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“I was disappointed that the iPhone wasn’t... a phone that ran Mac software.” What? I admire Dave Winer’s idealism, but really?! Would anyone else enjoy using

“I was disappointed that the iPhone wasn’t... a phone that ran Mac software.” What? I admire Dave Winer’s idealism, but really?! Would anyone else enjoy using the full Mac OS X interface on the iPhone? (Ignoring the iPhone’s performance and power limitations, which negate this possibility.) Does he really want a phone to run applications that were designed for much larger screens, with mice and keyboards? If you know how to write a Mac app, it’s not a terrible leap to write an iPhone app. If you want compatibility with Mac apps, look for iPhone apps like OmniFocus, Things, &c. that have been retooled for a mobile use case. If anything, the iPad comes closest in this regard, with some of it’s near-desktop-class apps, e.g. iWork, OmniGraphSketcher, OmniFocus, OmniGraffle, &c.

earcar 16y ago
Exactly. The touch paradigm is completely different than the mouse and keyboard one, phone usage patterns are completely different than that of a Mac, the distance from the screen is different, proportions are all different... Imagine looking at a Mac application, that has to be displayed in ultra high resolution in a small phone, in direct sun or while running and trying to click that 3x3 millimeters button to close the window. An application's phone interface has to be different than the desktop one, and since there is no programmatic way to adapt the desktop interface to the phone, it has to be rethought and then reimplemented.