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Is Apple Copying Palm's WebOS? (salon.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Salon: Released in 2009 by Palm -- the same company that popularized the PDA in the 1990s -- WebOS pioneered a number of innovations, including multiple synchronized calendars, unified social media and contact management, curved displays, wireless charging, integrated text and Web messaging, and unintrusive notifications [that have all been copied by the mobile operating systems that defeated it on the marketplace]. The operating system, built on top of a Linux kernel, was also legendary for how easily it could be upgraded by users with programming skills. WebOS was also special in that it used native internet technologies like JavaScript for local applications. That was a huge part of why it was able to do so much integration with Web services, something its competitors at the time simply couldn't match.
Apple's upcoming iOS 11 once again demonstrates how far ahead of its time WebOS really was. The yet-to-be-released Apple mobile system has essentially copied the WebOS model for switching apps by having the user swipe upward from the bottom to reveal several "cards" that represent background applications. While Apple's decision to remove its massively overworked Home button is an improvement, it is still an inferior way of switching apps, compared to what you could do on WebOS eight years ago.
Apple's upcoming iOS 11 once again demonstrates how far ahead of its time WebOS really was. The yet-to-be-released Apple mobile system has essentially copied the WebOS model for switching apps by having the user swipe upward from the bottom to reveal several "cards" that represent background applications. While Apple's decision to remove its massively overworked Home button is an improvement, it is still an inferior way of switching apps, compared to what you could do on WebOS eight years ago.
This is a non-story. iOS has supported switching between background apps via cards for several years already, and supported it via a slightly different interface prior to that. I think it's been around since iOS 4 in some form or fashion.
The only thing that's different now is that they once again tweaked the UI slightly and made it so that it appears via a different gesture than before (right now, you can either double-tap the Home button or four-finger pinch to bring up the app switcher, depending on how your settings are configured and which iOS device you're on).
Even Blackberry did this in the playbook and that's getting on a bit. Swipe from the edges, the screen turned into sliding set of cards and you could flip to another app or flick one away to close it.
Not to mention all those ridiculous "Stop quitting your apps!" articles going around lately chastising users for force quitting apps.
Yeah sure in iOS 3.0 or whatever the default was to immediately quit all apps when exiting to the home screen, always freeing the memory up for the next app. Not anymore, many apps like Trulia, Facebook, Twitter abuse backgrounding APIs to keep their apps always active even if you kill them and turn off their background update permissions. They may be using scheduled events to relaunch themselves and keep a constant presence in your device memory. It is no longer possible to tell which apps are truly closed and ejected from memory.
Users sense this in slow app load times and general sluggishness, which reboots temporarily fix. Whether it's Apple or app makers faults, the end result is user hostile and increasing frustration. But yeah, lets chastise the users for killing apps when they can see the speed differences themselves.
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Apple copied LG Prada and other phones
Which where only released after the iPhone was announced. Cool trick.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.