[kwlug-disc] Mobile PR&bravado, or is there a historic design/architecture path?

[Doug Moen]

If you're interested in history, I'm pretty sure that Apple's Cyberdog /Opendoc from the 1990's had similar capabilities on a Mac desktop. One Mac app could invoke another to display specific content in a specified window pane within the first app, etc.

And then you could trace Opendoc's capabilities back to more general and powerful systems, like Smalltalk in the 1970's and to NLS/Augment in the 1960's. Those earlier systems didn't have walled off isolated "apps" that can't be composed with one another, they had a more flexible architecture.

I'm not saying that the developers of Android would necessarily have been aware of this history. They might have just invented this stuff anew, as happens all the time.

Apps are a shitty idea and I am opposed to them. But they are popular in the commercial market, because software vendors like to trap consumers in walled gardens.

On Sun, May 26, 2024, at 9:59 AM, Mikalai Birukou wrote:
> In Android docs, "Introduction to activities" initial section "The 
> concept of activities" ( 
> https://developer.android.com/guide/components/activities/intro-activities#tcoa 
> ) says, quote:
>
> """
>
> The mobile-app experience differs from its desktop counterpart in that a 
> user's interaction with the app doesn't always begin in the same place. 
> Instead, the user journey often begins non-deterministically. For 
> instance, if you open an email app from your home screen, you might see 
> a list of emails. By contrast, if you are using a social media app that 
> then launches your email app, you might go directly to the email app's 
> screen for composing an email.
>
> """
>
> But, when I click on mail-to or something like that tag in a browser, 
> Thunderbird opens "screen for composing an email".
>
>
> Was that a mobile PR & bravado BS to dress preexisting concepts into 
> "activities" lingo for a shine new at the time platform, or was 
> aforementioned UX historically developed first on mobile.
>
> Are there any pointers?
>
>
>
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