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by tjoff
5093 days ago
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Because the previous touchscreens was resistive and used with a pen/nail. And their UIs wasn't at all about dragging stuff but rather clicking on them. Once you define your UI around a capacitive touchscreen "slide to unlock" becomes trivial. |
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Technology moves forward enabling new behaviors that were never possible before, and much of the "innovation" that people declare is nothing more than a land-rush (see the "on a computer" that was the invention of countless patents). The iPhone stood on the backs of the GPS industry, for instance, that pushed much of the innovations in mobile chips, GPUs (OpenGL ES and mobile GPUs were made for the in-car GPS industry), screen and touchscreen technology. Suddenly the technology was there to do things that couldn't be done before and the land grab was afoot. Is a land grab innovation?
I don't discount that Apple invented and refined a lot, or that some companies seem to be addicted to simply cloning (Samsung is particularly guilty of this), but a lot of what Apple is credited with isn't much more evolved than "on a computer". And now that we have all sorts of innovations in battery technology, chipsets, etc, things like Google's glasses are possible, but only a fool would imagine that they created them out of the ether, instead of simply moved to where technology had brought them.