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A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

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Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#121

Post by SimHacker »

nirvana wrote: post #86
corin_ wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about the ability to put them together, it's about deciding what to put together, when to do it, how to market it and of course a big part: what software to put on it. I'd never say " all Apple do is" about this, just that it is what they do, and they do it better than anyone else.

Except that the major parts- like a touch oriented UI- don't exist until Apple develops them. And having seen them, other companies can't replicate them well at all because they don't do the research. Calling them a lego assembler ignores all the real innovation they do.

Oh bullshit. We were doing finger operated gesture user interface on the Palm in 2000 (pie menus on virtual buttons for consumer electronic IR remote control interfaces). Lots of people were using touch screens with finger gestures. The Palm included a stylus, but if the interface was designed correctly you could certainly use it with your fingers, and pie menus (self revealing gestures) worked just fine, and there is lots of older prior art and research about touch screen pie menus and gestures.

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#122

Post by protomyth »

varelse wrote: post #22

And the Atari Jaguar was both the first 64-bit videogame console and the first videogame console with a GPU. But history is written by the victors... And never mind the Atari STylus demoed in 1991... Never happened...

Uhm, no. The Atari Jaguar was a 32-bit with a 64-bit bus to memory not 64-bit addressing or registers. It would not be counted as a 64-bit processor particularly since it used a 68000 and its GPU was 32-bit.

The Amiga CD32 beat it to market by a month. I would argue the whole Atari game line based on the 400/800 should count, but others peg the Amiga as the first with a GPU.

GO Corporation was formed in 1987 and can be read about in the book "Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure". Atari was a little late to the game.

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#123

Post by mbell »

slantyyz wrote: post #98
mbell wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that it didn't work as a 'smartphone' at all. It couldn't connect to blackberry's e-mail server, it couldn't connect to exchange, it couldn't send an MMS, it couldn't multitask or run background apps, it couldn't copy-paste. The iPhone was completely incapable of replacing existing smartphones for quite some time. It took blackberry's monopoly on 'push' e-mail dying and several updates to iOS before it…

>> couldn't connect to blackberry's e-mail server >> it couldn't connect to exchange >> it couldn't send an MMS Didn't realize those were "must-haves" for a smartphone (an enterprise smartphone, maybe), because I never did that with any of my Windows Phones prior to getting an iPhone. I used my Windows Phone for my consulting work, by the way. >> it couldn't multitask or run background apps That's a double edged swor…

> Didn't realize those were "must-haves" for a smartphone (an enterprise smartphone, maybe), because I never did that with any of my Windows Phones prior to getting an iPhone. I used my Windows Phone for my consulting work, by the way.

The _vast_ majority of the smartphone market at the time was enterprise. The consumer smartphone business didn't exist in any significant way. I had a Wmobile phone and didn't use exchange either, however you and I were an extremely small minority. Apple's inovation was changing that, opening up a real consumer smartphone market.

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#124

Post by eropple »

nirvana wrote: post #111
antidoh wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"a touch oriented UI- don't exist until Apple develops them." Hmmm. I'm still using my Palm Centro phone, which used to be a Treo, which used to be a Palm PDA, which used to be a Palm Pilot. All of those have a touch oriented UI, and most if not all of them pre-date iPhone by years. So now I guess we can watch the debate about whether Newton or its competitors pre-date each other.

None of those have a touch based UI. Touch means finger touches. Very different from a stylus which is only touching one or two pixels at a time. This is very easy to sense because the stylus pushes two layers together physically and effectively is closing swithces. A touch is much difeferent, a finger is an amorphous blob over many pixels of a varying shape, and Apple had to figure out how to resolve that into a sin…

None of those have a touch based UI. Touch means finger touches.

This is dishonestly revisionist, given how common it was to see people thumbing through applications on Palm devices. That Palms came with styluses doesn't mean that they weren't touch-friendly in a lot of ways, and that should be taken into account.

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#125

Post by RegEx »

flatline3 wrote: post #27
w1ntermute wrote: post #16

This entire trial was a farce. The jury foreman admitted that they "skipped" prior art because "It was bogging us down."[0] > "Once you determine that Samsung violated the patents," Ilagan said, "it's easy to just go down those different [Samsung] products because it was all the same. Like the trade dress, once you determine Samsung violated the trade dress, the flatscreen with the Bezel...then you go down the produc…

The groklaw quotes were taken out of context. As far as I can tell, there's no evidence from those quotes that they skipped prior art, so much as skipped the task to move forward on others before circling back around to it. > I don't like to think of Apple as a pure innovator - I think of them more as an assembler. When they see a market in which all the hardware pieces are available and waiting to be put together, t…

> Sigh. I'm sick and tired of people twisting reality to fit an Apple anti-hero narrative.

It'd be disingenuous to claim that no subsets of people, on HN and elsewhere, twist reality to fit an Apple hero narrative. Looks like people just have different points of view.

