Original iPhone Prototype With iPod Click Wheel Surfaces Online

[springsup]

It's a real testament to Scott Forstall's design that this seems so...clunky and that the iOS design seems so inevitable. Although Forstall gets a lot of hate for his penchant for skeuomorphism, it's clear from this video alone that he is one of the most important GUI designers in the history of computing.

I was just watching a talk from Bjarne Stroustrup (inventor of C++). He mentioned how when new language features were added, the community designing the standards always wanted them to be really loud and obvious. Over the decades, new languages arose which proved that you mostly could strip those unnecessary details away and (surprise!) people's heads didn't explode, and suddenly C++ started getting stripped down as well.

I think the same is true of smartphone GUI design. When it was new, we wanted it loud and obvious, but now we've all become accustomed to how it works, there was a loud roar to minimalise.

I'm not sure if Apple could have launched with something that looked like iOS7, though. Like C++, we want new things to be loud until we're familiar with them.

 

[firewood]

App distribution was crap. I know, I tried to collect all kinds of stuff back then. GetJar was pretty much it, ...

PalmGear was distributing millions of dollars worth of PalmPilot and PalmOS apps, some fairly high quality (given the limited power of the platform) created by firms that later moved on to making iPhone apps. But Palm and their app distribution channels self destructed themselves 3 or so years before the iOS App Store.

 

[JGIGS]

It's a real testament to Scott Forstall's design that this seems so...clunky and that the iOS design seems so inevitable. Although Forstall gets a lot of hate for his penchant for skeuomorphism, it's clear from this video alone that he is one of the most important GUI designers in the history of computing.

I actually liked skeuomorphism and there a ways they could have stayed with it but just made the look more modern/flat. I found it made the OS more simplified to understand and use.

 

[ErikGrim]

The very real flaws, glaringly obvious when we look at these images with the benefit of hindsight, wouldn't have been so obvious back then. If you have a multi-touch interface, forcing people to use a virtualized representation of a physical interface device--the scrollwheel--is pretty clearly an odd approach compared to direct interaction..

What are you talking about? This is a simulator, the device was an iPod with cellular connectivity. The wheel would still be physical.

This is the concept Jobs mocked when he threw up that rotary iPod slide.

 

[Starship77]

Imagine typing text on that...?

Why so many people think that the wheel would be also used for typing? That was probably just for scrolling.

The idea of the flick gesture and inertial scrolling didn't exist so they were trying to come up with a solution for scrolling. That's very clear on the first iPhone introduction keynote. Steve Jobs even makes a big deal of scrolling and when he shows it for the first time, the audience is impressed. Typing on a virtual keyboard with touch was not new, though, but being able to do it so fast (with multitouch) was also impressive.

It was expected you could touch the text with your finger to select something, but the items where always static before, so you had to scroll somehow.

 

[kdarling]

The idea of the flick gesture and inertial scrolling didn't exist so they were trying to come up with a solution for scrolling. That's very clear on the first iPhone introduction keynote. Steve Jobs even makes a big deal of scrolling and when he shows it for the first time, the audience is impressed.

That clearly touch-naive audience was impressed by a lot of things which had long existed. Our enterprise mobile field apps group, which had been doing touch since the 1990s, saw little that had not been done before. (The novelty and beauty of the iPhone was in attractively bringing it all to consumers.)

For example, flick inertial scrolling had been known for at least 15 years, and even by those same terms:

(Heck, I think that anyone who did a lot of touch back then, would at least accidentally invent inertial scrolling. It happens all the time when your first non-optimized scrolling code runs behind a finger. It happened in the 1980s to me. Some simply fix their code; others say "cool!" and make use of it. )

That bit of touch history aside, you're right that the clickwheel would also be used for scrolling.

 

[meetajhu]

Scott Forstall the savior of Apple FTW!!

 

[yesjam]

That clearly touch-naive audience was impressed by a lot of things which had long existed. Our enterprise mobile field apps group, which had been doing touch since the 1990s, saw little that had not been done before. (The novelty and beauty of the iPhone was in attractively bringing it all to consumers.)

For example, flick inertial scrolling had been known for at least 15 years, and even by those same terms:

(Heck, I think that anyone who did a lot of touch back then, would at least accidentally invent inertial scrolling. It happens all the time when your first non-optimized scrolling code runs behind a finger. It happened in the 1980s to me. Some simply fix their code; others say "cool!" and make use of it. )

That bit of touch history aside, you're right that the clickwheel would also be used for scrolling.

