Slashdot Mirror
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.
Grafitti.
I was so used to it, I caught myself using it on a whiteboard one time.
Man, talk about a burst of nostalgia.
My last Palm device was a Treo 650. Before that, I was firmly a PDA user because I didn't want to pay extra for unlimited data when I could use bluetooth and have it billed against my voice plan on Verizon. Boy, those were the days!
This was all through school. While I was of a nerdier persuasion, between gameboy, nes, and SNES emulators and an assortment of movies on my get this: 1GB SD card that I paid $60 for, people thought I was cool in a sort of Ferris Bueller type of way.
Handheld devices were so exciting, new, unique, and not an everyday gadget that most people had. I started with a Sony Cleo, migrated to a Tungsten E, fell in love with a Tapwave Zodiac, and then was seduced by the ever more and more compelling hardware devices on the Windows Mobile side.
Dell's Axim x50v was my first, followed by an x51v that I got Dell to replace for free out of warranty (hehe). Had a Treo 650 for a long time and then I got the nifty HTC xv6700 followed by the even more powerful xv6800. Tried another Windows Mobile phone and got fed up with it.
I went to a Blackberry after that and held out for as long as I could until Moto's Droid 4 got me into Android. Switched back to Blackberry and i've been using a Keyone ever since.
I had a really bad warranty experience with Blackberry and I think it's time I just go out and find a no name, keyboardless, boring candy bar smartphone off of ebay for $200. It was hard to justify the expense on my Keyone and the level of BS I went through to get it serviced wasn't worth being Blackberry's CS b!tch again.
Sigh, those were the days. This must be what car enthusiasts must have felt when cars started becoming computerized monstrosities. Yeah, technology marches on, things become streamlined,and cheaper but you lose the excitement and enthusiasm.
A lament of a bored hardware nerd.
Everybody in this industry copies ideas from everybody else, we already know this and it has been the case for forever. Apple is not some great inventor of ideas to be called out when they have the audacity to implement a concept that somebody else already implemented. Their original idea of what multitasking should be like was rubbish, so they copied the way that Windows Phone did it and that's a good thing. The control center was a copy of what Android was doing and that's a good thing otherwise you end up with shitty implementations purely as a result of NIH syndrome. Likewise these products copied concepts that Apple came up with.
Are people really surprised to find out that many of the features being introduced in this industry have been done before? Yes webOS was a decent operating system (and so was Maemo and Meego and Windows Phone and FirefoxOS, etc) but it wasn't successful because the things that made them good weren't disruptive and compelling enough to make people abandon their existing platform. "Oooh you close an app by swiping up on its 'card' instead of pressing the little 'x' on its app icon"...it's nice to have but it isn't going to convince people to switch.
That wasn't the only thing Apple was suing Samsung over, and that specific item was certainly a reach, but at the time Samsung had done almost no UI development on their own, taking instead the route of copying just about everything from iOS upon entry. Apple lit up every gun they had and good for them. If you're going to whine about it, look at how a handful of the leaders of Samsung, as well as the President of South Korea, just went to jail for corruption and embezzlement. Those are the people Apple was fighting with. Anyone who argued for Samsung in that case must also argue for Zynga every time they mercilessly cloned Indie games and flooded the markets with them.
Break down story paragraphs like so:
WebOS was a really cool OS, that had lots of neat features and ran JavaScript apps.
WebOS was built on Linux, and if you're knowledgeable, you can update it.
WebOS had a feature that permitted the user to switch apps by swiping up from the bottom of the screen to see the backgrounded apps. (Note: Android already has a similar feature, accessed by the square icon at screen bottom)
Apple is going to do something similar, so they must be copying from WebOS, and that validates how advanced WebOS was.
If Apple were going to start supporting js apps, you might have a case, otherwise not... There are only 4 sides to the screen too, top is notifications, sides for switching desktop screens, so that only leaves the bottom...which they picked... Coincidence?