[AndrewStephens]

I remember watching the original iPhone presentation thinking "this looks OK but touch screens suck" then having the UI-design-oriented part of my brain completely blown by the bounce-back effect. No other touch screen software worked that way and it is hard to think of something physical that bounces like that (unlike the swipe-to-open metaphor).

I am not a lawyer and I have no opinion on the validity of the bounce-back patent (although the German court rejected it based of publication date rather than merit), but from a business point of view I can see why Apple was so keen to hog bounce-back for itself. I didn't buy a iPhone for a few years but they won a customer that day.

[jasonkester]

It wasn't novel though. I had personally implemented a drag-to-scroll interface with momentum and bounce-back for a Web 1.0 startup in 1999. Just substitute mouse pointer for finger and it's exactly the interface that mobile devices use today.

I can't think it even remotely conceivable that I invented that. It's just one of the first things you think of.

[Retra]

>it is hard to think of something physical that bounces like that

Have you never quickly opened a drawer with stuff in it?

[talmand]

I think a better example would be a drawer with rubber stops that causes the drawer to bounce back if you open it too quickly.

Or a door with a rubber stop on the wall. Or even a door with a soft spring that prevents it from opening too far.

Or a car with good bumpers.

Or a chair that springs forward if you rock back too far.

Or bungee jumping.

Nope, can't see any evidence of that action in the physical world at all.

[AndrewStephens]

Good examples, but I would be willing to bet that at some point all those things have been covered by different patents. The company who patented a chair rocking mechanism would not be affected by the inventor who made a door with soft springs (although I have never seen a door that works exactly that way).

[gamblor956]

The difference is that those patents would cover the specific mechanisms by which the bounce-back effect was achieved. In this case, the Apple patent covered the bounce-back effect itself, without regard to the code or other specific mechanisms used to achieve the effect.

[georgemcbay]

"I would be willing to bet that at some point all those things have been covered by different patents"

I agree, but whether they have been covered and whether they should have been are very different things.

"The company who patented a chair rocking mechanism would not be affected by the inventor who made a door with soft springs"

Probably not, given how messed up the patent system is, but if you read Thomas Jefferson's writings on patents, it isn't too hard to imagine him spinning furiously in his grave at where the patent system is now because of this sort of thing.

See, for example:

http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/presidents/thomas-jefferson/letter...

What the founding fathers considered "non-obvious" was a vastly higher standard than what is passed off as non-obvious these days (these days it seems like most people who talk about patents consider "non-obvious" to be about the equivalent of "could someone have come up with in in a minute off the top of his or her head?", but for Jefferson, et al, these "X but on Y" patents would have been considered laughably weak and extremely damaging to the public good.