dunstanorchard

I would I have tried that. Presumably it either didn't look as good, or there was something about the bad-word checker that required me to run it server-side. Maybe we didn't want a list of rude words sitting around in a .js file for anyone to look at. I don't recall, but whatever the reasons the imagemagick solution worked best for us.

Apple was a very segmented company back then (I've no idea what it's like now) and the online store had three groups that contributed to it: my team, which designed the pages; an engineering team, which took our designs and transformed them into WebObject templates that ran the site; and a content team, which controlled the database that spat out the images and prices.

I did my work in HTML/CSS/JS (and some PHP for the imagemagick stuff in this case), which the engineering team then had to adjust to fit the code their templates could output.

I don't recall much detail about how WebObjects was viewed. I do remember that at the time the store used a version of WebObjects that could only run on old hardware, so there was an impending deadline for a total re-write before the hardware stopped being available. I've no idea if they did that rewrite or swapped to a different system altogether.

I got hired to do it. The internet was quite small back then, and some people on the team read my blog and knew what kind of things I might do for them. It was a very fortunate time to be a creative web developer wanting to work at interesting places. Today is a nightmare in comparison.

I’ve always been happy I left when I did. It was the right thing for me at that time and it led to a great adventure and a new set of friends.

It was very exciting to work at Apple. In one way it felt like I was at the center of the creative world (despite not being in the hardware or software division). But the interesting _web_ stuff was all happening elsewhere. Stewart Butterfield kindly kept asking me to join the Flickr team, and eventually the pull of that outweighed the allure of Apple.

I spent the next four and a half years at Flickr and it was foundational to the rest of my working life. The people I was lucky enough to be around and learn from there were extraordinary, and the environment and opportunities were second to none.

In retrospect another six months at Apple, further taking advantage of their employee stock purchase program, would have been life changing. Shares were about $7 each back then after the discount. But you do what you think is right at the time, and I'm grateful for every moment I got to spent in Cupertino.

The demo is taken from the archive of my work back then, so it’s all true to that period.

On my site it shows a static background image just to give the demo something contextual to play against. On the actual site the page was obviously all live HTML.

That’s my site. I’d be happy to answer any questions you might have about it.