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Comment by mikeryan | Hacker News Reader

Matías Duarte has been consistently at the forefront of mobile UI design.

This is a pretty subjective statement. It seems that a lot of Duarte's designs are somewhat derivative. Material extends MS's Flat design. I'm also not sure how much of that is Duarte, its a pretty open secret that Google makes use of some pretty high end digital agencies who aren't allowed to let folks know what they're working on.

WebOS was pretty tacky though an interesting OS design - actually implemented better by LG on their SmartTVs.

The Sidekick may have been his most interesting product but it was completely broadsided by the release of the iPhone and was n't anywhere near competitive to the Blackberry so I'm not sure how innovative it was.

If anything Duarte's had pretty good record for working on products with innovative features but never necessarily ground breaking on UI/UX

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> WebOS was pretty tacky though an interesting OS design - actually implemented better by LG on their SmartTVs.

I've got to stop you there. WebOS was far ahead of its time, and especially considered in the context of a small startup going against established players, was brilliant.

It offered in some ways better and more intuitive usability than iOS, along with a great app development ecosystem and philosophy.

Palm's WebOS devices were a pleasure to use, in a time when that was a very rare thing for a mobile device.

Agreed. WebOS was the only other OS other than iOS that offered the singular upgrade experience.

It was clunky under the hood and never received enough love. It would have been interesting to see where WebOS (phone) would be today had Palm survived.

Was Palm a small startup? I think it was more like the last effort of a company on it's way out.

Preware was one of the most amazing pieces of software I've ever seen on mobile (I remember going out at lunch multiple times to hang around a fast public wifi spot to try and download an LDXE-based chroot that was too large for my home connection).

Stuff like Xposed is interesting, but I haven't seen any software for mobile that managed to match the kind of community driven tweaking that Preware fostered.

Ever heard of Cydia?

Yes, but Cydia requires jailbreaking which limits how similar I'd say it is to Preware, as the average iOS user probably isn't jailbreaking

> WebOS was far ahead of its time

I see this any time WebOS is mentioned but this makes WebOS sound a lot more innovative than it was. WebOS is widely lauded for two things: (1) the card application interface and (2) the accompanying physics/gestures, especially swipe from edge. Now these are great and appropriately lauded but that is a short list that really pales compared to a similar list of things the iPhone OS had introduced at that time. Other than that WebOS is basically a nicely polished clone of the iPhone OS. Even the cards metaphor itself, the hallmark of WebOS, was used two years earlier in the original iPhone in Mobile Safari and Cover Flow.

My wife had a Palm Pre with WebOS when I had an iPhone 3G. The Pre was pure crap, but the OS was very interesting and intuitive. I rarely had to help her with it. She's had iPhones since then, which can frustrate her due to how it handles settings, and she hates changes -- this week it's the removal of swipe to unlock :)

> a short list that really pales compared to a similar list of things the iPhone OS had introduced at that time

Like what?

Exercise left to readers making good faith arguments.

Pass. I will say that I saw features in webOS that took a long time to roll out to Android and iOS.

> Material extends MS's Flat design.

Don't see much credit for that original work being passed around, but I haven't dug up the facts.

I liked the WindowsPhone 8 instance, pity that's being flushed away. Hope it will be stolen and resold to the public.

> It seems that a lot of Duarte's designs are somewhat derivative

All UX/UI design on major platforms is "derivative". None is ground breaking.

I find it funny how you back up your claim by showing an equally derivative work (LG Smart TV)

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