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'."

Comments

Re:Science or Fiction

[Zarquil]

And then we can discuss the Dvorak keyboard which is generally considered quicker to learn, quicker to type with, and much more comfortable on the wrists.

It makes more sense with the vowels together at left home and the common consonants on the right. Many professional writers make quite a fuss over the Dvorak keyboard if they hold a preference.

QWERTY is difficult to use and understand compared with other alternatives. We shouldn't stop improving simply because of inertia.

(No, I don't use the Dvorak keyboard myself. I jump between keyboards too often and I've been afraid of how difficult it would be to transition constantly between mine and someone else's. I should be less hypocritical in my life.)

- Zarq

Re:UI of Kirk's Enterprise

[t_allardyce]

I just love the way enterprise has the same scope thing, you have to wonder what it is that just cant be displayed on a monitor, especially since they always seem to give readings like they were reading off numbers.

Re:I've asked that question online.

[bill_mcgonigle]

Obviously from a TV point of view that realistic a use of comm links would have slowed down the show.

Just think of it as how they squeeze a multi-day plot line into 42 minutes. They cut out the boring parts. :)

Re:Lapel phone?

[bill_mcgonigle]

How did the lapel button ever figure out that a communication "Picard to Crusher" would go to either the doctor or her son

Maybe in the 23rd century they still have addresses books with a nickname field. Picard has his setup with "Crusher" for Dr. Beverly Crusher. "Ensign Crusher", and "Wesley Crusher" don't need a special nickname - they're just LDAP lookups. The o= defaults to the current ship.