The Courier Comes to the iPad (Sort Of)
All those who were pining for Microsoft's Courier can now try an approximation of the interface on an Apple iPad.
Courier was Microsoft's skunkworks tablet project that got killed in favor of the all-out effort to bring the tablet computing style to the whole Windows world in Windows 8.
The Courier concept involved a tablet that looked like an open notebook with two main parts to the screen and digital ink.
When Microsoft decided to go another way, a few people took notice and started a company, Taposé (a play on "touch" and "juxtapose") to bring the concept to the iPad. (No digital ink support, though.)
[Click on image for larger view.]
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| Taposé app on the iPad. (Source: Taposé) |
If there were any doubt of the product's Courier origin, it's dispelled on the company's About page:
"Team Taposé must first give credit to the once hyped Courier project, as it provided the initial inspiration for what was to come. Benjamin Monnig saw the Courier as a revolutionary idea and knew it still had a place in the current tablet market, although Microsoft had killed the project soon after the announcement of Apple's iPad."
On Tuesday, Taposé blogged that it had finally won approval to go on sale in the Apple App Store after "four months, three rejections, one appeal win and then reversal of said appeal, management UI review, and then one more final review for good measure."
The app costs $2.99. Intriguing, but can anyone help me understand how this would get past Microsoft's intellectual property lawyer army?
Posted by Scott Bekker on March 28, 2012