That video is so interesting. Makes you wonder what is in development today that will become "revolutionary" tech in 15 years' time.

 

[kdarling]

That video is so interesting. Makes you wonder what is in development today that will become "revolutionary" tech in 15 years' time.

In response, I was going to post some recent futuristic videos. But you know what, let's start with some long PAST concept videos.

They're interesting because a lot of possibilities that they predicted actually became reality, albeit often in much different ways than could be envisioned back then. (E.g. we did get remote home shopping, but it's done via touch/mouse instead of by pushing buttons or entering punch cards. Remote comms is done by email, not Fax. And so forth.)

Here's a sampler to get started:

The 2003 Home of the Future, as predicted in 1967:

First Born - 2003 Technology as predicted in 1991:

The future, as predicted in 1993. Check out the folding tablet at 1:30, and the almost iPad like double-screen laptop at 9:40.

Another reason I like these is because I was part of such an R&D group at a Bell company during that time period. We were tasked to figure out how the world would change if we had ubiquitous fast communications, and what services they could market.

We actually got one basic part correct: that people would use central repositories for media, and access them from anywhere on earth.

However, we mistakenly thought only the phone companies would be able to afford being such repositories, as a multi-GB movie storage array cost something like $100,000 at the time. We simply never envisioned the dot com explosion, with entities such as Flickr rising as "free" storage choices.

 

[Negan Lannister]

http://www.networkworld.com/article...-refused-to-attend-each-other-s-meetings.html

Scott Forstall and Jony Ive refused to attend each other's meetings

Apple last week delivered a bombshell when it announced that long-time Apple veteran Scott Forstall would be leaving the company in 2012. Part of the reason was that Forstall simply did not get along with various Apple executives, including famed designer Jony Ive.

And so, just like that, Forstall is out and Apple's Craig Federighi - who currently heads up Apple's OS X group - will assume responsibility for the future development of iOS.

Going back to Forstall, his refusal to sign Apple's apology letter may have been the final straw, but trouble between Forstall and other Apple executives had reportedly been brewing for quite some time. Specifically, Forstall had a confrontational management style that didn't sit will with other Apple executives. In a Bloomberg profile on Forstall from a few months ago, it was reported that the tension between Forstall and other Apple execs was so tangible that some wouldn't meet with Forstall unless Tim Cook was there to keep things under control. The report also describes Forstall as "the most divisive member of Apple's executive team."

Building on that, Bloomberg added some more color to its initial report regarding Forstall's intransigence. Forstall, the report claims, wasn't terribly keen on close collaboration with other groups within Apple and refused to attend design meetings spearheaded by Jony Ive. And driving the point home, the report claims that Ive and Forstall were rarely ever in the same room together.

Clashes between Forstall and other senior managers since Jobs’s death a year ago had made it harder for teams to work together, threatening Apple’s ability to keep producing the kinds of electronics that made it the most valuable company.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was able to keep the executives’ long-simmering tension under control. Cook made the final decision to revamp management after Forstall refused to sign a public apology for the mishandling of mapping software, people with knowledge of the matter said...

Effective as both executives are, Ive and Forstall didn’t get along, said former Apple employees. Just as Forstall didn’t go to Ive’s product-review meetings, neither did Ive attend Forstall’s, one of these people said.

Again, the tension between Forstall and others began to pick up steam in the months following Jobs' passing. With various executives campaigning for greater control and influence, Forstall's team was "particularly insular" and showed little to no interest in making improvements in iOS that would benefit the products from other teams within Apple. Perhaps it's quite telling that when news of Forstall's departure made the rounds at Apple, many on the iOS software team reportedly reacted with quiet jubilation.

Bloomberg also quotes 21 year Apple veteran Brett Halle - who worked on operating systems while at Apple - as saying that Scott wasn't particularly interested in "melding" iOS and OS X together. "He just didn't care," said Halle.

As for Forstall, we've yet to hear his side of the story, but in the wake of his impending termination it's been reported that he was extremely frustrated with things at Apple in the post-Jobs era because there was no "decider" to deliver executive decisions on divisive issues. Further, anonymous sources from within Apple's iOS software team told the Wall Street Journal that Forstall would complain that they weren't "working on enough big ideas in mobile software."

