The new iphone calendar widget to choose a date (2007)

Vangelis proposed cylinder visualisation method in 1995 (from his Thesis describing a new method for visualising time series (temporal data) on the surface of a cylinder):

Excerpt from my thesis about the 'cylinder' visualisation method:
"...the instances of each time varying value are placed in a single column. The value instances over a time period can be viewed by rotating the cylinder around its axis. The correspondent to "NOW" time point, textual tuple is positioned along the facet closer to the viewer, which is the most distinguished due to the perspective projection and the photorealistic rendering."

also an example of a font list control which can replace a conventional 2D combo box:

Steve Jobs email response to this similarity can be found here.

more ideas for text visualisation (from Vangelis thesis) at:

http://www.katsiafas.com/umist/euorasis/textual.html