Designer of notification system for Palm's WebOS hired by Apple

Rich Dellinger worked as the User Interface Design Architect at Palm for nearly 4 years. During his time there, he invented the WebOS notification system and co-developed the application framework used by the operating system found on Palm's Pre.

Dellinger was also the visual designer, interaction designer and engineer of WebOS, and he created the icon suite for Palm, Sprint and other partner applications.

Dellinger, who has more than 15 years of experience in the technology industry, was hired by Apple in May, according to his LinkedIn page. It will be his second stint with the Cupertino, Calif., company, as he worked there from 1999 to 2006 in a variety of roles, including tech support, Web design, and a 9 month stint as a user interface designer for Mac OS X, the iPod and iPhone.

"I've worked at two companies over the past 15 years," he wrote this week via Twitter, where he also wrote he was attending new employee orientation on June 1. "There are great people doing amazing work at both places."

Palm has seen an exodus of employees since it was announced in April that the struggling smartphone maker would be purchased by computer maker HP for $1.2 billion. HP has said it plans to leverage the technology in WebOS to create tablet-style devices to compete with Apple's iPad. Company officials have suggested they are less interested in the smartphone market.

"Delliger represents the latest in what could be called a minor brain drain at Palm," wrote Palm enthusiast site PrecCentral.net, "after (senior vice president) of software and services Mike Abbot left to join Twitter and the main designer for webOS, Matias Duarte, left to join up with Android. We wish Dellinger the best of luck at Apple."