| I was also once dissed by Steve Jobs at a keynote! Back when widgets first came out for OS X I was in college and was beginning to learn programming. I was sill very bad, but these widgets interested me because they were essentially just little HTML/CSS/JS webpages. I looked around and saw there was no widget for CNN news. CNN had RSS feeds of their news, I found some other widget that displayed an RSS feed and basically just plugged this new data source in and it worked! Next I just restyled it to look like it the CNN website which at the time was light blue and pretty ugly, but I made this widget to match. I released it, and it got some downloads! Months later at the WWDC keynote, I was watching live and I saw Steve sit down at the demo computer and show off some widgets on the big screen. The CNN widget I made was there on screen at the keynote! I didn't believe it at first, I was in shock. Next though, when he showed my widget his only comment was that "it's not as nice looking as [some other news widget] but it gets the job done." Ouch! Not only was Steve Jobs personally aware of a piece of software I (kind of) wrote but he demoed it at WWDC! But he also said it looked pretty bad... And he was right, it did. Shortly after this I restyled the widget to look nice on its own, regardless of what the CNN website actually looked like. While this stung, it was a good design lesson to learn. Thanks Steve! |