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Businesses Google The Almighty Buck News

Former webOS, Pebble Design Lead, Who Just Left Andy Rubin's Essential, Heads To Google (variety.com) 38

Posted by msmash from the musical-chair dept.
Janko Roettgers, writing for Variety: Google has hired a former lead Pebble and webOS designer Liron Damir as the new head of user experience of its Google Home group, which works on products such as Google Home, Chromecast and Google Wifi. Damir announced that he joined Google on LinkedIn this week, writing that he was "super excited and proud to be joining Google... to lead the design of Google Home products." A Google spokesperson confirmed the hire Thursday, but declined to comment further. Most recently, Damir worked as head of UX for Essential, the new startup from Android founder Andy Rubin. Before that, he was VP of design at Pebble, the pioneering smart watch maker that got acquired by Fitbit in late 2016. Before joining Pebble, Damir led the webOS design efforts at HP, and then at LG. webOS was initially developed as a mobile operating system to take on Android and iOS, but HP scrapped these efforts when it realized that it couldn't compete with the likes of Apple and Samsung. The company sold webOS to LG in early 2013, which ended up using the operating system for its smart TVs.
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Former webOS, Pebble Design Lead, Who Just Left Andy Rubin's Essential, Heads To Google More

Former webOS, Pebble Design Lead, Who Just Left Andy Rubin's Essential, Heads To Google

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  • Will he adapt? (Score:3)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Friday July 28, 2017 @03:39PM (#54900507)

    WebOS and Pebble were rather praised for their design, however the never really had taken off as well as they hope, but at least the companies had tried. Google is notorious with having fad products that they will dump if they don't meet expectation. This type of business may take some adapting to.

    • WebOS and Pebble were rather praised for their design, ...

      Wait, what?

      I have no opinion on WebOS, but Pebble's stuff looked like a committee of fifth graders designed it.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Desler ( 1608317 )

      Pebble was praised for its designs? Amongst what group of people? All I ever heard was people mocking their designs.

  • webOS is a really good interface (Score:5, Interesting)

    by asliarun ( 636603 ) on Friday July 28, 2017 @03:39PM (#54900515)

    I have to say that webOS is an absolute delight to use. Simple, snappy, very easy to use on a TV along with a remote. The optional cursor with the remote working as an "air mouse" is a fairly unconventional notion but actually works quite well too. In fact, i would say that the webOS interfaces found on LG TVs is one of the best user interfaces I have used in a long time. And a very fresh approach to user design. If Liron was the one who conceptualized and designed and implemented this user interface, then more power to him!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by r1348 ( 2567295 )

      I owned a Palm Pre 2 and I still have nightmares.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Plammox ( 717738 )
      Seconded, webOS really is great. Just too bad there's no long term support from LG (stuck with webOS 2.0 on a relatively new TV from 2015).
    • Why are people always delighted with webOS? Back when HP tried to get into the tablet market with the Touchpad reviews of the UI were mostly positive. Had "real multitasking" before the iPad, etc. Has LG actually done anything with this OS?

      • Because webOS was great compared to the crap small device OSes at the time. Namely PalmOS, WinCE, or EPOC/Symbian.

        PalmOS had like no memory protection it was like MS-DOS. WinCE had several UI limitations. While EPOC/Symbian had a really quirky system API no one liked to write code for.

        Now with iOS and Android it isn't as much of a big deal.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Desler ( 1608317 )

          Huh? That's an interesting alternate history. iOS and Android were two and one years old respectively by the time webOS first came out. Your post seems to falsely imply that webOS was older than them when it wasn't.

        • Huh? I had a WebOS tablet a couple of years after iOS and Android were released (I already owned an Android phone at the time). WebOS had a clean and well-designed UI and I'd have done more work on it if HP hadn't decided to kill the line completely shortly after I got mine.

  • A number of Google products need love too... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bogaboga ( 793279 ) on Friday July 28, 2017 @03:40PM (#54900525)

    For instance:

    GMail - I find it ugly and too bland by default.

    Photos - We cant sort within this application! Google, really? Neither can a user separate videos from photos!

    Hangouts - Does anyone still use this app? Where is WhatsApp's competition? I guess all iterations of potential apps were DoA!

    Calendar - It needs a refresh. One cannot copy an event and have it repeated at another date/time! I am glad one can move it by dragging though.

    Am I wrong?

    • If there's one thing I use daily that doesn't require shiny bling makeover it's gmail. Function over form any day!!!

    • If you want to see what "bling" does to an app, get the new Skype for Android. Total suckage. Things you use every day need to be solid, simple, and functional. Please don't give anybody ideas of "refreshes" and bling. You can provide ideas on what needs to be fixed (like the calendar copy idea) but you don't need to rewrite anything to make something better.

    • On GMail, I find their interface good enough. Only annoyance is the promotional mails that I get, but thankfully, they're not completely junk mail of the type I used to get on Yahoo! mail.

      Photos - agree w/ you on that one. There are a whole lot of music videos that I have, as well as family photos & videos. There is no way to separate them. This is an issue common to both Google & Microsoft. The apps ought to be able to distinguish - maybe by folder location - whether a video is that of Black

    • GMail - I find it ugly and too bland by default.

      I'll do one better: Google seems to have this foundational war on e-mail. It's not a letter form anymore, it's more like a chat window. Things aren't put into folders, they're put into 'labels', and while labels may have their benefits, they translate poorly to IMAP implementations. System resources seem to be a secondary consideration as well. While HTML-only Gmail takes a reasonable 44MB of RAM when I checked, the standard Gmail interface takes over 300.

      Photos - We cant sort within this application! Google, really? Neither can a user separate videos from photos!

      The issues with Photos makes sense, actually. The tw

  • With that track record... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Google's doomed!

  • Are these the assholes who foist on us monstrosities like Gnome and the Windows 8 desktop?

  • For those of us who don't live in Silicon Valley, I assume this summary means, "Some guy I've never heard of, who's never done anything I vaguely care about, who used to work for some other guy I've never heard of, has left his company that never made anything important. And now he works for Google."

    Dang, I switched jobs last year and it didn't make the front page of Slashdot. I gotta work on my PR.

  • This is good. I've really enjoyed my Pebble 2 and can see the potential for a smart watch that has more functionality, and a long battery life by not needing energy intense screens. It's too bad Pebble went under.

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