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I'll never forget the crowd going bananas when Steve Jobs showed that you could scroll on the iPhone by just dragging the list with a finger, or zoom a map/webs

I'll never forget the crowd going bananas when Steve Jobs showed that you could scroll on the iPhone by just dragging the list with a finger, or zoom a map/website with two fingers. Smartphones weren't new, but one where you didn't have to rely on buttons or an input pen on a terrible resistive touchscreen on the other hand was a big improvement. I still miss phones with qwerty keyboards but not the UIs before the iPhone.

vidarh 3y ago
The touch certainly was a big issue. I think gestures would've been less of an issue vs. getting decent capacitative touch instead of those horrible resistive screens. This is the one I worked on then: https://linuxdevices.org/freepad-norways-alternative-to-swedens-screen-phone-a/ https://linuxdevices.org/freepad-norways-alternative-to-swed... The screenshots you see are real (the phone dialler even has the name of one of the employees up...). The GUI was NanoX, which is still around (and despite the name it's not an X11 server, but has partial X11 source-level compatibility; we built our own toolkit for it). And even that, of course, was a testament to the limitations - we picked NanoX and writing our own toolkit not because we wanted to but because fitting an actual X11 server cost too much in terms of extra RAM and flash. It added many months of engineering. Fun months, but time that'd have been better spent on more applications. I still love that project, but the hardware limitations gimped it so painfully.