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March 7, 2010

The Suing Circle: PARC => Apple => Microsoft

That Apple borrowed heavily from PARC to create the first commercial GUI is computer history folklore.  But here's a little tidbit I didn't know (from the Wikipedia entry on PARC).

Xerox was allowed to buy pre-IPO stock from Apple in exchange for engineer visits and an understanding that Apple would create a GUI product. Much later, in the midst of the Apple v. Microsoft lawsuit in which Apple accused Microsoft of violating its copyright by appropriating the use of the "look and feel" of the Macintosh GUI, Xerox also sued Apple on the same grounds. The lawsuit was dismissed because Xerox had waited too long to file suit, and the statute of limitations had expired. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_PARC 

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March 6, 2010

Better than Paper and Pencil?

As beautiful as the iPad is (and as vaporously strategic as the pundits predict it to be) the functions demo'd so far are sleek but kind of pedestrian (with the exception of Brushes).  It seems to offer the same kind of child-ish experience that the OSX mail program does. Something that drives me to distraction (Apple, if you give me resize handles on embedded images, really, I won't hurt myself).

This however promises something quite different.  If it works, as fictionally demo'd, I think it could really be something that improves upon raw paper and pencil for ideation and creative thinking:

Is it real?  Apparently not - it's just a "concept car" ... but hopefully the iPad has ruffled Microsoft enough that they get serious about pushing it out of the lab, or out of the UX designers heads, whichever the case may be.  Windows Phone 7 series is a good sign...but I've seen pretty designer videos before, like the one above, that come to nothing.  And finally, Microsoft, please don't invent some new UI platform for this - that's what your Silverlight investments are for.

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