WebOS’s Innovative Gesture-Based Navigation

If we’re going to talk about good ideas from Palm devices in the iPhone X, the mute switch is the least of them. The gesture-based navigation on iPhone X is a lot like that of WebOS on the 2008 Palm Pre — swipe left and right at the bottom to quickly switch between recent apps, swipe up from the bottom to access the card-based multitasking UI (replete with roundrect corners), pull down from the top right to access controls like Wi-Fi and airplane mode. Palm’s demise is probably the greatest tragedy in the industry of the iPhone era. The hardware wasn’t great, and the low-level software was too slow, but the design of WebOS was brilliant, and brilliant design is the most precious commodity in this industry.

Dieter Bohn (of course) wrote a longer look at the WebOS gestures in iOS 11 on iPhone X.

★ Wednesday, 27 December 2017