Palm’s answer to the iPhone
p2pnet.net news:- Palm’s answer to the iPhone? Hire Paul Mercer.
Back in 2004, “Pixo was on board to help Apple create an operating system that would run the user interface of the iPod,” said the San Francisco Chronicle. “We were able to get something running and demonstrate it in a couple of weeks,” said Paul Mercer, founder of Pixo, which was sold to Sun Microsystems last year.
“Iventor is a software design company based in Palo Alto, California,” says its site, going on, “We specialize in user interface design for high volume mobile devices” and —
— “Iventor was founded in 2000 by Paul Mercer.”
Now, “iPhone is still several months away from being available, but its flexible interface is already shaking up the cellphone industry, including Palm, which makes the hybrid phone-organizers known as smart phones,” says The New York Times.
So, hire Paul Mercer.
“Mr. Mercer, a college dropout, joined Apple in 1987,” says the NYT. “While there, he was the lead designer of Version 7 of the Macintosh finder, the operating systemââ¬â¢s graphical desktop. He later founded Pixo, a software tools firm that created a development system used by Apple software designers to conceive the first version of the user interface for the iPod music player.
“More recently, as an independent designer, he worked under contract with Samsung to design the Z5, an MP3 player that has been a best seller in South Korea. He has developed a reputation for designing interfaces that have cinematographic qualities and yet perform briskly on small consumer electronics devices.”
“Paul Mercer devised Swatch, also known as Pocket Mac, in late 1990,” said Evan Koblentz on snarc.net. He went on:
He’d been working on the Macintosh operating system, became aware of Junior’s technical problems, and was encouraged by colleagues on that team to pursue “something small”, as explained in the book Apple: The Inside Story by Jim Carlton. I asked Mercer to elaborate further. He explained that he was aware of the pros and cons of existing products from Casio and Sharp, and was especially influenced by the Sony PalmTop. He took one apart and realized it contained a Motorola 68000 processor, which was proof that a Macintosh-like device could be built small enough and run on battery power. To start, Mercer worked on a pen version of the Apple PowerBook, dubbed Rolex – a high-end product vs. Swatch – but his excitement was for the latter project. He slyly code-named its software Karoshi, the Japanese word approximately meaning “death from overwork”. Ultimately, and with knowledge gained from Smartifacts, the Swatch prototype was a typical PDA size at 4.25 inches wide x 6.5 inches tall x 1 inch thick, and as with later products like those from Palm, Mercer’s team designed it as a peripheral to a desktop computer (Macintosh of course). He estimated that it would take $200 to build one, selling for $400. His team produced 10 hand-made units in various colors, initially based on the PowerBook design (but six months before the PowerBook launched) of dark gray plastic with a colored Apple logo in the center. A similar design was used for the early Newton models. Swatch’s software was a late version of Mac System 6 and Mercer modified a version of the Mac Classic ROM, all attached to a dissected Sony PalmTop chassis and motherboard. It ran most of the traditional Macintosh software, such as Finder and MacPaint, along with a custom note-taking application compatible with Claris Write documents. Full handwriting recognition wasn’t completed, but methods such as scrubbing to erase text, a gesture for opening the system panel, and way to make traditional mouse double-clicks work with a stylus were all successfully developed. Those are noteworthy accomplishments since they had to work with a pre-existing operating system that was never intended for pen input, unlike the Newton’s software. (Apple CEO John Sculley and others were impressed with the product, but killed it anyway because they already were working with Sharp, a main Sony rival, on the Newton. Mercer was then transferred to the Newton team, and brought along Swatch’s puff-cloud animation that appears when text is erased, along with graphics for the help system. Frustrated, he left Apple in 1994.
It’ll be interesting to see what he does for Palm.
“Heââ¬â¢s the best of the best in this space,the NYT has said Paul Saffo, an, “adviser to Samsung and a Silicon Valley forecaster,” saying. “The guy has a knack for designing complex systems in ways that are accessible.”
Also See:
San Francisco Chronicle – Little-known startup was behind iPod’s easy-to-use interface, August 16, 2004
The New York Times – Palm Responds to the iPhone, March 9, 2007
snarc.net – The Evolution of the PDA, May, 2005
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Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!
March 12th, 2007 at 11:13 am
All it is is an iPod merged with a cell phone. You can’t even download songs from the cell network onto it. You must sync it with a computer. What’s the point?