John, do you have Sophie running on this thing yet?

Aaron Reichow revaaron at bitquabit.com
Sat Jan 13 09:08:40 UTC 2007


Jon-

On Jan 10, 2007, at 12:41 PM, Jon Hylands wrote:

> 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?

I hope not! In addition to your work, I've seen that feature in  
another application, one that I like a great deal- Picsel's Picsel  
Browser and Picsel Viewer applications. It's a doc viewer (PDF, MS  
Office) for various mobile platforms.  You mostly control it with  
various gestures- a double tap with a stylus movement in or out while  
holding the second tap down zoom in and out, and the flick acts like  
you describe.

Incidentally, Picsel Viewer and Browser are awesome apps, and easily  
is the best mobile PDF reader around. The bummer is that you can't  
buy it or download a demo- you can only get Picsel OEM with your  
device. They are starting to change this, but they are moving  
glacially on that front. Which is a shame, as Picsel is an awesome  
doc viewer for PDAs and smartphones.

Regards,
Aaron



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