Jacob Farkas

The screenshot functionality was there since before 1.0, but only on internal builds. SpringBoard took ownership after my original patch so I'm not familiar with the rest of the story until Pogue managed to get screenshots enabled in the public builds. Before they added it to a public release they changed the gesture from home+ringer switch to home+volume up button. 8/8

The next day I went in to work, pulled the source code for SpringBoard, and wrote some code to grab a screenshot on the phone. I needed a way to trigger the screenshot that wouldn’t happen by accident so I picked a home button press and a ringer switch change happening at the same time. I saved the photo to the camera roll and I think I triggered the camera shutter noise for fun. 6/8

I didn't work on SpringBoard but it was essentially just one guy writing it, so I messaged him about it. I wrote a Radar and attached my patch, and I think it was merged into the iPhone builds within a week (things moved incredibly fast back then!) Since screenshots were just for engineers to do bug reports (and because I knew almost nothing about SpringBoard or UI code) I put all my code inside a compiler flag for internal builds only. 7/8

Back in early 2007 the iPhone had been announced but not yet released. The phone was under strict lockdown and we weren’t even allowed to use them on Apple campus outside of the few small lockdown areas. Steve Jobs of course started carrying his everywhere not long after the MacWorld announcement, and other execs followed not long after. 2/8

One day in spring 2007 it was my turn to get carry permissions. I was allowed to take an iPhone home for the first time and I was really excited. I remember going home and using my iPhone and then quickly finding a UI bug in the weather app. 4/8

In the office I would have connected my phone to my work desktop and run an internal tool to grab a screenshot (which is what Pogue is talking about) but at home I had no way to grab a screenshot. I was allowed to carry the phone but I couldn’t bring code or development tools outside the lockdown so I had no way to capture this bug. 5/8

They quickly found all kinds of problems with things like wifi, and they realized that the phone would benefit from a lot more real world testing. They started a “carry list” of people with permissions to take iPhones outside of the lockdown areas. It started with the VPs and top level managers on the project but eventually spread to most all of the engineers working on the iPhone. 3/8

I just realized @modenaboy is on here, but he probably doesn’t check this account. Thanks for letting me know about this video!

@timonus you’re right! It used to be home + lock

@enhancedscurry hahaha I remember that being my exact thought when I first saw the bug