iOS home screen's simplicity "is Apple's innovation"
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 20th Feb 2013 09:04 UTC
Apple John Gruber illustrates the dangers of not having a clue about history: "The utter simplicity of the iOS home screen is Apple's innovation. It's the simplest, most obvious 'system' ever designed." Thanks for playing.
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henderson101
Member since:
2006-05-30

They are within the framework of Apple fanboy logic, where "popularise" == "invent".


No, no, no. "invent" == "innovate" in your usage. Please look up the difference if you are unaware. If you listen to any Apple keynote or read Apple Propaganda/copy, they never claim to "invent" anything there is a definite prior art for. I'd go as far as saying they never use the word "invent", but I can't be 100% sure about that, so I won't make up facts.

Devices running the Newton OSes don't count because they were spectacular failures as commercial products


If that was true, a lot of later Palm devices (i.e. most of the late Garnet and almost all of the WebOS) are also in that category. As are most of the early Microsoft Windows CE devices and the later 6.5 ones, and all of the Windows Phone 7 and even all the Meego based phones (and the other Maemo devices.) In fact, there are plenty of devices that exist today in a cult like status, even though they were extremely unpopular at the time of manufacture (Vectrex, NeoGeo MVS both spring to mind, and the PCEngine/TurboGrafx in Europe - as it was never released here.)


and the fact that Newton devices were unpopular automatically means that they were crap. And obviously Palm wouldn't have taken inspiration from a pathetic failure like Newton, so all of PalmOS' features must have been created completely-independently & any similarity with Newton is clearly just a coincidence.


I dunno. The Newton reached cult status, and when I was on the "scene", there was still a lot of development going on (maybe 4 or 5 years ago) and the later Newtons were going for stupid money ($200+ for a 10 year old PDA is pretty ridiculous.)

Not nearly as sad as the fact iOS is still playing catch up... to the old PalmOS, half a decade after it was discontinued. Sad in a pathetic kind of way, that is.


I'm not sure they are.

.... figured out how to rationalize-away Apple's flip-flop over 7" tablets? Or are you just using the strategy of "if we never bring it up, then maybe people will just forget"?


Humans are fallible. I guess "Android first", "GoogleTV everwhere" and "Windows Phone dominating", or really anything else out of Balmer's mouth in interviews, proves all of that.

Yes, it was superior to iOS in every way (except to the "durrrr, there's an app for that, durrrr" chimps) & only lost out because it was developed by a company that was already circling the drain, then sold to a company managed by special education drop-outs.


Sorry, no it wasn't. The API was cute, but it was hard to write any real apps for until they released a native SDK, because with all the will in the world, native without native you can't leverage all of the third party libraries available and make performance king.

But hey, I hear webOS is Open Sores now. Maybe Apple could warm over the remains and then take credit for it, just like they did with the corpse of NeXT. They could call it "iOS Pro"...


*sigh* Flame bait aside, WebOS is a slow OS that requires quite fast hardware and a lot of optimisation to run well. The fact that the Palm guys proved this by porting the WebOS tablet stack to iOS and making it run "better" was pretty telling. Basically, you completely missed the *real* reason Palm failed with WebOS, and the reason they would have failed again - even if another company had bought them. Their initial hardware was slow and underpowered. There you go.

The sad thing is that you don't even seem to understand what happened with Nextstep and Openstep. It's still alive and well. It runs on ARM and PC, as well as PowerPC. It's now called Mac OS X and iOS. It's the same underlying OS, same underlying API's and well, had Apple not bought Next Inc, it would be a largely forgotten now.

Reply Parent Score: 2

zima Member since:
2005-07-06

Nextstep and Openstep. It's still alive and well. It runs on ARM and PC, as well as PowerPC. It's now called Mac OS X and iOS. It's the same underlying OS, same underlying API's and well, had Apple not bought Next Inc, it would be a largely forgotten now.

I think Nextstep is largely forgotten - only us ~geeks know it morphed into OSX.

Had Apple not bought Next Inc, ~geeks would still remember it (by the virtue of www being bootstrapped on a Nextcube)

Reply Parent Score: 2