Kevin Lynch

Steve Jobs personally tried to recruit Kevin Lynch to Apple after the big Flash debate in 2010. Lynch, of course, was Adobe's chief technology officer at the time and had just went head-to-head with Apple CEO Steve Jobs over Flash and iOS. Apple later hired Lynch away from Adobe in 2013, giving him the title VP of Technology and a project that would later become the Apple Watch. Lynch is one of the world's preeminent software developers and technology innovators. His work has included leadership on some of the most influential software development efforts over the past 25 years at companies, including Apple, Adobe Systems, Macromedia, General Magic, and Frame. Lynch, as a student at the University of Illinois at Chicago, helped create Mac3D, the first 2D+3D drawing application for the Mac, and then went on to create advanced desktop publishing software that was licensed to WordStar. His innovation combined word processing, drawing and page layout, as well as the first directly editable property inspectors in the GUI and a page layout pane that could be directly manipulated. Kevin M. Lynch received Honorary Degree of Doctor of Engineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2017.