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A lot of these UI ideas (unified inbox, the cards & gestures for multitasking, etc.) were taken straight from Palm WebOS. Palm called the unified messaging "Syn
by cmrdporcupine 3y ago
A lot of these UI ideas (unified inbox, the cards & gestures for multitasking, etc.) were taken straight from Palm WebOS. Palm called the unified messaging "Synergy" and it applied to calendars, chat, and emails; the OS provided a unified API for all such products to work together and it worked pretty well for the time.
I suspect app developers aren't really a fan of this as half the reason they're building such a tool is to have a branded environment to capture your attention in....
Of course WebOS also died in an ignoble fashion as BB10. Its UI DNA does live on at Google in some ways though as the head of UX at Palm (Mathias Duarte) eventually became VP of design at Google. When Android & iOS eventually rolled out multitasking gestures it looked a lot like WebOS.
- lproven 3y agoThat's interesting -- I was only vaguely aware of that. The deal that nearly happened between PalmSource and Symbian when Palm was moving to Arm processors is one of the great might-have-beens of the IT industry. Symbian was a superb OS, with a choice of UIs not of which matched its greatness. Palm had a very good, widely-loved UI, but a poor kernel underneath. The combination could have been industry-beating, but the deal never completed. Now Symbian is FOSS but nobody cares, and PalmOS is buried inside Access Corp, never to be seen again. I think WebOS survives as the UI of some LG smart TVs...
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoThe WebOS UI in the LG TVs doesn't have much connection to the phone OS's UI at this point, though it's from the same code base originally, yes. From my understanding, same idea of building apps in an HTML/JS stack, and using some of the original SDK.