With a slew of novel features, Apple’s 2007 introduction of the first iPhone completely upended the market. However, there were some capabilities that Apple initially omitted from the first iPhone, one of which being the ability to cut, copy and paste text. Now, former Apple engineer Ken Kocienda, who is the inventor of iPhone autocorrect, has explained why the feature was not included.
“The original iPhone didn’t have cut/copy/paste. Infamous! The quickest explanation is that I didn’t have time to do it right. I had too much keyboard, autocorrection, and text system work to do. The design team didn’t have time either. So we passed on the feature for 1.0,” wrote Ken Kocienda.
Ken Kocienda, who became a member of the Apple team in 2001, and he served as the lead engineer on the original iPhone, shared many other interesting details about the “original iPhone”. He said it had no virtual memory.
“Some folks came up with a system named “jetsam”. Since we only showed one app at a time, we terminated background programs when memory got low. Those programs would relaunch rather than resume when brought back to the front,” he wrote.
“Since there was no tactile feedback on the touchscreen, some folks came up with the idea of “charging” a button. This meant that the active area for a button could be bigger than its graphical bounds.”
He also wrote: “Entering accented characters in text couldn’t be done as it was on desktop and laptop keyboards, so a colleague and I came up with the idea to tap and hold to get a menu of accented variants for that key/character.”
Ken Kocienda thinks the home button is a “great idea”. “One hardware button on the front of the device. Press it to go home. What a great idea!” he wrote.
“About the keyboard, it was impossible to hit within the bounds of the keyboard rectangle and miss a key. You always got one. My reasoning was that if you touched the screen, something should happen.”
Ken Kocienda shared an interesting take on the touchscreen technology. Have a look:
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