OK, this is completely and absolutely inspired. Brilliant, especially the redirect handling.
The design needs a bit of polish, but the core concept is just so damn good it's blatantly going to be copied.
The design needs a bit of polish, but the core concept is just so damn good it's blatantly going to be copied.
Chris Lacy (the author) delayed the release because he was encouraged to patent the idea. Looks to me like that was a good move.
Im a big fan of it and find it makes my phone faster to use than any other launcher without having to learn new ui concepts.
Yeah until a point that nobody will be able to innovate anymore, even being original and inventive, because of patents into nuclear ideas or generic ideas..
Its the difference of "everybody against everybody" to "everybody working for everybody"
I hope software patents became a thing of the past soon.. the concept of property and the concept of ideas do not belong to each other
(See Sections 7 and 8 of GPLv2, for an example.)
It looks like a very good implementation for Android, and good implementations are valuable and important, but the concept itself isn't original.
Link Bubble behaves very similarly to Facebook Messenger in this way (the way the bubbles move, how you interact with them, close them, etc), and I can't help but think that Facebook was inspiration for the project.
This is actually a good thing because I always thought that the Chat Heads were a novel idea, though Link Bubble's implementation of the concept is rougher around the edges than Facebook (e.g. "laggier", not quite as clean in design).
I believe Holo in Paranoid Android's ROM was first, beating Facebook's app by a few months at least.
That was what got me to click the install button just now. And he used my least favorite example, Instagram out of Twitter with the t.co redirects and yada yada—I've always felt like that was super awkward.