John Maeda

You're less important because they were working with scarce materials.

I think what's interesting about this era is that this idea of taste doesn't fit when all the materials are available to everyone.

I mean, it's all about the leader, right?

You mentioned Steve Jobs, a unique combination of design, business, technical sense.

That's very rare.

And I want to go back to Paul's stuff, but not to embarrass him again.

So what's interesting about Impeccable is the design is very interesting.

from the API perspective.

And Bill Atkinson, the engineer who recently passed away, who worked on the Macintosh, specifically, people may know this thing called Quickdraw, which was Apple's graphics library.

Photoshop happened because of the design of Quickdraw's API.

It was impossible for there to be a Windows version of Photoshop because it didn't have the same API shape in DirectX.

So I would argue that Paul, design engineers are able to design the shape of the APIs really well.

So they can work with agents as well as they can with humans.

Oh, my gosh.

So the Macintosh quick draw had this routine built upon this idea of regions.

Everyone had polygons.

The Mac had regions based on pixel shapes, which you could, like, do logical set or and.

And so things like flood fill were super-duper optimized for speed.

So, again, great APIs are not just shape, but performance.

So on that topic, I had a, I was having dinner like last week.