iPhone X and Gestures Invented by Apple?
Last week Apple annouched new iPhone models as expected and one of the models is iPhone X. What makes iPhone X more special than other models is the buttonless, fullscreen display. Home button has been around for 10 years since the first iPhone and now with the iPhone X, Apple is starting a new era by introducing new gestures for buttonless iPhone X.
I believe most Apple users think that many of the new features and gestures are invented by Apple. Well, bad news. There’s not really new innovation in this area. Instead Apple has made their own version of a gesture based navigation, but as almost always, they do good job on that.
Other Gesture Based User Interfaces
Palm Pre had gesture based navigation already in 2009, few years after the first iPhone was released. I have personally worked on two home-buttonless and gesture based mobile devices — Nokia N9 and Jolla.
Nokia N9 was released 2011 and the device had fully gesture based UI. The display was possible to wake up by double tapping it or by pressing the power button on the right side. It was possible swipe apps to left or right to move them to background to a multitasking view or close them by swiping from top to down.
Unfortunately Nokia N9 and it’s MeeGo operating system never really got a chance to fly because it was killed by Nokia’s “beloved” CEO Stephen Elop.
MeeGo operating system got a second life in a form of Sailfish OS by Jolla. Sailfish OS was released in 2012 in Slush.
I was also lucky to be part of that story and to work with all those talented people. In Jolla, the gesture based UI was even taken further and the UI was really easy to use with one hand. I gathered here few videos where you can see some of the UI navigation principles on Jolla:
In addition to these gestures, we also had back-navigation gesture in Sailfish OS in 2012. When Apple released iOS7 in 2013, it had a similar idea of back-navigation by swipe gesture e.g. in Settings app. See it yourself how it works on Sailfish OS:
What about iPhone X then?
I’ve said many times before that what Apple usually does, it does it well. Apple may not be the first one to introduce new features, instead they pick (or someone might say they steal) nice features from other players and adapt those to their operating system pretty well. This is exactly what has happened with iPhone X too.
It has been nice to see, that some of the things we have made in the past, are now adapted by Apple. After all, Apple is selling user experience which only means that what Nokia and Jolla created several years ago, was right way to go. I personally want to thank Jolla’s UX team for the great work back then!
iPhone X is a very interesting device. I still use my iPhone 6s plus but I must admit that iPhone X looks appealing to me. Not only because of the new and smaller form factor but because I believe the gesture based UI is the future. I also think that gesture will be more and more important in the future when virtual reality applications hit for real.
It’ll be very interesting to see how gesture based UIs starts to fly now that Apple has chosen that path. Will others follow? We can only wait and see.
Thanks for reading my blog!
