Meet the genius behind key Apple designs

Get a free e-book about the man who brought iOS and macOS to life.

Author

Leander Kahney
August 21, 2023

Interface designer Bas Ording worked at Apple for 15 years, designing key parts of the software you and I use every day on our Macs and iPhones.

In fact, a demo he created of the “rubber band” effect — the bouncing animation when you scroll to the end of a page — was the light-bulb moment for Steve Jobs that launched the iPhone.

You can read all about Ording’s career at Apple in Unsung Apple Hero, a new $9.99 e-book (available here on Apple Books).

Learn how Steve Jobs bullied Ording into taking a job at Apple when the company appeared to be going down the pan; how Ording created key interface elements like Exposé and the Dock magnification effect; and what it was like working intimately with Jobs.

As a newsletter subscriber, you can download a free copy of Unsung Apple Hero here.

Also in today’s newsletter:

  • I’ve been on a documentaries tear recently. I loved Tour de France: Unchained and Thai Cave Rescue, a six-parter about saving a kids’ soccer team from a flooded cavern, both on Netflix. But Apple TV+ serves up its share of great documentaries, too, and is especially strong on music documentaries — like innovative director Todd Haynes’ The Velvet Underground. Check out our lineup of the best documentaries on Apple TV+.

  • For the first time, your iPhone 15 will likely come with a color-matching USB-C cable (unless you always buy white iPhones).

  • If you need a big fat power bank to charge every Apple device you own (simultaneously), this 25,000mAh monster may be for you.

  • Lurking deep in your Mac’s Applications and Utilities folders are six very handy apps you may not be familiar with.

— Leander Kahney, EIC.

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Sign up for our newsletters, get free e-book about key Apple designer

Interface designer Bas Ording is one of those little-known Apple employees who has had a huge influence on our digital lives.

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One more thing ...

❝

Object-oriented programming — they had it all running back in 1979. And networking. They had several hundred Altos hooked up with network printing, network file service, email, all in 1979. If I just stayed for another 20 minutes!

— Steve Jobs on Xerox Parc, 1997.

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