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If you look into the history of Apple's multi-touch and touch based gestures you'll see that they were not the first to come up with the idea. In fact, they bou
by tensor 15y ago
If you look into the history of Apple's multi-touch and touch based gestures you'll see that they were not the first to come up with the idea. In fact, they bought much of the technology when they bought a company called FingerWorks.
But even before that, in 1991 Pierre Wellner at Xerox published and demonstrated multi-touch gestures including the pinch.
Despite all this, Apple still managed to get a patent on multitouch gestures and continually claim it as their innovation. They filed the patent in 2007. In my opinion, the patent system is really broken.
[source] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-touch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-touch
- Steko 15y ago"Despite all this, Apple still managed to get a patent on multitouch gestures and continually claim it as their innovation. They filed the patent in 2007. In my opinion, the patent system is really broken." Apple doesn't have a total multitouch idea patent. This is the sort of widely repeated ignorance that makes everyone think the patent system is totally broken when it's just mostly broken.
- tensor 15y agoI realize that their patent is somewhat narrow and I'm not aware of the full details. But considering the enormous research history of multi-touch gestures, I'm left wondering why we as a society feel it important to give protections to what amounts to a minor tweak to the idea. Here is a better history of multi-touch by one of the researchers in the field: http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html