Aside from Xerox, what large company has originated a UI paradigm or OS? Apple b...

philwelch · on Feb 10, 2011

Apple bought the multi-touch stuff

I didn't know that they bought or licensed the entire UI paradigm from someone else. Or do you just mean the low level parts? Because there's more to a UI paradigm than the input device. So, if it's just the screen tech that Apple bought and not the interaction software, I would count multi-touch as an Apple-originated UI paradigm, just as you credit the desktop GUI to Xerox, not Stanford Research Institute where Engelbart invented the mouse.

Also, the iPod scroll wheel is an Apple-originated UI paradigm.

seabee · on Feb 10, 2011

Well count yourself wrong: http://www.amazon.com/Fingerworks-IGESTURENUMPAD-iGesture-Pa...

That thing even let you switch between apps with gestures.

The iPod scroll wheel isn't an Apple paradigm either; jog dials for menu selection existed years before the iPod. I remember seeing it on the minidisc recorder in our school's music department.

philwelch · on Feb 10, 2011

That's not even a touchscreen. It's a trackpad with multitouch gestures designed for use with a desktop-based GUI on a PC. How is that equivalent to the iOS UI paradigm? That's like saying a mouse is equivalent to a Xerox Alto.

on Feb 10, 2011

[deleted]

philwelch · on Feb 10, 2011

Of course; Fingerworks developed the input device, Apple developed the UI paradigm. There's more to a UI paradigm than the input device. How many times do I have to say this?

jasonkester · on Feb 10, 2011

Yeah, the rotating jog wheels on VCRs were the inspiration, but the touch wheel itself was pure awesome.

Don't forget, other companies were still scrambling to find a legal way to clone it right up until the day when Apple released the iPhone.

ugh · on Feb 10, 2011

Multi touch is not even the most important part of the iOS UI. It could have been done without it.

nooneelse · on Feb 10, 2011

The most important part of the user experience that multi touch input enables might just be an onscreen keyboard that doesn't suck by being frustratingly slow and/or error prone. Requiring the user to only ever be touching the screen location of one key at a time slows the user down. And when the inevitable happens, i.e. the user is touching two on-screen keys at once, to take the average (which lots of older single-touch screens did) is not acceptable for text entry.

rahoulb · on Feb 10, 2011

Disagree. Apple paid Xerox for the GUI (in shares) but then added a number of elements we consider an integral part of the GUI.

Xerox had overlapping windows, a mouse, networking and Smalltalk.

Apple lost the network and Smalltalk (later to reappear as Appletalk and Obj-C) but added icons, pull-down menus and the desktop metaphor.

podperson · on Feb 14, 2011

Xerox didn't "invent" the GUI any more than Apple did. (Xerox got its ideas from Englebart et al.) Apple's desktop UI was "original" insofar as anything is. Windows (and for that matter NeXT) pointedly was not. Similarly Newton had a complete and "original" UI. Then there's iOS.

Apple's track record here is pretty darn good.

jacabado · on Feb 10, 2011

Nokia S60?

Blackberry for mobile texting?

We're past them now but we still see lots of bad UIs that could learn with their success. I'm thinking about the heterogeneous button layouts on Android and previous generation Windows Mobile devices.