„The Pogue Feature“
iPhoneOS 2.0 enthielt im Sommer 2008 die Möglichkeit Bildschirmfotos anzufertigen. Deshalb.
And it’s funny because, like, in certain tertiary ways, I was a character in the Apple story. And this one did not make it in the book, and I’ve never told this story in public, but the way you take a screenshot on the iPhone—press two buttons—internally, they call that the „Pogue Feature.“ And I’ll tell you why.
In 2007, I was writing the first iPhone Missing Manual, a how-to book about the iPhone, and there was no way to create screenshots with the original iPhone.
And so I contacted Apple PR and said, „You have screenshots in your ads, in your documentation. You must have a way to take screenshots.“ And they’re like, „Well, yes, we have a—a very, you know, not-polished-looking internal tool that we use.“ And I’m like, „Can I have it for this book, so it looks good?“ And they went all the way up to Steve, and the answer was no.
They said, „You can fly to Cupertino, and you can sit in a conference room here under supervision and use our tool to take your screenshots.“ I’m like, „Okay, great. I’ll book my flight.“ And then two days later they said, „Steve’s changed his mind. You can’t use the tool at all, but we will set aside an engineer.
„If you describe exactly every screenshot you want—you know, ‚this is a spreadsheet, in the first column, it’s revenue’—you know, describe exactly what you want, we’ll have this engineer make the screenshots for you.“ So this poor slob, whom I’ve never identified, spent the entire summer taking 400 screenshots. For this book.
So then, cut to—and they were beautiful, and they worked out great. But then cut to a year later, the second annual iPhone comes out, and I called Apple PR. They’re like, „No. No. We are not doing that. We’re not giving you an engineer for the whole summer.
We will put in a feature built into the iPhone. You press these two buttons, and you take a screenshot.“ So that is with us today on every iPhone, and that was for David Pogue.