Reinventing How This Game Is Played - shimon http://daringfireball.net/2009/06/reinventing_how_this_game_is_played ====== derefr There's a lot of people out there who are basically saying that the idea of putting a tiny box over the entire bottom 1/5 of your computer screen that has a fixed-size window into the desktop is _dumb_ , and that this behavior should be an easy thing to implement in every app out there. Basically, people like this are re-inventing a window manager, by making all windows the size of a square, and with a mouse-wheel in the corner of the window to change their size. This is the fundamental idea (although, yes, they don't make the window into a square.) The behavior and user interface here is just as much an extension to a desktop metaphor, though, as OSX's "flipping" of windows or their app's docking is; it's just the user's new "Desktop" interface, but with the ability to "move" between the desktop elements. I actually think a lot of people are going to buy into this, because it's an "easy-to-use" interface that also, by necessity, removes _many_ of the most-used features of their desktop environments. People who re-invent a desktop environment have two major hurdles to overcome: getting the user onboarded onto the new paradigm, and getting the major app manufacturers to play along. The former has been done with varying degrees of success, while the latter would require a _huge_ amount of developer buy-in, and will be harder to get the adoption rate necessary. Remember that, in order for OSX's Aqua interface to work, developers had to _design_ their apps to play nice with it. With this method, you'd have to re-design your apps for iOS-like touch interfaces _and_ to work in a "window" as the user has seen in OSX for _years_ now. So, good for them, I guess—I'm sure it will generate a huge revenue stream. And, of course, they're going to open-source the basic work so that, in the future, this "concept" of window frames and icons can be used as the basis of _any_ graphical interface. That's pretty good thinking for taking a completely new interface concept and turning it into a revenue stream. Good, unfortunately. ~~~ jshen I'll second your sentiments on the user buy in. Most users are used to a cursor and clicking stuff. On that basis, this is a fairly poor interface. It really boils down to what the users need and want from an interface, and that is not changing anytime soon. While these guys can make some serious cash by creating the initial version of a completely new standard, they're going to soon discover that this is the market they are in. ------ kls First, I want to give all the credit to the creators of the Aqua interface for making some great UI patterns for developers. It is what drove them to where they are today and they deserve a lot of praise. But this is the kind of stuff that Apple got really good at doing, reinventing software paradigms. They are not alone in this, Microsoft has historically been good at reinventing software paradigms and doing it more times than anyone, however, Microsoft does a lot of the same things as Apple and with far less innovation. There is something interesting about watching Apple rip off another company strategy and innovate on top of it. We do not see that a lot from Microsoft. Microsoft is a great example of what happens to large companies that stagnate and are not able to keep innovating in the wake of a new paradigm shift. In order for them to reinvigorate they need to innovate, they can't simply rip off and copy, they have to be original, their competitors are innovators. As an aside, I recently purchased a Zune, for the first time in a few years I bought a music player. I got tired of iTunes and the Apple culture around music players, so I went out and did a bit of research and found that my hardware and usage matched that of the Zune, and then was curious as to how the product performed. I had not ever heard of Aqua, because I always buy Macs, so I went into the Zune software wondering what the buzz was about, it was really well designed for a music player. After going through the setup wizard, it was clear that the designers knew their product and how they fit into the market. Once I played my music though, I came to two conclusions, firstly, I forgot I had a Zune. Secondly, I felt pretty bad that I had such a cheap mp3 player, it was like carrying around a brick, however, it had a UI that really fit my usage model (not a laptop, I am not carrying around the thing). It was a solid UI, you know what you were doing, you know how to use it. Sure the UI itself could use improvement, but it was the first time I had truly seen a UI design like that in years. That is something Apple really brings to the party and the other platforms do not. So when I saw this article I had to re-read it again, because I had thought of myself as being fairly pro-Apple, but the fact is, I used to think that they were reinventing UI patterns when in fact the other OSs do it first. This makes me actually think that MS is doing a bit better of reinventing UI's than we give it credit for. Now if Microsoft can actually get some new ideas on how to architect software it may turn into something interesting, or may not, but we are starting to see the cracks in the traditional PC way of doing things. ~~~ mseebach There's a big difference between ripping-off another company's idea, and re-imagining something from scratch (like they did with touch screens), which is what Apple did here. What they did, is not really rip-off (Apple copied the concept wholesale), it's very much inventing. They went from mouse cursor to touchscreen. That's a major innovation. The concept is so fundamental, it's surprising it took Apple this long to realise that there is something to do about it. A similar thing is happening with the web. It's hard to imagine what the web would look like without "Aqua", without Google, without Apple. ~~~ cstross _What they did, is not really rip-off (Apple copied the concept wholesale), it 's very much inventing._ They didn't invent it, they just took it wholesale and made it a core part of the OS. The iPhone OS is not the first multitouch OS (Symbian 3.0's gesture- based user interface was already multitouch in its own way). The multitouch OS on MacBooks was borrowed from UIQ, which was itself a rip-off of Symbian from just a couple of years previously. (This _isn't_ original to Apple -- UIQ was an early mobile platform from early 2000, originally designed by Psion. Later versions had Nokia support; UIQ was also sold as an application platform that enabled "multitouch" applications for Nokia's Symbian handsets, such as a full-scale photo album viewer app. It did multitouch and all kinds of other clever things back then -- it was even used by NEC to power some of their early multitouch PCs.) Apple certainly deserve to take the credit for bringing multitouch to the mass consumer in a mass-market device -- the iPhone is the first mass-market consumer device to make multitouch a central part of its design philosophy. And multitouch makes _every_ aspect of the UI easier -- whether it's flipping the page on the built-in Safari browser or panning and zooming a picture housed in iPhoto, it's all a lot more intuitive if you can just move your fingers around on the display. But Psion was there first, and they've been licking the Apple's heels ever since. ~~~ mseebach They've made it far more integral to the OS than UIQ was. They made the iPhone use it, you couldn't do it without it, and you couldn't get it without buying the iPhone (well, not easily, you can now emulate touch with a mouse). To be fair, Apple didn't really invent the finger as UI metaphor -- that goes back to Simon. But they did create the Apple Mouse. ------ jshen apple does rip off apple