Obviousness and interpretation heuristics
Obviousness and interpretation heuristics
Posted Feb 3, 2009 7:39 UTC (Tue) by pjm (guest, #2080)Parent article: Apple's touch-screen patent
Surely this first claim (at least) counts as obvious ... to a person having ordinary skill in the art. Just a couple of weeks ago I was working on code to implement heuristics for what type of scrolling to do based on stylus/finger movement on a touchscreen. If there's no prior art for the claim then it would only be because no-one's previously had that set of available commands specified in the second half of the claim, or that no-one particularly wanted to restrict scrolling to one dimension. (I know that I considered whether to restrict scrolling to just one dimension and decided it not particularly useful for my application.)
I'd be fairly sure that snapping an angle to exactly a multiple of 90° when near said multiple isn't novel: I believe this is found in various drawing programs when drawing a line. The general principle comes from Bayes theorem, which is already widely employed in deciphering analogue input (especially handwriting or other on-screen text input methods): that the probability that a gesture intends a particular command/result is calculated from the a-priori likelihood of the user wanting a given result (for each available result) and the probability of the user using this particular gesture if they want that result. ("A-priori" here meaning how likely you'd think the user wanted that result if you didn't know what gesture they'd given.) In terms of that Wikipedia page, search for partition; B refers to the gesture that the user has just given, and {A_j} are the available commands/results. I mention this in the hope that it reminds readers of this principle when writing any code that interprets pointer position, both so that better software is written and so that better prior art is created.