Apple iPhone

[Richard Franks]

On 1/10/07, Dave Crossland <dave at lab6.com> wrote:
> On 10/01/07, Attila Csipa <plists at prometheus.org.yu> wrote:
> > Conceptually very similar to the FIC1973, with of course the
> > added Apple candy and design team efforts.
>
> I wonder how the FIC1973's graphics capabilities will compare - all
> the slick XGL style swooshing around and zooming in makes the
> multitouch interface really 'wow!'

Think of it this way though - we get the best of both worlds - a
stable UI foundation means that we can prototype and build whatever
swooshing interfaces we want in specific applications we want (e.g.
one for mapping, a different one for IM), whilst still using more
traditional widely understood metaphors for the day-to-day stuff like
dialing.

Things like 'point & click', 'copy & paste', 'trashcan', 'drag & drop'
are now so obvious to us, that it's easy to forget how revolutionary
these computing metaphors ever were -- the point is that the optimal
metaphors do build upon their 'simple' ancestors.. and that isn't so
much a property of your design team, but emergence/evolution.

With OpenMoko, I believe we'll be able to leverage from these emergent
forces precisely because it is (will be!) open and the UI does not
lock us into highly speculative UI design pattern, which always have
more potential to become an evolutionary dead end.

In a year after release we will probably have two things:
1) Tried and tested new UI paradigms/metaphors.
2) A NeoXXXX (released or in the works) which can provide all the 'eye
candy' decoration to those paradigms which we would ever need -
assuming we run into graphical limitations in the first place.

Richard