Wil Shipley on changing the world with design
WIl Shipley is the main developer of a Mac app called Delicious Library. Apple's new iBooks app on the iPad uses many of the same interface design elements as Delicious Library, such as the wooden shelf books are placed upon.
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As a creator, part of what I seek is recognition, immortality. I don’t work for Apple or Google (I’ve been offered jobs & buyouts) because I want the fame myself. It’s my shot at immortality. My designs are my children. So it stinks when I feel like Steve might get the fame for my innovation. I lose my children, as it were.
But your children aren’t really yours. They have lives of their own. So when your designs do change the world, you have to accept it. You have to say, ‘Ok, this was such a good idea, other people took it and ran with it. I win.’
8 comments
But visually representing wooden shelves as something Apple might have taken from him? Definitely a bit of a stretch.
Sorry ;)
That's not to say that maybe Apple's app designers wouldn't have come up with a bookshelf on their own, too.
But I imagine that the app designers at Apple are very familiar with the most popular apps for OS X and the iPhone. Delicious Library is precisely one of those apps. In fact, many of those designers probably use Delicious Library. Hence, Shipley's app served as an impetus for the designers at Apple, who had likely seen it dozens of times already.
What's semi-frustrating here is that Apple didn't just buy Delicious Library, Microsoft- and Google-style. They could have let Shipley continue releasing Delicious Library, but also given him credit as designing a great system that they chose to incorporate into iBooks. That could have been even more of a win for them, when Jobs could have said: "Look at how much we love your apps. So much, in fact, that we even take time to find the best and foster them, and incorporate them into what we build & innovate every day." Developers would have had an insta-gasm.
On the other, other hand, people could have seen that as Apple being lazy, or becoming too conglomeratory. And given that Delicious Library doesn't have really more than one feature anyway (showing your products on a bookshelf), there wasn't enough for Apple to actually buy up.
I'm sure there are more angles than these, and un-finished thoughts that I'm just too lazy to keep following through.
