macrumors.com— New patent filings suggests the use of swipe gestures to be used on top of the iPhone's on screen keyboard in order to provide the user with quick access to common keys.
Dec 26, 2008View in Crawl 4
I wonder if Xerox will sue them like they did Palm sing their patent #5,596,656. Though, the fact that Apple is using a finger instead of a pointer may make a difference unless you interpret the finger as being a pointer."a user interface including a manually manipulatable pointer for writing mutually independent unistroke symbols in sequential time order and a user controlled signaling mechanism for performing a predetermined, symbol independent, delimiting operation between successive unistroke symbols in said sequential order, some of said unistroke symbols being linear and others being arcuate, each of said unistroke symbols representing a predefined textual component said delimiting operation distinguishing said unistroke symbols from each other totally independent of without reference to their spatial relationship with respect to each other;"
Useful, but shouldn't be patentable. Apple deserved a patent for its implementation of the multitouch keyboard (that it actually bought the company fingerworks for). But not for every gesture one can think up on it.
statcDec 26, 2008
Then they could just patent-squat it and no phone could ever implement it.
phoompDec 26, 2008
Especially since the Palm and Windows Mobile OS's were doing this *years* ago.
ruefusDec 26, 2008
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Closed AccountDec 26, 2008
They already have that, but it only works on Jobs' iPhone.How? He just swipes with his middle finger repeatedly.
kabloinkDec 26, 2008
I wonder if Xerox will sue them like they did Palm sing their patent #5,596,656. Though, the fact that Apple is using a finger instead of a pointer may make a difference unless you interpret the finger as being a pointer."a user interface including a manually manipulatable pointer for writing mutually independent unistroke symbols in sequential time order and a user controlled signaling mechanism for performing a predetermined, symbol independent, delimiting operation between successive unistroke symbols in said sequential order, some of said unistroke symbols being linear and others being arcuate, each of said unistroke symbols representing a predefined textual component said delimiting operation distinguishing said unistroke symbols from each other totally independent of without reference to their spatial relationship with respect to each other;"
rolfDec 26, 2008
Useful, but shouldn't be patentable. Apple deserved a patent for its implementation of the multitouch keyboard (that it actually bought the company fingerworks for). But not for every gesture one can think up on it.
inkswampDec 26, 2008
No, companies like Creative and others suing Apple frivolously needs to stop. Until then, preemptive patents like this will continue.
inkswampDec 26, 2008
The interface is not the problem. I wrote about the real underlying issues with doing copy-and-paste properly in my blog. Here it is (assuming I won't get buried for pimping my own blog):<a class="user" href="http://tinyurl.com/9w5k2s">http://tinyurl.com/9w5k2s</a>