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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

Did iOS actually invent the idea of scrolling with a gesture? I could have sworn it already existed at the time. Like panning over a map on a GPS…

The momentum on iOS is nicely tuned though.

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Touchscreen scrolling has been in consumer products since at least the early 1980s and inertial scrolling on a touchscreen has been around since at least the early 1990s with Sun's Star7[1].

(And I wouldn't be surprised if there are academic papers that predate the consumer products by a decade or more.)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CsTH9S79qI&t=266s

I love the delightfully 90's/global village icons they used in the UI here. So few pixels but they still incorporated popular aesthetics from the time.

That is a seriously sick demo. I had no idea such capability existed back then. Way ahead of its time.

Practically, though, the UX in that demo was terrible. The frame rate was entirely insufficient. The latency between tapping and action taking place was too long. The idea was absolutely great and way ahead of its time, but it was also way ahead of the hardware's capabilities.

We saw a lot of great ideas in the 90s, but either the hardware performance wasn't ready, or the software effort fell short of the polish needed for mass adoption. We had to wait for the iPhone to be one of those rare products where they used capable hardware AND actually finished the software.

The breakthrough aspect of the iPhone was enabling gestures and a very usable UI without having to use a stylus. This is despite the much lower precision of the capacitive touchscreen tech available in that era.

Other smartphones and PDAs back then used more precise resistive touchscreens that required an annoying pressure stylus because it was a way to get more usability out of the very small screens that devices were limited to.

Not necessarily the first, but the earliest that I can remember: Decades ago (before they were sold/bought/sold), Opera (web browser/suite) used gestures as a navigation tool with your mouse. I never could figure out how to get it to work, but it was a thing.

I know mouse gestures existed previously because I remember someone on /. talking about them circa 2000 and I had to look up what they were. But I don't remember what they were being used for.

Adobe Illustator had a Hand tool already in 1987 that let you pan the canvas by dragging the mouse. Probably it’s older than that.

But adding the physical feel of momentum and inertia was Apple’s invention, AFAIK.

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