Rip off, my behind. It's an _obvious_ metaphor. Commenters on the article even point out other examples like Shelfari.
"As a creator, part of what I seek is recognition, immortality. I don’t work for Apple or Google (I’ve been offered jobs & buyouts) because I want the fame myself. It’s my shot at immortality. My designs are my children. So it stinks when I feel like Steve might get the fame for my innovation. I lose my children, as it were.
But your children aren’t really yours. They have lives of their own. So when your designs do change the world, you have to accept it. You have to say, ‘Ok, this was such a good idea, other people took it and ran with it. I win.’"
WIL SHIPLEY, DELICIOUS MONSTER
Therefore the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.
She has but doesn't possess,
acts but doesn't expect.
When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.
* 1. No app had ever displayed books on a bookshelf in this way until Delicious Monster did.
* 2. The designer who designed the bookshelf UI at Delicious Monster was poached by Apple to work on the iPad team.
(And because I'm irritated by comments on Hacker News lately, I just want to point out that sarcasm is the simplest form of humor.)
If you're referring to Mike Matas, the co-founder of Delicious Monster, he left DM to join Apple back in 2005. While I imagine he's probably working on the iPad, he wasn't poached specifically to work on the device.
Phil Ryu is a master of marketing. Making a fuss about this is just another press opportunity.
That having been said, I sympathize with your disbelief. Yeah, what we did was obviously a direct port of reading real books. But you have no idea how much crap we took for doing exactly that – what I considered the obvious. To a lot of people apparently things like a page flip port seemed completely idiotic. To me it was an integral part of the enjoyment of reading books that had been lacking in most ereader experiences.
We did reap the rewards too, so ultimately I can't really complain, and we always joked that Apple would eventually rip off the page flip since it just makes sense. All those TV ads Apple featured Classics in now seem strange in retrospect though, presuming iBooks was designed and under developed before our app's release.
Though certainly far from their most avid reader, I must say I generally enjoy reading Wired's content quite a bit. That gem right there, however, made me want to throw up.
Is anyone familiar enough with Wired's writers to declare this an isolated incident? Maybe then the nasty taste in my throat would go away, and I wouldn't have to worry about coming across this level of obvious dickishness in their articles were I to start reading them more regularly.
"The 3D page-flipping effect looks almost exactly the same." How many ways are there to animate a flipping book page? It's not like we're talking about tons of different moving parts. There's like...one.
For the _life_ of me I couldn't figure out where to find the options on how to change the font size - obviously it's there some place (nobody makes an ereader without the ability to change font size ) - but no amount of clicking, checking in settings, or otherwise scanning could reveal it.
Regardless, I feel reassured in my $9.99 investment in Eucalyptus - which has all of the above (page turning, font size) nailed - better than the Kindle App, actually.