Patent Watch: More Multi-Touch Gestures for the iPhone
MacRumors brings word of yet more Apple patents passing through the system, this time focusing on multi-touch gestures. How can you patent a gesture? Don't get us started. The USPO has raised the bar on ludicrous so high a giant could now safely run under it. The particulars of this one is interesting to anyone interested in the iPhone interface, however:
For example, erasing and basic punctuation insertion, directional swipes (also referred to herein as "swipe gestures") over the alphabetic keys can be used as an alternative to striking certain keys. Because the Space and Backspace keys are quite frequently used, they are logical candidates for the rightward and leftward swipes, respectively. Leftward and rightward swipes intuitively match the cursor travel caused by these symbols. Following this cursor movement analogy, the Enter/Return may be invoked by a downward swipe, and a Shift/Caps may be invoked by an upward swipe. Alternatively, as the Enter and Shift functions may be less frequently invoked, these may be substituted for other functions as well. One alternative mapping for the upward swipe, for example, could be to activate an alternative numeric and punctuation keypad or a particular punctuation symbol like an apostrophe or period.
Our question? Where's the cut/copy paste gesture already?!
Editor-in-Chief of iMore, Executive Producer at Mobile Nations, co-host of Iterate and ZEN and TECH, cook, grappler, photon wrangler.
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I wish somebody would cite Graffiti as prior art for this nonsense.
And then make Apple open the platform up to PDA emulators.
I agree with the cut and paste thing, having patents to help people make peorids and apostrophès is, in my opinion, less important than developing cut & paste. Though these are inovative gestures, it should be all the more easier to create cut & paste gestures which, again in opinion, more important than symbol gestures.
But what do I know. -KM.
How hard is it to hit the spacebar? The keyboard's already there. Some things just don't need to be improved. Work on the things we're missng please.
I think Apple is introducing this patent (and few others as well) to change few things around in terms of functionality in order for them to implement features like cut & paste.
Sounds interesting. Don't know if they should go removing the spacebar though!
Sounds like grafiti to me.
Did they ever even try a Windows Mobile device? And did they ever hear about the expression 'prior art'?
Sounds cool to me.
Really, a copy/ paste bitch?
iPhone Blog Post = Copy Another Blog's Article + Complain About Copy/ Paste
Google "Fitaly" for Palm, Windows Mobile, Tablet, etc. It's only been around for 10 years or so.
"Most of the time we tap on keys of a keyboard. In addition, version 2.0 of the Fitaly keyboard has introduced the notion of sliding, that is, the act of moving the pen to another key after the initial tap."
and
"Our experience with Fitaly 2.0 has shown the value of sliding to quickly enter capitals and digits. Most users have found it to be very natural and fast: it is much faster to slide a key than to tap a shift key and a given letter."
Does no one even make an attempt to find prior art anymore???
What we really need is mms cut and paste and video recording forwarding messages I hope the next iPhone includes all this
Anybody here use the MobileTerminal application available on hacked iphones? It has gestures exactly like what this patent is claiming. Swipe down to return, swipe left to backspace, etc. It even distinguishes between long and a short swipes, as well as making use of diagonal swipes.