Your older Palm device was almost certainly much worse at browsing the web both in fidelity and interactivity. Loading a full desktop website on a device that small and being able to pinch to zoom in to sections was pretty novel at the time.
Yeah arguably the biggest innovation the iPhone had was the capacitive touch screen - they weren't the first (that was the LG Prada) and the various interactions like pinch zooming and inertial scrolling were done before, but they did have a 2004 patent on capacitive multi-touch screens.
Yeah as I recall it, the iPhone was the first device where touch felt really natural and fun. They nailed that feeling that you’re actually interacting directly with what is under your finger. Previous touch devices I tried felt kind of disconnected because they hadn’t sweated the details in the same way.
but this discussion always has the tendency to go completely off teh rails because there are so many people unable to talk rationally about apple products.
innovation basically never happens in a vacuum, and especially apple products have historically "come second" into a product category -- and just nail the implementation so well that they just felt great to use.
(and yes, smartphones were well established by the time the iphone was released. thats what i'd call the product category there. dialing in to ever narrower definitions to make it into a "new" category is exactly the reason why this can never be settled - because you can call _every_ product a new product category like that)
So now we got endless discussions about "who was first" even though its completely meaningless to ask this question -- because that "previous product" also took inspiration from other products, and if you squinted enough, could also be called "just an iteration" vs a "innovation".
It’s not really a different narrative, though: They started with the idea that the phone should be nearly all screen (which was very controversial at the time) and designed the software around that. No one had a UI or UX that was as fully committed to this idea as the iPhone, although they certainly got inspiration from others.
You’re right that Apple isn’t usually a first mover within a product segment. But that have a tendency to nail what they consider to be a better execution of that product.
I'm so glad someone else remembers and values their contributions here.
That full package of capacitive touch, a UI and UX optimised for touch, inertial scrolling with pinch and zoom came together to form something much greater than the sum of the individual parts: an experience that could convince you to part with physical buttons
Also I think it took me almost a decade to find a touch keyboard (fleksy) I liked as much as the iOS keyboard. I think people also take for granted how far ahead their quiet innovations in the touch keyboard were without fanfare.
The ones in 2007 were unusable, the original android ones were terrible and I didn't much like swiftkey. Google Keyboard came much later but lacked some of the smoothing and tappiness of the Apple one
To put out something that is opinionated, one needs to risk others being critical of their opinions. People who are always worried about having the “right” opinions will rarely risk stepping out and doing something different.
So all the safe boring stuff that gets released is just a defense mechanism, where people avoid going too far in and direction to avoid being accused of having bad taste. Ironically, this creates its own lack of taste. This lack of taste is usually just ignored as boring, rather than attacked, so it feels safer.
Apple has used this kind of blurry resizing animation in the past. For example, circa macOS 10.14 Mojave resizing windows in Split View would have the same effect: https://youtu.be/KDDMUxBtnkI
current view transition stack on ios was built for static transition between two well know layouts, like portrait to landscape rotation change. i would like live reflow too but i suspect 99% of existing apps aren’t ready to reflow at 120hz when they’ve been written around tween(start layout, end layout) style for decades
UIKit apps can already resize fluidly on Mac Catalyst and iPadOS. I suspect the issue here is more related to the video encoding / streaming used for iPhone Mirroring.
Wow seriously? To me it looks like a throwback to Windows 95 lightweight settings or some lightweight WM of the early 2000s like Fluxbox/OpenBox which didn't implement proper resizing to save on resources.
Until recently TDC had a very slow FCDO satellite link that required their website to be quite basic in order to actually be viewable on computers on the island.
They now have a fast Starlink connection, but I’m glad they’ve kept the website as it is.
Parallels and VMware still do implement their own graphics virtualisation (among other things) for Windows and Linux guests on Apple silicon, and in my experience Parallels still works better than the alternatives for Windows.
Yet ASML is always cited as a great Europe great achievement, but it's hardly ever mentioned that without American's EUV research and patents, and without Cymer there would be no AMSL as we known of.
In all honesty I believe ASML's success is mostly their own. Still, lamenting "being bought up by foreign countries" is a lame excuse.
Without Google’s funding its not obvious i DeepMind would have went anywhere.
Unless the moved to US for funding while keeping a back office in the UK.
It’s strange to expect anything significant to come out from Europe when VCs there are either very risk averse and/or don’t have enough cash to begin with. It’s not like government or EU funding can replace that since its almost always wasted or missdirected
It’s a company containing such remarkable talent that I’m sure they would not have run into significant issues raising capital on international markets.
It’s not like VCs are only allowed to invest in companies in their own country.
Usually to maximize its funding the company would move its HQ to the US and if they are lucky have an IPO there and eventually become effectively American after a few years (e.g. Unity)
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