Former Apple UI Designer Bas Ording Now at Tesla

Thom Holwerda, writing for OS News back in June 2014:

After about 15 years at the company as User Interface Designer, he left about a year ago for unknown reasons - until now. Speaking at a conference here in The Netherlands, and noted by Emerce (via Tweakers), Ording explains that he decided to leave Apple because he was fed up with having to appear in court.

“Because my name is listed on patents, I increasingly had to appear in court cases versus HTC and Samsung,” he said, “That started to annoy me. I spent more time in court than designing. Aside from that, I missed the interaction with Steve Jobs. We discussed matters every fourteen days.”

In March 2015, Ording joined Tesla as a user interface designer. I missed this back when it happened, but now it’s starting to look like part of a trend. Tesla seems to be poaching more good people from Apple than Apple is from Tesla.

Here’s a good 2014 piece by Luke Dormehl at Cult of Mac on Ording’s role in the creation of iOS’s text selection and copy-paste interface.

★ Monday, 23 January 2017