Maybe he’ll shed some light on it himself at some point, though he’s probably under some crazy NDA. But before people start slinging mud at Apple for ‘ripping off’ the ‘wooden shelves’ look for the new iBooks app from Delicious Library, consider that Mike Matas who designed that interface for Delicious Monster worked for Apple for a couple of years (leaving in july of last year).
Update: “[Delcious Monster co-founder] Mike Matas was a UI designer on the iPad, [former employee] Lucas Newman is an iPhone / iPad engineer, and [former employee] Tim Omernick was an iPhone / iPad engineer but left a while ago to work on games independently.” #
He already did, an hour ago:
http://twitter.com/wilshipley/status/8289716016
Yeah, hope they got bought out (or did some licensing agreement).
Simply ripping it off would be a court-case they’d be sure to lose and a PR disaster.
Sorry, I am talking about Wil Shipley, not Mike. His statement is pretty clear though.
josue, Yeah, it is, question is if he’s talked to Mike about it :)
James, I doubt Apple would lose such a case.
Consider that nothing happened when Apple introduced the Dashboard, despite the fact that it was by and large a Konfabulator clone (only nicer).
Shite, shows how much I know.
And forgot about Konfabulator. Still, some journalist could have a field day with this.
Who cares? It is wrong if anyone owns this idea at all. If you play this game that ideas, not just created products, are property then we’re stuck in the mud and no one can do anything because trivial things are PATENTED/OWNED.
Will Shipley didn’t invent bookshelves, does he give credit to the various inventors? No.
Give credit where you can but jesus christ, if ideas can’t be free, neither can we.
That’s true to an extend, but there’s a difference between ideas as a whole and specific implementations, is what I think these people are saying.
Did apple steal artwork? No.
Did apple steal code? No.
Did apple steal a trademark? No.
Then what did they steal? An idea.
Feel free to march towards cultural stagnation, I will fight against it. Also using Apple products, especially this insult to consumer rights and freedoms will lead to the same thing.
The abyss awaits.
Just because Apple didn’t copy or directly clone art or code, doesn’t mean they didn’t lift the concept wholesale. Even an overly dramatic ‘anonymous coward’ such as yourself must necessarily admit that that in itself is a bit cheap. No?
The Delicious Library creators were hardly the first people to conceive the idea of books on a shelf. Books have been stored/presented/sold this way for centuries. It is a simple and elegant idea that apparently appealed to Apple was much as it apparently appealed to Delicious Monster. And I know must have created their own code too as iBooks worked much more smoothly and was without the endless bugginess that I have had using every version of Delicious Library.