★★★★☆ (as a book)
★★★☆☆ (for the purposes of this blog)

There are as many books about Steve Jobs as there were Quadra models, but they focus mostly on two phases:

• 1955–1985 – Steve Jobs befriending Wozniak, the early days of Apple, Lisa, and the Mac
• 1997–2011 – Steve Jobs’s “second act” at Apple, and the creation of the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and so on

Steve Jobs in Exile by Geoffrey Cain is a just-released, rare volume that focuses on the “in-between years” – starting with Steve Jobs founding NeXT and Pixar after his Apple ouster, and ending with him coming back to Apple under the absolutely strangest of circumstances. It’s a doubly interesting phase, both because we see Jobs maturing as a leader and actually learning from his many mistakes, and because the early technical NeXT decisions eventually became underpinnings for modern macOS and iOS.

I do not see this as a book of new immense insight, technical depth, or design details, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t go beyond surface level. What I appreciated most was Cain not shying away from pointing at some of Steve Jobs’s mistakes: hiring wrong people he happened to like, almost driving the company to the ground through obstinance, inability to focus on things he considered uninteresting, and a profound dose of duplicity coming into the NeXT/​Apple merger.

Other things that stood out: focus on people around Jobs, spotlight on Jobs’s disappointing moral flexibility around working with government (or befriending Larry Ellison, for that matter), and a really fun pizza ordering story that serves as a prelude to the Starbucks call during the iPhone 2007 keynote.

Some learnings:

• Craft and taste alone are not enough; you can spend your talents and energy on things that don’t “matter” given some definition of the word. That could be okay if that’s a choice you make – “impact” is ill-defined and often overrated, anyway – but you need to approach it clear-eyed, which Jobs didn’t initially know how to do.
• Confidence, like everything, needs to be practiced, and focused, and influenced back by feedback and reactions. (Witness the negotiating acumen of a certain Jean-Louis Gassée!)
• It’s really hard to create a culture of hard and honest and deep conversations that’s also not a culture of abuse and toxicity.

The one thing I didn’t like about the book was that the few photos inside are only perfunctory; there’s a lot of chatter about a beautiful, symbolic NeXT lobby staircase, top-of-the-landline phones, and expensive chairs, but we never get to see them. Many of the photos are by Doug Menuez – which you can also see online – but the problem is that those photos are generally not that interesting.

That aside, it’s still a breezy and entertaining read that filled in some gaps and provoked new thoughts.

Column view cut its teeth on NeXT computers…

…and blossomed on early versions of Mac OS X…

…but where I thought it really shone was the first iPods:

This was perhaps the most fun you could ever have navigating a hierarchy of things; it made sense what left/​right/up/down meant in this universe, to a point you could easily build a mental model of what goes where, even if your viewport was smaller than ever.

It was also a close-to-ideal union of software and hardware, admirable in its simplicity and attention to detail. This is where Apple practiced momentum curves, haptics (via a tiny speaker, doing haptic-like clicks), and handling touch programmatically (only the first iPod had a physically rotating wheel, later replaced by stationary touch-sensitive surfaces) – all necessary to make iPhone’s eventual multi-touch so successful. And, iPhone embraced column views wholesale, for everything from the Music app (obvi), through Notes, to Settings.

Well, sometimes you don’t appreciate something until it’s taken away. Here are settings in the iOS version of Google Maps:

I am not sure why the designers chose to deviate from the standard, replacing a clear Y/X relationship with a more confusing Y/Z-that-looks-very-much-like-Y. They kept the chevrons hinting at the original orientation – and they probably had to, as vertical chevrons have a different connotation, but perhaps this was the warning sign right here not to change things.

I think the principle is, in general: if you’re reinventing something well-established, both of your reasoning and your execution have to be really, really solid. I don’t think this has happened here. (Other Google apps seem to use standard column view model.)

A few thoughts after reading Gruber’s take on Finder and its new auto-sizing columns:

1.
Column view as a concept and when done well deserves to be in the UI hall of fame. It flew and still can fly high in the Finder, and it was the unsung hero of both the iPod and the iPhone. It’s really fun to fire up NeXTSTEP 0.8 in Infinite Mac and see its first incarnation.

2.
Apple decided not to ship the auto-sizing columns a few years ago, hiding it under a “defaults write” incantation as a sort of a beta, but then seemingly just launched it this year without any changes. There are some charitable explanations – perhaps the beta was hard crashing Finder and the released one no longer does? – but in the current zeitgeist I’m feeling that it’s something more like this: the people with taste who were stopping it from getting launched in the bad state were either sidelined or are no longer there.

3.
And it is a bad state. It’s a first draft made public. Like anyone who deals with layouts learns over time, things like this one need careful min and max widths to have certain good pleasing and stable visual rhythm. They might even need a scale or a grid on top. And the fact that the width accommodates only visible objects doesn’t seem to make sense.The top hand doesn’t know what the bottom hand is doing, and it feels the feature is incompatible with itself.

This feels like an old Unix windowing feature, a sketch of an idea for GUI nerds who get excited about just the cool concept alone, ignoring the execution. Although, to be fair – this is opt-in and buried as the last checkbox inside a pretty obscure window. This might still be GUI nerd territory.

4.
So Apple really did think we’re going to love Liquid Glass, huh?