Joining Apple
I joined Apple in 2009. After spending almost a year at Apple Paris, waiting for my Visa, it was finally time to move to the U.S.
I learned so many things working in the minuscule macOS design team (we were 3!), all the important changes that happened in Lion, being part of the upscaling effort for macOS retina support, multiple refreshes of Aqua, the user interface, expanding the initial set of emojis, and more.
You can read these stories on Dribbble where they were originally posted if you prefer.
AirDrop
First is the AirDrop icon, which I had the pleasure to see projected on a gigantic screen behind Steve Jobs during a keynote. I’m still very proud of this icon and this feature, which is still used by people every day.
All My Files
Next is the All My Files application icon. This is actually the second version of the icon. The first version got me into some trouble because I had sneaked in some quotes from Steve, which were not approved. We had to ninja-edit the icon in the next beta 👀
More details are in a TUAW article about the first version of the icon.
Maps
The map application was a “Macification” of the iOS application icon. It was at the time of the “back to the mac” craze, but unlike some other apps like Game Center, we managed to make the Mac app really feel native to the system.
Since there were no good gestures on the Mac to tilt the map in 3D, rotate, etc, we had to come up with a cool little 3D compass that could achieve the same functionalities without relying on a multitouch input device. You can read more on the patent.
Sidenote, the original macOS Map application was almost entirely French made, from cartography, to client-side code, to UI, to app icon 😎
Messages
Not a huge story around Messages on the Mac. It was at the time we unified iChat with the “Message” app on iOS, while creating the iMessage service on top of both apps.
iChat had a blue bubble from the beginning, but the original SMS app on iOS had a green stripped background, which lead us to explore using a green striped bubble on the Mac. You can see how well it went in this tweet 😄
Applications
While working on the Mac App Store, we explored the idea of using the traditional pencil + brush + ruler icon, which has symbolized “Application” on macOS since forever.
I didn’t love the original rendering of the Cinema4D icon, so before trying to integrate it in the Mac App Store icon, I decided to clean it up and redraw it.
We ended up not using this concept in the final Mac App Store icon, but I still liked my new rendering. We almost put it in the OS, but ultimately, we changed the placeholder for apps without an icon to the one with the slanted paper, which is more inline with the Human Interface Guidelines.
