Heh, in 2001 I went to work on a visualization platform. It had the concept of a "p-unit"; things in the UI were measured in p-units and p-units were converted to pixels. But eventually people decided this level of abstraction wasn't buying anything and it was always going to be 1:1 so let's just talk to users (designers of visualizations) in words they already knew. Years later, mobile devices arose... This is not the only area where that product was ahead of its time but didn't follow through, alas.
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Heh, in 2001 I went to work on a visualization platform. It had the concept of a "p-unit"; things in the UI were measured in p-units and p-units were converted to pixels. But eventually people decided this level of abstraction wasn't buying anything and it was always going to be 1:1 so let's just talk to users (designers of visualizations) in words they already knew. Years later, mobile devices arose... This is not the only area where that product was ahead of its time but didn't follow through, alas.