[juliendorra]

Yes, the book explains how everything started from the capacitive touchscreen. The initial idea (2004-2005) was to build a Mac tablet computer based on touch screens. Bas Ording designed all the interactions we know, rubber band and inertial scrolling, the home screen… for a mac tablet!

So really the capacitive screen drove the interactions. Input first, just like the mouse on Macintosh or the stylus on Newton, everything then flows from there.

On the web browser, I disagree with you (sorry!), the killer app of the iPhone was that Safari was the same Safari, with the same capacity and rendering, than on desktop.

It was completely new. Yes, you had to double tap on complex, non responsive websites, but every single (non-flash) site would render the same.

My 640x480 HTC Universal with a plastic keyboard felt antiquated compared to the 320x480 iPhone, especially starting with the 3GS

[Lammy]

> The initial idea (2004-2005) was to build a Mac tablet computer based on touch screens.

There was lots of speculation about this starting in 2002 when “Inkwell” handwriting recognition showed up in Mac OS X Jagwire:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkwell_(Macintosh)

https://www.macworld.com/article/155597/wacom.html

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/mac-os-x/0596004605/ch0...

And related patent filings go as far back as 2000: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7564995B1/en

[cyberax]

> My 640x480 HTC Universal with a plastic keyboard felt antiquated compared to the 320x480 iPhone, especially starting with the 3GS

Opera Mobile existed at that time, though.

[juliendorra]

As I remember it, all these mobile browsers for Windows Mobile were not exactly the same code and rendering engine / javascript engine that on desktop. They were ports

As the iPhone OS was Mac OS at its core, Safari was exactly the same engines, and that was a quite novel and enticing promise: the real web in your pocket (minus proprietary plugins like Flash)

[cyberax]

Opera was a direct port, with some mobile adaptations. The problem was the IE6-only sites and other braindead web-development practices that affected Opera even on desktops.

[amarshall]

> Yes, you had to double tap on complex, non responsive websites

I suppose GP’s point is that the vast majority of websites in 2008 were “desktop”-only.

[jbverschoor]

But the double tapping was intelligent to zoom exactly what you meant.

Also tapping links was very easy