Trust the eagle eye of Long Zheng to catch this one; but it seems that there must have been some good parts of the cancelled Courier project from Microsoft after all, as some user interface similarities have shown up in a new iPad app called “Clibe”.

After doing some digging Long found out that the folks behind the Clibe did in fact have a connection to the ill-fated Courier project. The company behind the Clibe is called Visere, and it turns out that not only did the company do contract work for Microsoft in the past, but that one of the company’s directors, Adam Wulf, claims that part of their past work included the Courier user experience.

Although Clibe doesn’t do nearly as much as what was envisioned for Courier (which I believe to have been overly exaggerated), it lives within the confines of the iPad, it does take one of the ideas and execute it very well – digital journals.

As an example of how refined it is, users can customize the cover of their journals and even publish them online as an interactive HTML5-powered book (a portrayed feature of Courier too).

via Long Zheng

It’s good to see great ideas manage to live on, even if they are now on a competing platform.

[Cross-posted at Winextra]