Adaptive Path

I've built my experience mainly through exposure to native mobile. I find that the walled gardens and constraints you work within tend to help focus what you're creating. It's easier to tell when something looks or feels "wrong" when you're looking at apps that are built to match the OS's ecosystem, instead of the latest web trends.

When you work with a standardized set of UI elements on a canvas of limited size, you tend to start thinking about the interface in terms of modular actions and tasks, which you can repurpose later when scaling up to tablet or desktop web. You also have a good basis to simplify these tasks further when branching out to wearables and in-car devices.

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At this point, Google, Apple, and Microsoft each have pretty defined ideologies and UI — check out their guidelines:

https://developer.android.com/design/material/index.html

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/MobileHIG/

http://dev.windows.com/en-us/design

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Check out some of the sessions from WWDC and Google I/O too:

https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2014/

https://www.google.com/events/io/io14videos

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There are also a lot of great blogs out there that have pinpointed info on different parts of interface design. Sometimes these info-morsels can be easier to digest than starting a full course in UX. This is definitely not a comprehensive list, so look around, and get your RSS client fired…

ActionScript 3 was released in 2006, long after developers had already started departing the Flash ecosystem in droves and Flash fell out of favor as delivery technique for web applications. "Ajax", as we were calling it then, started to be used as the primary delivery technique for rich applications; the original Ajax essay came out in 2005 (http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/ajax-new-approach-web-applications/) and that's when we started reverse-engineering applications like Google Maps to build interactivity without proprietary plugins and languages.

It isn't that Apple has better designers or programmers, but they have a culture that thrives on quality, innovation and just plain building better products than the competition.
Here's a great post on that:
http://www.adaptivepath.com/blog/2007/07/05/how-many-of-your-teams-ideas-are-in-the-iphone-2/

"... [Apple] is a company with leadership who has the fortitude to take the risk, find the budget, and push the technology for the single cause of designing compelling user experiences. Apple got it right."

Agreed, it's missing context.

My graduation thesis was around this subject. The book "The Experience Economy" by Pine & Gilmore is a great start and generally regarded as the origin for the idea of experiences as products: http://www.amazon.com/The-Experience-Economy-Theater-Business/dp/0875848192

A couple interesting articles:

http://www.experience-economy.com/wp-content/UserFiles/File/Article%20Lapland5.pdf

http://www.adaptivepath.com/uploads/documents/apr-005_businessvalue.pdf

AJAX as a term and design idea was coined in 2005[1], which is what intent of the quote (though it too is technically inaccurate]. The quote you listed is talking about coining the term, not inventing the technology.

If you read the article you linked, it also says this:

"Finally -- 6 years later -- Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path coined a catchy phrase: the term Ajax was born."

[1] http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/ajax-new-approach-web-applications