> Incremental search was a great idea, but it's like Jef bet the farm on that one idea. Incremental search was a headline feature, but it was far from the only

> Incremental search was a great idea, but it's like Jef bet the farm on that one idea. Incremental search was a headline feature, but it was far from the only novel idea. Among others, Raskin also removed the notion of files with separate lifecycles on disk and in memory. Rather than presenting files, the Canon Cat worked by offering workspaces that were persistently stored on a floppy disk. Take a workspace disk to a Cat and the entire workspace state is available to you without worrying about loading specific files, etc. He also took a minimalist approach to the application suite. Rather than switching between multiple fixed function apps, he extended the core word processor app with calculator, terminal, and programming capabilities. In an era where mass-market PC's only really ran a single fixed function app at a time, this was a huge step forward. > I find it incredible that it used to take getting a machine manufactured en masse to push out a UI idea like this. In one sense, it didn't. There was also the SwyftCard, which brought similar concepts to an Apple ][ expansion card. You view that in the context of a mid-80's ecosystem that also had the likes of TopView, Windows, GEOS and the like, and there was a great deal of contemporary prior art to the notion that it did not take a new machine to introduce a new UI concept. Having said that, there is a sense in which it did take hardware to introduce a new UI concept. Maybe the best semi-current parallel is the original Apple iPhone. Running iOS on a contemporary Windows CE mobile phone would not have produced the same level of experience - there were aspects of the Apple hardware design that were very important to the overall experience. So it was with the Cat also. The notion of a machine that booted off a single disk into a complete workspace state is one example, but so is the keyboard. (Which included not only the specific Leap keys, but also front labels on the keys for specific functions and a "Use Front" key that selected those operations. > Now we can emulate any idea you want to try in a web browser, emulator, etc.... As long as it fits into the hardware you have available. Just as a counterpoint, I can emulate Castelvania Symphony of the Night on my iPhone, but it's a comparatively terrible experience to play using a flat touch screen instead of a normal controller. The software is there, but the experience is not.