Jon Rubinstein: OS X and iOS 7 borrow features from webOS
You might remember Jon Rubinstein as the Apple executive turned Palm CEO who helped spearhead development of the short-lived Palm Pre, a device which many initially thought might put Apple on the defensive.
The way things played out, however, couldn't have been more different. Since the Pre first launched in 2009, Apple has gone on to sell millions upon millions of iPhones while the Palm Pre, not to mention Palm, are now all but non-existent.
Nonetheless, some of the UI features introduced by the Palm Pre and the webOS that powered it have lived on and are now being incorporated into Apple's own software. Notifications and multitasking are two examples that come to mind.
Naturally, this wasn't lost on Rubinstein who, in an interview with FierceWireless, couldn't help but insinuate that Palm's webOS was ahead of its time.
FierceWireless: It seems like iOS 7 is taking lots of multitasking cues from webOS. How do you think that platform, webOS, influenced other mobile platforms?
Rubinstein: It's not just mobile platforms. If you look at the notifications on Mac OS X, it looks just like webOS, too. We did a lot of things that were very, very innovative. Obviously, multitasking, notifications, Synergy, how we handled the multiple cards. There's a long list of stuff we did that has been adopted by Microsoft, Apple and Android. Our over-the-air updates and mechanism has been updated by everybody. Our whole Synergy concept is now becoming much more common. I don't think anyone has implemented it as well as we did yet, but clearly they're all heading down that direction.
The entire interview is worth checking out as it touches on a number of subjects, including why the Palm Pre was exclusive to Sprint upon launch and why Rubinstein feels that selling out to HP was a waste.
