It took a couple of days for this to surface, but it looks like Apple was awarded yet another patent last week – a big one. Awarded on January 20th, the company scored patent number 7,479,949, which was applied for on April 18th of last year. The patent covers multi-touch functionality like pinch, rotation, and swipe.
World of Apple has the text from the patent titled "Touch screen device, method, and graphical user interface for determining commands by applying heuristics."
It begins,
A computer-implemented method for use in conjunction with a computing device with a touch screen display comprises: detecting one or more finger contacts with the touch screen display, applying one or more heuristics to the one or more finger contacts to determine a command for the device, and processing the command. The one or more heuristics comprise: a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a one-dimensional vertical screen scrolling command, a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a two-dimensional screen translation command, and a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a command to transition from displaying a respective item in a set of items to displaying a next item in the set of items.
The real question is whether the legality of certain gestures will be upheld. For example, the Palm Pre also uses a "pinching" gesture for zoom, which would seem to be covered.
"In some embodiments, a multi-finger de-pinching gesture magnifies the image 1606 by a variable amount in accordance with the position of the multi-finger de-pinching gesture and the amount of finger movement in the multi-finger de-pinching gesture,"Apple's patent continues. "In some embodiments, a multi-finger pinching gesture demagnifies the image 1606 by a variable amount in accordance with the position of the multi-finger pinching gesture and the amount of finger movement in the multi-finger pinching gesture."
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World of Apple has the text from the patent titled "Touch screen device, method, and graphical user interface for determining commands by applying heuristics."
It begins,
A computer-implemented method for use in conjunction with a computing device with a touch screen display comprises: detecting one or more finger contacts with the touch screen display, applying one or more heuristics to the one or more finger contacts to determine a command for the device, and processing the command. The one or more heuristics comprise: a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a one-dimensional vertical screen scrolling command, a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a two-dimensional screen translation command, and a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a command to transition from displaying a respective item in a set of items to displaying a next item in the set of items.
The real question is whether the legality of certain gestures will be upheld. For example, the Palm Pre also uses a "pinching" gesture for zoom, which would seem to be covered.
"In some embodiments, a multi-finger de-pinching gesture magnifies the image 1606 by a variable amount in accordance with the position of the multi-finger de-pinching gesture and the amount of finger movement in the multi-finger de-pinching gesture,"Apple's patent continues. "In some embodiments, a multi-finger pinching gesture demagnifies the image 1606 by a variable amount in accordance with the position of the multi-finger pinching gesture and the amount of finger movement in the multi-finger pinching gesture."
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