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When your customers are nerds like you, I think engineers do fine.

I should qualify it somewhat though — I mean I was, for a spell, working on the ColorSync framework. So the "customer" was also an engineer using our API.

At the same time, when I worked on Preview initially I added features that I wanted and I think it dovetailed what users wanted. I am also a user I rationalized.

Further, many of the old timers like myself, were hung up on Tog and his Human Interface Guidelines. We would argue over lunch the Right way to handle UI for a specific feature, etc.

Jobs comes along and with Design at his side, and they decide that the address field in Safari should also be a progress bar (that appears to select the text as it loads?). Some poor engineer was told then to implement that. (I hated what I came to call one-off UI.)




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