Scavenging what’s left of Palm’s once strong engineering pool following their sale to HP, Apple has hired Rich Dellinger, Palm’s engineer and visual designer. Like many other former Palm executives who left Apple with Jon Rubinstein for a chance to develop a brand new smartphone platform, Dellinger honed his engineering skills at Apple.

PreCentral found out about the hire through the engineer’s LinkedIn page.

Dellinger joined Apple in 1999 as a tech support engineer and later went on to work in other capacities. He will be re-joining the Californian firm as a senior designer of user interfaces. Considering his high-profile designer role at Palm, Dellinger’s fifteen year-strong experience of building interactive visual interfaces and web-based designs should be felt across iOS, iPhone, and Apple’s other mobile devices.

The engineer’s personal website sheds more light on the career change:

After four years at Palm and a lot of recent discussion with friends and family, I decided to move on and take a rare opportunity to work with some old friends on some new projects at Apple. It was a really difficult decision, but it’s the right thing for me at this point.



NOTIFICATIONS Facebook for webOS uses the notification feature developed by Dillinger.

He also praised his former colleagues and added he is “looking forward to seeing what Palm can do with HP’s support.” On Twitter, Dellinger later sung praises for both Apple and Palm:

I’ve worked at two companies over the past 15 years. There are great people doing amazing work at both places.

During his tenure at Palm, Dellinger co-developed the Application Framework for webOS, as well as webOS Notifications, a mechanism similar to iPhone notifications that delivers sound, visual, and text alerts in apps without requiring the originating application to be running all the time. He also developed HTML layouts and CSS structures used by core Palm apps and in Mojo Application Framework and co-invented “software and hardware interaction models for a new generation of Linux-based, Palm-branded mobile devices,” the publication wrote.

Read more at PreCentral.net