Francisco Tolmasky is the name of the employee Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), who in 2006-2007 worked on the development of the mobile version of the browser Safari, the one that would end up in iOS. speech in an interview given to the New York Times, Tolmasky says that Steve Jobs was initially suspicious about his employment, the former CEO Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), trying to protect the project from possible spies sent by competing companies. Temporarily employed by Apple, Tolmasky claims that the keyboard Safari it was the result of a hackathon organized by Steve Jobs, but of course he was unhappy with it, so the whole Safari development team had to make keyboards for a week, Francisco managing to produce the best version, being then permanent employee at Apple.
He was super guarded about the project, and he was probably suspicious of some random 20-year-old. I remember being very frustrated. This was, like, an impossible task. The keyboard, he said, was the result of a sort of hackathon run by Mr. Jobs. The chief executive had been unhappy with the keyboard prototypes for the iPhone, so he assigned everyone on the team to work only on keyboards for an entire week. An engineer on Mr. Tolmasky's team won the contest, and from then on his full-time job was to work on the iPhone keyboard.
Solving the Safari problems, the new employee immediately found out how persuasive Steve Jobs can be and how well he manages to motivate his employees to develop exactly what he needs in the time period he imposes. In this idea, the Maps application was developed in just two weeks and was presented by Jobs at Macworld. Furthermore, the former engineer talks about the personality of Steve Jobs and how he led the meetings of the team developing the iPhone, additional details being available in the article from the New York Times.
Within a week he had something that was working, and in two weeks he had something to show at Macworld that we were showing, That was the kind of effect Steve could have on you: This is important, this needs to happen, and you do it. Mr. Jobs was notorious for throwing his weight around however he could. One person on the iPhone design team was also named Steve, which caused some confusion in meetings. Mr. Jobs sought to change this. "At some point Steve Jobs got really frustrated with this and said 'Guess what, you're Margaret from now on,'" Mr. Tolmasky said. From there on, members of the team would always address the designer Steve as Margaret.
Leaving the Apple company, Tolmasky was the co-founder of a start-up that was purchased by Motorola for the sum of 20 million dollars, his company producing an interesting game dedicated to mobile terminals.
