Former Apple engineer Ken Kochienda tells the story behind the development of iPhone software. A part of the contents is taken up by the tech media “9to5Mac”.
*Category：technology Technology｜*Source：9to5Mac ,@kociendaSamz222
iPhone software development was a series of difficulties
Kochienda, who joined Apple in 2001, is one of the key engineers behind the iPhone. Prior to developing the iPhone, he was on the team that developed Apple’s web browser, Safari, and played an important role in the development of the original iPhone.
Apple announced the first iPhone about 15 years ago, but it had far fewer features than the current one. The old iPhone didn’t even have a “copy and paste” feature.
◇ Copy and paste to iPhone “did not make it in time”
According to Kochienda, the lack of copy-and-paste capabilities on the original iPhone is simply straightforward: the engineer didn’t have enough time to implement it in time. Of course, that’s not all, and why Apple struggled to develop this feature.
First, he said, the team was already busy developing the iPhone’s virtual keyboard and autocorrect system. It wasn’t until the first iPhone was released that Kochienda and his team were able to work on the development of the copy and paste feature.
However, its development was not easy either. Mr. Kochienda came up with the idea of ”a loupe that enlarges characters” to let the user know the exact position of the important text cursor when copying and pasting. However, when the user lifts his finger off the screen, he touches the screen and the cursor moves between characters.
Therefore, it was necessary to develop a “touch history log” just for text editing. That way, after you take your finger off the screen, it automatically detects the position of the user’s finger a few milliseconds after the last touch, leaving the cursor where the user really wants it.
Another interesting thing about the iPhone’s text input system is that all styled text was based on WebKit. WebKit is a general term for a group of open source HTML rendering engines developed mainly by Apple.
This meant that every time the application used a custom font, a small web page was displayed to render the text. When the text wasn’t in edit mode, a still image of its contents was displayed to save CPU, RAM, and battery.
The copy and paste feature was introduced as part of iPhone OS 3.0 in 2009 and is pre-installed on iPhone 3GS by default. At the time, Apple even created a television ad that appealed to this new feature.
◇ Ingenuity to familiarize users with touch operations
Kochienda talks a few more about the development of the original iPhone. According to him, touchscreen devices weren’t widespread at the time, so the iPhone development team implemented a virtual area larger than the buttons displayed on the interface. That’s why we made it possible for the iPhone to recognize touches even if the user didn’t touch the buttons exactly on the screen.
The curvature of your fingers makes you think you’re touching higher up the the screen than you are. So, touches are warped to account for this. That’s why—to this day—it’s hard to target taps when you hold your phone upside down. pic.twitter.com/xl8YaxvKKu
— Ken Kocienda (@kocienda) June 19, 2022
The system also plays an important role in the keyboard’s AutoCorrect feature, which identifies the characters around the character tapped by the user and replaces the misspelled word with the correct character. Also, according to Mr. Kochienda, the user felt that “the place where he is touching with his finger is different from the place where he is actually touching”, so adjustments for that were necessary.
