Apple has been handed a huge victory in its patent case against Samsung. One of the patent at the centre of the dispute was Patent 381. This patent is commonly refer to as the ‘rubber-band’ or ‘bounce-back’ patent. The patent was filed in December 2007 and issued in December 2008. Full patent number is 7,469,381.
The Patent Background:
[box]
As portable electronic devices become more compact, and the number of functions performed by a given device increases, it has become a significant challenge to design a user interface that allows users to easily interact with a multifunction device. This challenge is particularly significant for handheld portable devices, which have much smaller screens than desktop or laptop computers. This situation is unfortunate because the user interface is the gateway through which users receive not only content but also responses to user actions or behaviors, including user attempts to access a device’s features, tools, and functions. Some portable communication devices (e.g., mobile telephones, sometimes called mobile phones, cell phones, cellular telephones, and the like) have resorted to adding more push buttons, increasing the density of push buttons, overloading the functions of push buttons, or using complex menu systems to allow a user to access, store and manipulate data. These conventional user interfaces often result in complicated key sequences and menu hierarchies that must be memorized by the user.
Many conventional user interfaces, such as those that include physical push buttons, are also inflexible. This is unfortunate because it may prevent a user interface from being configured and/or adapted by either an application running on the portable device or by users. When coupled with the time consuming requirement to memorize multiple key sequences and menu hierarchies, and the difficulty in activating a desired pushbutton, such inflexibility is frustrating to most users.
As a result of the small size of display screens on portable electronic devices and the potentially large size of electronic files, frequently only a portion of a list or of an electronic document of interest to a user can be displayed on the screen at a given time. Users thus will frequently need to scroll displayed lists or to translate displayed electronic documents. Users also will need to rotate and to scale (i.e., magnify or de-magnify) displayed electronic documents. However, the limitations of conventional user interfaces can cause these actions to be awkward to perform.
Furthermore, scrolling displayed lists and translating electronic documents can be awkward on both portable and non-portable electronic devices with touch-screen displays. A user may become frustrated if the scrolling or translation does not reflect the user’s intent. Similarly, a user may become frustrated if rotation and scaling of electronic documents does not reflect the user’s intent.
Accordingly, there is a need for devices with touch-screen displays with more transparent and intuitive user interfaces for scrolling lists of items and for translating, rotating, and scaling electronic documents that are easy to use, configure, and/or adapt.
[/box]
Claim 19:
[box]
A 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 programs including: instructions for displaying a first portion of an electronic document; instructions for detecting a movement of an object on or near the touch screen display; instructions for translating the electronic document displayed on the touch screen display in a first direction to display a second portion of the electronic document, wherein the second portion is different from the first portion, in response to detecting the movement; instructions for displaying an area beyond an edge of the electronic document and displaying a third portion of the electronic document, wherein the third portion is smaller than the first portion, in response to the edge of the electronic document being reached while translating the electronic document in the first direction while the object is still detected on or near the touch screen display; and instructions for translating the electronic document in a second direction until the area beyond the edge of the electronic document is no longer displayed to display a fourth portion of the electronic document, wherein the fourth portion is different from the first portion, in response to detecting that the object is no longer on or near the touch screen display.
[/box]
Source: USPTO
