and started coding that up. I got to the point late one night, two in the morning at Apple, no one else was there, where I needed some kind of animation to indicate that the folder was about to open. I'm certainly not an animator and I certainly wasn't going to do anything thoughtful in the middle of the night. I just wrote some code that blinked the folder, like selected unselected, selected unselected five times and thought, oh, I'll email one of the really talented visual designers to do something much more interesting. Long story short, apple finally shipped that feature four years later. Sat in the source code repository forever while we did other things. When it shipped four years later, it blinked five times. Roll the clock forward six or seven years, Mac plus 10 comes out, entirely new Finder rewritten from scratch. No spring-loaded folders anywhere to be seen. People complained about it. It got re-implemented. All of the code, brand new. Folder blinks five times when you hover over it. Roll the clock forward another decade, IOS comes along and they added folders. When you drag an icon around, it blinks a few times. I'm not sure what the point of this story is other than maybe it's something about, I think we all do this as designers and product people. We take these shortcuts that we think that we'll go back later and clean up. Sometimes, it's literally been 30 years that little design detail lingers three implementations later and now it's just a part of the way that these Apple products work. Pretty bizarre. As you were talking, I'm on a Mac right now recording this and I just did it just to make sure it's still there and it is indeed still there. I think it blinks three times and then just opens up for you.…

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