"I decided to add "inertial" scrolling, where you gave the image a push..." (opens in new tab)

Great story. My favorite part is the contrast between Gates' and Jobs' negotiating styles. Gates: use your pride to set a lowball effort/value frame. Jobs: imply use of Apple proprietary information, leverage reputation of stubborness.

Hertzfeld's tactic is nice, too: request a royalty for the unbundled version that Apple "would never do" -- but did.

"The program is only half finished, and if I don't think you're paying me fairly, I won't be motivated to finish it."

Wow, this guy made 150k while he was about to make 750k from the Thunderscan stuff? Incredible stories.

And those are 1987 dollars. That's roughly $1.4 million today.

Do people still do royalty based contracts? I wish they did.

No context in particular :) Just an observation of how the "inertial scrolling" people are raving about on the new iDevices has a history deeply rooted in Mac folklore (Andy Hertzfeld was part of the original Mac team).

Also note mention of hysteresis and Floyd-Steinberg Dithering which are worth reading up on.

Hah, funny you should mention that. I noticed it when I stumbled across Preceden a month or two back, but it's always seemed a bit buggy, and put me off trying out the site. In Firefox & Chrome, if you drag the timeline to one side and hold in place for a bit, then release, it scrolls as if I hadn't held it stationary.

My friend Mike's essay on making things stop: http://stereopsis.com/stopping/ (I've been meaning to port it to JS, but haven't yet.)

I'm guessing he means something like "when the user clicks, drags, and releases something, keep scrolling at the rate the mouse was moving at the release point only if the rate is above some threshold." It'd be annoying if the mouse had to be absolutely still when you let it go, most people don't have the fine motor control for that.