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Star Trek's Design Influence On Palm, New Tech
kevcol writes "The San Francisco Chronicle has a fun article describing how many of the inventions of Star Trek have made early appearances, 2 centuries ahead of Captain Kirk's time. They talk with one of Palm's UI designers, who admits that '...my first sketches were influenced by the UI of the Enterprise bridge panels', and also notes: 'When we designed the first Treo... it had a form factor similar to the communicators in the original series. It had a speakerphone mode so you could stand there and talk into it like Capt. Kirk'."
The UI of star trek (at least TNG and onwards) has been horrible. A bunch of numbered buttons with lines going in virtually random directions to displays of other grouped buttons that don't seem to make any sense as to why they are grouped... They look pretty, but there is no way someone would lay out an interface like that and use it daily...
Don't take my word for it, do some googling for actual set shots of the UI... it's upsettingly poorly designed.
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Seriously. I think I'd buy a new wireless phone in a heartbeat, if it was modeled after the classic trek communicator. I fail to understand why Paramount hasn't licensed this to Motorola yet.
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I don't think so, but I am convinced that watching Star Trek is 90% of the reason I got my latest cell phone, which is a flip phone. If I could only find some Star Trek ring tones. . .
Seriously, Paramount is sitting on a goldmine here. Someone ought to license that. There are enough of us Geeks floating around that whoever came out with at ST:TOS style cell phone would probably make decent money on it.