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#127

Post by slantyyz »

mbell wrote: post #123
slantyyz wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> couldn't connect to blackberry's e-mail server >> it couldn't connect to exchange >> it couldn't send an MMS Didn't realize those were "must-haves" for a smartphone (an enterprise smartphone, maybe), because I never did that with any of my Windows Phones prior to getting an iPhone. I used my Windows Phone for my consulting work, by the way. >> it couldn't multitask or run background apps That's a double edged swor…

> Didn't realize those were "must-haves" for a smartphone (an enterprise smartphone, maybe), because I never did that with any of my Windows Phones prior to getting an iPhone. I used my Windows Phone for my consulting work, by the way. The _vast_ majority of the smartphone market at the time was enterprise. The consumer smartphone business didn't exist in any significant way. I had a Wmobile phone and didn't use exch…

Now that you bring it up, an interesting observation on my peer circle pre-iPhone:

All the enterprise users I knew had Blackberries. Everyone else I knew bought their own Windows Phones (and some Palm users) and most did not use Exchange. So maybe it could be argued that to some degree, Windows Phones were the only equivalent to a "consumer" smartphone at the time.

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#128

Post by corin_ »

nirvana wrote: post #111
antidoh wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"a touch oriented UI- don't exist until Apple develops them." Hmmm. I'm still using my Palm Centro phone, which used to be a Treo, which used to be a Palm PDA, which used to be a Palm Pilot. All of those have a touch oriented UI, and most if not all of them pre-date iPhone by years. So now I guess we can watch the debate about whether Newton or its competitors pre-date each other.

None of those have a touch based UI. Touch means finger touches. Very different from a stylus which is only touching one or two pixels at a time. This is very easy to sense because the stylus pushes two layers together physically and effectively is closing swithces. A touch is much difeferent, a finger is an amorphous blob over many pixels of a varying shape, and Apple had to figure out how to resolve that into a sin…

> Touch means finger touches.

According to who, you? Feel free to argue around the technological improvements Apple have brought, but to argue that everything everybody has always called "touchscreen" isn't that... makes no sense.

And even by your strange definition of a "touch based UI", were Apple the first company to create capacitive touch screens? Hell, I don't think they were even the first to create phones using them, if I remember correctly LG beat them to it with the Prada? Not to mention how many people used Palms etc. using their fingers rather than a stylus.

As to working out how to ignore stuff like knuckles touching the screen... wonderful, I'm sure Apple did a great job in this area. I haven't used enough devices to really have an opinion of whether they were the first to perfect this, but it's irrelevant. Nobody is claiming Apple haven't done some stuff better than other companies - but even if you can definitively say that they created the first really good touch based UI, that's not the same as creating the first touch based UI.

You know what I expect from HN? Civilised discussion. All I've seen from you is rudeness, arrogance and a holier-than-thou attitude that could be summed up by the last part of your profile description.

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#129

Post by georgemcbay »

nirvana wrote: post #86
corin_ wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about the ability to put them together, it's about deciding what to put together, when to do it, how to market it and of course a big part: what software to put on it. I'd never say " all Apple do is" about this, just that it is what they do, and they do it better than anyone else.

Except that the major parts- like a touch oriented UI- don't exist until Apple develops them. And having seen them, other companies can't replicate them well at all because they don't do the research. Calling them a lego assembler ignores all the real innovation they do.

Microsoft developed the "old" Surface (now called PixelSense) at the same time Apple was working on the iPhone. Both were released in very early 2007 after years of R&D work. Both had multitouch UIs of the type you seem to think are so innovative. Both arrived at these solutions at the same time because the wide availability of capacitive touchscreens (which neither MS nor Apple invented, mind you -- capacitive and multitouch tech was being done in lab environments back in the late-70s/early-80s by CERN, Bell Labs and others) made such UIs an obvious next step to anyone paying attention to the field.

Apple made billions off the iPhone while MS made peanuts off the Surface solely because of how each tried to bring their respective takes on the product to market. I give Apple all the credit in the world for knowing how to package technology up for mainstream use and bring it in at a price point the masses can afford, while Microsoft was dicking around with giant table size systems (primarily because being burned by the stylus-touch tablet market early, they had stupidly convinced themselves that general consumers didn't want touch at all) but you're totally wrong about this tech being completely innovative and non-existing before Apple came down from the mountain and presented it to us, because that isn't how it went down at all.

For someone who seems to have so little grasp on the real history behind all this stuff you should be careful about calling other HN readers out as you do in a post below this one.

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#130

Post by gergles »

sjwright wrote: post #43
dreamdu5t wrote: post #36

"Intellectual property" is an oxymoron and the laws are a farce. Information is not property. Property has no objective foundation if you decouple it from tangible or economic scarcity. Samsung stole no property from Apple. Samsung was providing value to the market by responding to the market's demands that were exposed by Apple. The existence of patents distorts economic incentives to divert activity towards patenta…

It sounds like your problem is with the law, not Apple.

This is farcical reasoning. Apple chose to sue Samsung. They could have not sued them. Therefore, the problem is with Apple, who chose to be the aggressor in a bullshit rounded rectangle lawsuit.
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