One memorable story I heard from Joe Britt on my tour of Danger, Inc. was on the origin of the highly distinctive flipscreen of the Hiptop/Sidekick devices. It turns out that Joe Palmer, the Danger team member who concieved of the flip idea, blogged his story in a post way back on August 8th, 2002. I excerpt it here:

Okay, here's my story:

On the Friday before my first day at Danger, I was standing in the shower, looking at the bar of soap in my hands. I'd learned about the Danger device / hiptop / sidekick during my interviews, and I was thinking about all of the ways that a keyboard could be exposed from an object the size of a bar of soap. (1) I'm not sure if that's where Mr. Mossberg got the soap idea....

I imagined sliding out the keyboard in a little drawer, but that puts all the weight out of your hands. (In an odd way, a wet bar of soap is an ideal model, since the slightest imbalance will cause it to slip. After about 10 minutes (Or two gallons, your mileage may vary) I fell on the idea of a single axis rotation of the hinge to reveal the keyboard.

Later that morning I went up to the Danger offices to sit in on a meeting -- just to get a feel for the place, and sitting on the table in the glass conference room was a post-it note pad. (No soap.) I peeled off a chunk of sheets, then drew a keyboard on the remaining pad, then demonstrated the idea by rotating the top of the pad. The room got rather quiet...

ANYWAY, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it

For fun, I re-enacted the Post-IT flipscreen in the photos illustrating this post.

This brilliant concept was refined by many, won a Wired Rave Award and was recently granted a design patent.

To this day, a swift flip of my screen still draws gasps of wonder from the uninitiated.

- mike lee - baltimore