I got one of the first sidekicks when they first came out and got into mobile development through it since it was really easy to get a developer key. With SK2 they made it a lot more difficult for no real reason and myself and a number of hobbyists I knew moved away from them.
The Forgotten Sidekick
11–20 of 29 posts
Re: The Forgotten Sidekick
#12This applies just as much to the iPad. Tablets have been out for forever, and some of them have even been well made only to be ABANDONED by the makers. It's been blisteringly obvious for a decade that tablets are the future of mobile computing. The real lesson here is that marketing and sales matter. Apple, as a company, rarely invents new things. Rather it executes on old ideas that other companies failed to execute…
tablets with finger input? with a dedicated OS built around that UI? really? i've worked with stuff from HP, Lenovo, all using Windows Tablet edition. NOTHING came even near the iPad in usability. fucking booting that thing? field force users HATED these crapfests. the tablet notebook pc is dead, the industry is switching in droves to the iPad. not nerds, business people. Android will catch up, the HP PalmOS stuff lo…
The iPad is just a tablet that doesn't suck.
Just like the Sidekick:iPhone relationship, there were a few tablets that didn't suck too much, but the parent companies tended to hamstring them. They would stop supporting them, they wouldn't do proper marketing, and basically they would constantly trip over their own feet. Suits were calling them dead before they even had a chance to be born. It wasn't a technology failure it was a business failure. Hence, Steve Jobs to the rescue.
Re: The Forgotten Sidekick
#13I carried and developed for the Sidekick since the SK1 days. Most people really don't realize just how capable those devices were for their time, and still to this day how they had some super neat features. It is no coincidence that the same team members were involved with Android and WebOS. Some of the things that were amazing: - totally proxied IM support, across AIM, MSN and Yahoo chat. (they never got to Google)…
> They did so much right, but in the end they couldn't survive the paradigm shift of touchscreen
Or being bought out by Microsoft.
Re: The Forgotten Sidekick
#14I carried and developed for the Sidekick since the SK1 days. Most people really don't realize just how capable those devices were for their time, and still to this day how they had some super neat features. It is no coincidence that the same team members were involved with Android and WebOS. Some of the things that were amazing: - totally proxied IM support, across AIM, MSN and Yahoo chat. (they never got to Google)…
> Everybody had a Sidekick username, and your app could send a packet of information to any other Sidekick as long as you knew their username. That was guaranteed to be delivered and guaranteed to be delivered in sequence. Made all sorts of neat social / sharing apps dead simple to write.
Telepathy offers the same API over various backends (via Tubes - http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/Tubes). Telepathy is already heavily used in Gnome and some apps are starting to use Tubes (http://people.collabora.co.uk/~cassidy/talks/TelepathicDeskt...).
Re: The Forgotten Sidekick
#15I carried and developed for the Sidekick since the SK1 days. Most people really don't realize just how capable those devices were for their time, and still to this day how they had some super neat features. It is no coincidence that the same team members were involved with Android and WebOS. Some of the things that were amazing: - totally proxied IM support, across AIM, MSN and Yahoo chat. (they never got to Google)…
> Everybody had a Sidekick username, and your app could send a packet of information to any other Sidekick as long as you knew their username. That was guaranteed to be delivered and guaranteed to be delivered in sequence. Made all sorts of neat social / sharing apps dead simple to write. Telepathy offers the same API over various backends (via Tubes - http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/Tubes ). Telepathy is alrea…
I am pretty sure that the vast majority of mobile phones do not support Telepathy. While your comment is interesting for people consider desktop Linux development, it is a bit off-topic in a discussion about mobile platforms.
Re: The Forgotten Sidekick
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
tablets with finger input? with a dedicated OS built around that UI? really? i've worked with stuff from HP, Lenovo, all using Windows Tablet edition. NOTHING came even near the iPad in usability. fucking booting that thing? field force users HATED these crapfests. the tablet notebook pc is dead, the industry is switching in droves to the iPad. not nerds, business people. Android will catch up, the HP PalmOS stuff lo…
The iPad is just a tablet that doesn't suck. Just like the Sidekick:iPhone relationship, there were a few tablets that didn't suck too much, but the parent companies tended to hamstring them. They would stop supporting them, they wouldn't do proper marketing, and basically they would constantly trip over their own feet. Suits were calling them dead before they even had a chance to be born. It wasn't a technology fail…
We've all heard/read stories of internal MS politicking that killed various projects/features that, on their own, would have been good/useful/great.
I can totally imagine that the same sorts of things happened at some of the larger manufacturers re: tablets. When you've got 6 variations of the same product line with various dept/division managers for each one, anything that might truly disrupt that is going to have a huge internal battle.
Apple probably has internal politics, but the way the product lines are developed insures there's a minimum of competition between them. That's just (imo) one of many distinctions between Apple success and the previous tablet mfg failures.
Re: The Forgotten Sidekick
#17This applies just as much to the iPad. Tablets have been out for forever, and some of them have even been well made only to be ABANDONED by the makers. It's been blisteringly obvious for a decade that tablets are the future of mobile computing. The real lesson here is that marketing and sales matter. Apple, as a company, rarely invents new things. Rather it executes on old ideas that other companies failed to execute…
Just an interesting sidenote, Apple is guilty of abandoning good products as well, especially in the tablet space. The Newton was very well designed, and the user community around it to this day is a testament to this fact.
Re: The Forgotten Sidekick
#18This applies just as much to the iPad. Tablets have been out for forever, and some of them have even been well made only to be ABANDONED by the makers. It's been blisteringly obvious for a decade that tablets are the future of mobile computing. The real lesson here is that marketing and sales matter. Apple, as a company, rarely invents new things. Rather it executes on old ideas that other companies failed to execute…
People tend to forget just how long tablets have been around. The first boom of pen driven tablet computing was in the very early 1990's – twenty years ago.
During that first boom, several operating systems were developed which were intended for exclusive pen or touch use. These include PenPoint OS, Magic Cap and Newton OS. Apple fans tend to remember Newton, but the other two are long forgotten.
Re: The Forgotten Sidekick
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Everybody had a Sidekick username, and your app could send a packet of information to any other Sidekick as long as you knew their username. That was guaranteed to be delivered and guaranteed to be delivered in sequence. Made all sorts of neat social / sharing apps dead simple to write. Telepathy offers the same API over various backends (via Tubes - http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/Tubes ). Telepathy is alrea…
I am pretty sure that the vast majority of mobile phones do not support Telepathy. While your comment is interesting for people consider desktop Linux development, it is a bit off-topic in a discussion about mobile platforms.
Maemo/MeeGo does, which means that a fair few Nokia phones and tablets do. I believe Sony's upcoming NGP will use Telepathy as well but I can't find a reference right now.
Regardless, my point was that the API has since been reproduced and is in wide use on non-mobile platforms, not that every mobile phone supports it.
Re: The Forgotten Sidekick
#20Am I the only one who started reading the article thinking of Borland's Sidekick?
Oh my... Guess I am really old.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SideKick)
edit: but it's interesting. When the iPhone was first shown, I had a Sony Ericsson P-800 phone. I wondered what was the big deal about Apple's gizmo.
And no other phone since got voice dialing as right as the SE...