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When Francisco Tolmasky was just 20 years old and started working for Apple, he took on a challenging task: to create a rich mobile web browser for the original iPhone, back when the device was still a pile of circuits.

On top of that, Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief, regularly met with Mr. Tolmasky to give feedback.

“Steve was really adamant, where he said, ‘This needs to be like magic. Go back, this isn’t magical enough!’” Mr. Tolmasky said about his experience developing the mobile Safari app. “I remember being very frustrated. This was, like, an impossible task.”

But Mr. Tolmasky eventually helped produce an Internet browser that could load web pages just like they looked on a computer, but shrunk down for a small phone screen. And instead of using a mouse and keyboard, people could interact with the web pages with their fingertips — a pinch, swipe or tap.

After the iPhone became mainstream, many of Apple’s competitors quickly came up with smartphones with smarter web browsers, too. And over all, Apple’s mobile Safari, which was expanded for the iPad, has had a major influence on how modern websites are designed today.

Mr. Tolmasky, now 29 and living in San Francisco, is an independent entrepreneur making mobile games. After leaving Apple in December 2007, he founded a start-up called 280 North, which created a tool kit for writing mobile web apps. Eventually the start-up was sold to Motorola for around $20 million.

Though it is uncommon for Apple employees, past or present, to speak up about their experience working for the secretive corporation, Mr. Tolmasky agreed to an interview to talk about his new game, Bonsai Slice, which was released Thursday, and to share his experience working for Apple. His story offers a rare window into the company’s start-up-like product development.

Mr. Tolmasky was first contacted by Apple when he was six months away from graduating with a computer science degree from the University of Southern California. An Apple recruiter had noticed Mr. Tolmasky because he was part of a then-tiny community of web developers who tinkered with WebKit, a software engine used by browsers to display web pages.

Apple wanted Mr. Tolmasky to start right away, but he opted to finish school. When he was officially supposed to start working at Apple in the first quarter of 2006, Mr. Jobs was taking a monthlong vacation, so Mr. Tolmasky had to wait for him to return to give his personal blessing for the hiring.

“He was super guarded about the project, and he was probably suspicious of some random 20-year-old,” Mr. Tolmasky said.

Mr. Tolmasky and the iPhone team worked in a secluded area of Apple’s campus. There were two main divisions of the secretive project: The hardware team and the software team, both of which were physically separated and did not work together directly, to help prevent secrets from leaking out. Mr. Jobs met with the team at least twice a week.

The software team was split up into a web team and an apps team. Mr. Tolmasky’s team, the web team, consisted of five people for a long time. (The naming of those subgroups turned out to be awkward, because several people on the web team ended up working on apps for the iPhone; and some of the people on the apps team had to rely on some web technologies.)

“Each one of these things is basically one person,” said Mr. Tolmasky, while tapping his finger on some of the app icons on the packaging for the first iPhone. While all members of the software team worked together on the many different software elements on the original iPhone before it shipped, each piece had a person leading it. Mr. Tolmasky said he was the point man on mobile Safari.

He told how several of the iPhone’s apps and key features came to be created. The keyboard, he said, was the result of a sort of hackathon run by Mr. Jobs. The chief executive had been unhappy with the keyboard prototypes for the iPhone, so he assigned everyone on the team to work only on keyboards for an entire week. An engineer on Mr. Tolmasky’s team won the contest, and from then on his full-time job was to work on the iPhone keyboard.

Mr. Tolmasky also reflected on the creation of the crucial maps app for the first iPhone. A lesser-known story was that Mr. Jobs decided he wanted a maps app on the iPhone only a few weeks before the smartphone was introduced at Macworld Expo in January 2007. Another of Mr. Tolmasky’s teammates, Chris Blumenberg, was given the task, and worked nonstop until there was a functional maps app for the presentation.

“Within a week he had something that was working, and in two weeks he had something to show at Macworld that we were showing,” Mr. Tolmasky said. “That was the kind of effect Steve could have on you: This is important, this needs to happen, and you do it.”

Mr. Jobs was notorious for throwing his weight around however he could. One person on the iPhone design team was also named Steve, which caused some confusion in meetings. Mr. Jobs sought to change this.

“At some point Steve Jobs got really frustrated with this and said ‘Guess what, you’re Margaret from now on,’” Mr. Tolmasky said. From there on, members of the team would always address the designer Steve as Margaret.

Mr. Tolmasky said he left Apple in late 2007 because by then, the iPhone had become such a success that the team had to grow and priorities changed. It no longer felt like a start-up, so he left to start his own.

Now Mr. Tolmasky says he is focusing on games that take advantage of the smart sensors, like the accelerometer and gyroscope, inside mobile devices. His game, Bonsai Slice, developed with a team of five people, involves swinging around an iPad like a sword, to cut through virtual objects on the screen.

That could, of course, raise concerns about physically whacking others in the room.

“We’ve been pleasantly surprised with how little people hit each other with it,” he said. “It ends up being much more of a finesse game. You’re being very careful when you play it.”