Palm Pre Design Team Gets Interviewed

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http://www.precentral.net/palm-pre-design-team-gets-interviewed
- r" z" S7 Z1 o0 R3 XBy Dieter Bohn | Friday, Jun 5, 2009 | 0 comments »
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0 i+ I% j% J# e9 }# B+ |Engadget points us to two interviews from the team that designed the Palm Pre: Michelle Koh all by her lonesome and an interview with the bigger team of Peter Skillman, Michael Abbot, Matias Duarte, and Mike Bell. There's oodles of good stuff here.
Koh on programming for webOS:
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As the age old saying goes, Palm didn’t “reinvent the wheel”, we just rolled the wheel in a different direction creating new pathways with familiar tools like HTML, CSS, and Javascript to leverage a web-centric technology.
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Skillman on the overall design of the hardware (inspired not just by a riverstone, but by an ostrich egg!):

We wanted to build something really soft and precious yet robust that would be very different from the hard, pragmatic products in the market

Duarte adds that they didn't want the Pre to feel like a piece of technology but rather a "found object."
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The goal, he goes on, was to marry the phone's hardware and software so closely that the device would almost seem alive, adapting to its environment and user in an intelligent way.
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The team literally kept photos of Zen gardens in their office and used them to help decide whether a feature or design element would fit on the Pre -- if it didn't fit in the garden, it likely didn't fit on the Pre.
. i; Z8 i% _* n# n, V3 {# e) B: vRead both of the articles in full, they'll have a nice, calming effect on you before the madness of the launch tomorrow morning.