Couldn’t help myself today!  I read more posts than I cared to that had effectively ceded mobile innovation to Apple today, based on the USPTO’s granting them a patent on fundamental multi-touch UI elements (the pinch, etc.).

What frustrates me at times (OK, most of the time) is the lack of fundamental prior art analysis before such a potentially broad-reaching patent is granted.  The work on multi-touch interface goes back many years.

If you want to get a good sense of just a subset of the work that has been done, take a look at this post by Bill Buxton back in January of 2007 (BTW, he is one smart cookie, currently residing in Microsoft Research with a deep related history to this topic, and a pretty prolific (and articulate) writer and speaker).  Hopefully his post gives you a little sense of the body of work in this area.

Here’s hoping for two things:

• The new administration continues to make strides on materially improvements the US patent process – patents like this demonstrate how far we still need to go.
• The tech community reacts to the innovation-inhibiting elements of this patent and supported efforts to get it revoked in its current form.