On Wed, 10 Jan 2007 10:33:35 -0800, Joshua Gargus <schwa at fastmail.us>
wrote:

> There are plenty of bright people who could invent patentable UIs for  
> this new class of device, but because of the high barriers to entry  
> everyone else has to sit on the sidelines while Apple generates new  
> patents at their leisure

Interestingly, I wrote a touch-scrolling system that works almost
identically to the one in the iPhone back in 1997, when I was working on
the web browser at Interval Research. Carl Watts had the idea to "flick"
the page to make it keep scrolling, and then you could touch the page to
stop it anywhere (which didn't count as a click). It also slowed down and
stopped on its own.

I wonder if they got a patent on that one?

Later,
Jon

--------------------------------------------------------------
   Jon Hylands      Jon at huv.com      http://www.huv.com/jon

  Project: Micro Raptor (Small Biped Velociraptor Robot)
           http://www.huv.com/blog