iIn a reexamination certificate issued on September 4, 2013, the USPTO affirmed the patentability of all 20 claims of Steve Job’s pioneering patent on certain features of the iPhone’s mult-touch user interface: US Patent No. 7,479,949 This patent has been in litigation with Samsung and Google’s Motorola Mobility.
The basic subject matter of the patent relates to 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 first claim of the patent calls for:
1. A computing device, comprising:
a touch screen display;
one or more processors; memory; and
one or more programs, wherein the one or more programs are stored in the memory and configured to be executed by the one or more processors, the one or more programs including:
instructions for detecting one or more finger contacts with the touch screen display;instructions for applying one or more heuristics to the one or more finger contacts to determine a command for the device; and
instructions for processing the command;
wherein the one or more heuristics comprise:
a vertical screen scrolling heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a one-dimensional vertical screen scrolling command rather than a two-dimensional screen translation command based on an angle of initial movement of a finger contact with respect to the touch screen display;
a two-dimensional screen translation heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to the two-dimensional screen translation command rather than the one-dimensional vertical screen scrolling command based on the angle of initial movement of the finger contact with respect to the touch screen display; and
a next item 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.
