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Samsung Reinvents Windows (Not the OS) With Touchscreen Display
An anonymous reader writes "If you want a large, interactive display on your wall, typically you have to make space for it by moving any pictures out of the way, and finding room next to any shelves or lighting you have installed. Samsung's idea is to remove that problem by creating a transparent display that replaces an actual window, or at least sit over the top of one. The display uses ambient light during the day and then can switch over to a more traditional black background as a night time mode. If you want to shut the daylight out it has virtual blinds you can draw to help darken a room. And from the outside you just like you are tapping your window as none of the graphics can be seen. Yes, your neighbors will talk."
The window itself is seriously awesome. But the weather app is a direct rip-off of OS X's weather widget. There's seriously no other way to design a weather app but how Apple did in 2005?
Never change, Samsung.
The Apple Weather app looks like the weather presentation has looked when PRINTED in different Swedish NEWSPAPERS from cirka 1980 (ever since Swedish newspapers started to be printed in colour). Similar weather presentations was used by Swedish Television when it was still broadcasted in monochrome; Sweden switched to colour TV broadcasts in 1970. I'm not claiming it is a Swedish invention, this kind of weather display may have been used and invented in some other country/-ies decades before it become common in Swedish media. I'm just pointing out that there is a much larger and diverse world outside the boarders of the country you live in.
Just because some "innovation" is brought to the publics attention by some company in USA, that doesn't mean that company invited it. Most (all?) US companies are copycats by nature (and Apple in particular is a pure copyist), usually decades behind how stuff is done in other countries (and usually the US consumer has less to choose from when it comes to different gadgets doing the same thing, differently, US companies like to standardise on one way for a consumer product to work, to avoid that their consumer will get confused (like early automobiles steered by reins), while most companies operatinh outside USA take for granted that their consumers are intelligent enough to understand that different products might achieve the same end result, even if they need to be handled/interpreted differently). Unlike companies in other countries, US companies like to imply that they invented the things they market, even when they didn't. Because the US population like to live in isolation from the (scary/insignificant/...) world outside USA (when was the last time you visited a foreign website? one that was not in English?), US companies can get away with this kind of shenanigans without getting caught.
The display looks like it's running the Enlightenment window manager. Samsung is a known, perhaps the biggest, sponsor of the Enlightenment project, which they probably use in some hardware already shipping now.