All that said, there's simply no denying the immeasurable impact that Forstall had during his tenure at Apple. He was the man who spearheaded the ambitious release of OS X 10.5 Leopard, and more importantly, he was the man in charge of Apple's iOS efforts. It's not an exaggeration to claim the iPhone may have never come to be without Forstall's innumerable and invaluable contributions to both the software itself and his overall management of the entire iOS development process. Indeed, Bloomberg points out that Forstall's supporters have long admired his "ability to manage massive technical complexity while pushing his team to innovate." On the other hand, Forstall detractors, the report points out, claim that Forstall was "overly concerned with empire building and pushing through favored features while blocking other teams’ ideas."

So, love him or hate him, one thing is clear - an environment where senior Apple executives can't even be in the same room as each other just isn't healthy and doesn't lend itself to great new products. As the backstory behind Apple's recent executive shakeup becomes more clear, it's apparent that Apple CEO Tim Cook had to effectively choose between Forstall and Ive.

And with Forstall out and Ive now in as the head of the human interface group at Apple, and Eddy Cue in charge of both Siri and Maps, you better believe that all eyes will be on iOS 7.


http://www.cultofmac.com/231140/ios-7s-flat-icons-are-a-blast-from-the-past/

Jony Ive Knew What He Wanted iOS To Look Like Back In 2005

Want proof that Scott Forstall blocked Jony Ive’s vision for iOS? Here’s an early prototype for the iPhone, made in 2005 by Jony Ive’s industrial design lab. On the back it says “iPod” because it was based in the design of the old aluminum iPod Mini. Remember that dinosaur? But check out the icons on screen. Look familiar? The icons on the prototype’s screen look just like iOS 7!

Check it out below. Notice the same flat design, the same signal bars and dock, the same unadorned icons. The Phone app icon is very similar. The Music App is identical. There’s the same dots to indicate signal-strength. Jony Ive has been credited with the flat new look of iOS 7 — now we know where he got his ideas: this is the way the iPhone operating system was originally envisioned!

The prototype’s Home screen is a mockup. It’s a fake screen; a picture of what iOS might look like. In 2005, it was still just a twinkle in Scott Forstall’s eye.

Thanks to Apple’s watertight secrecy, no one was allowed to get a peek at the operating system being developed by Forstall’s software group — not even Jony ive’s industrial designers across campus at Apple’s HQ.

Jony and Steve Jobs and several other Apple executives were party to it. But the dozen or so designers in Jony’s group never saw the software while they designing the hardware. To give them some idea of what it might look like, a dummy Home screen was created with fake icons. It’s featured on a lot of the early prototypes released during the Apple-Samsung trial.

One of the most interesting thing about these prototypes is how often Jony Ive recycles ideas. The early prototypes include designs that are very similar to the iPhone 3 and the iPhone 4, released several years later. During the trial, lead designer Christopher Stringer admitted that Jony’s design group often goes back to make sure they didn’t miss any good ideas.

So basically, mini-Steve Jobs got Sculley'd by an indecisive CEO like Tim Cook? Jony essentially wanted to make the cartoony TouchWiz as far back as 2005. His early prototype of the iPhone is basically an iPod mini with the LG Arena icons pack that was released in 2009.

LG KM900 (aka LG Arena)

Then Jony ripped off Android features for iOS7 and called it a day.

Jony should just stick to hardware and they never should've fired Scott because he was brilliant in software. Proves Tim Cook is a weak leader / decider who can't mediate and handle tension and pressure between people like Steve was capable of doing because he had a strong personality like Scott has. Tim is soft as Charmin'. We are now living in the most creampuff era of Apple.

 

[Starship77]

That clearly touch-naive audience was impressed by a lot of things which had long existed. Our enterprise mobile field apps group, which had been doing touch since the 1990s, saw little that had not been done before. (The novelty and beauty of the iPhone was in attractively bringing it all to consumers.)

For example, flick inertial scrolling had been known for at least 15 years, and even by those same terms:

(Heck, I think that anyone who did a lot of touch back then, would at least accidentally invent inertial scrolling. It happens all the time when your first non-optimized scrolling code runs behind a finger. It happened in the 1980s to me. Some simply fix their code; others say "cool!" and make use of it. )

That bit of touch history aside, you're right that the clickwheel would also be used for scrolling.

Yes, you're right! Multitouch and inertial scrolling, among many other things, already existed. I just meant in general public's notion. I didn't express myself right, sorry about that. And thanks for the video! I hadn't seen that before!

 

[SonnyDickson]

Still super cool!

 

[Vref]

I still have a iPod classic I’ve been looking at doing the SSD swap on, honestly the fit and finish on the stuff back then and just the design was phenomenal

 

[Bodhitree]

Really neat to see some of the work done by teams inside Apple.