The United States Patent and Trademark Office has rejected another Apple patent, but that’s still not the final decision as Cupertino-based company still has room to include additional information to protect its intellectual property.
What’s especially interesting about the patent number 7,844,915 is that it has been used in Apple’s case against Samsung. The patent covers the ability of a programming interface to determine whether one finger initiates scrolling, or a different number of fingers perform another action. And while 21 individual claims within the patent were rejected, only one (Claim 8) was used in the Apple vs. Samsung trial. Here’s what that claim is all about:
8. A machine readable storage medium storing executable program instructions which when executed cause a data processing system to perform a method comprising: receiving a user input, the user input is one or more input points applied to a touch-sensitive display that is integrated with the data processing system; creating an event object in response to the user input; determining whether the event object invokes a scroll or gesture operation by distinguishing between a single input point applied to the touch-sensitive display that is interpreted as the scroll operation and two or more input points applied to the touch-sensitive display that are interpreted as the gesture operation; issuing at least one scroll or gesture call based on invoking the scroll or gesture operation; responding to at least one scroll call, if issued, by scrolling a window having a view associated with the event object; and responding to at least one gesture call, if issued, by scaling the view associated with the event object based on receiving the two or more input points in the form of the user input.
Now we’ll see whether this new turn of events plays in Samsung’s favor or not. We’ll let you know the minute we hear something new on this…
[Via: TheVerge, AppleInsider]