Slashdot Mirror

These principles, based on experimental science as well as common sense, opened up the power of computing to several generations

Of course much of the science was based on a mouse and keyboard interaction on a computer, not touch on mobile.

Contrary to popular belief, Apple did not invent the touch interface. In fact they had absolutely nothing to do with its early development. IBM did most of the pioneering work, showcasing it with touchscreen kiosks at the U.S. Open in the 1990s (which led to the discovery of gorilla arm syndrome). Apple blatantly lifted most of that multitouch R&D and implemented it in the iPhone (then tried to sue others for "copying" them). They didn't even make the first touchscreen "smart" phone - IBM did in 1993.

Point being, touchscreens are not some newfangled 21st century development. The old GUI operating principles were based on touchscreens as well as mouse and keyboard. Many aspects like dialog boxes, radio buttons, scrolling, etc. carry over to both types of interfaces.

This is why those interfaces work. Let's take a scrolling view for example. The traditional approach is to put a scrollbar in, and that's what most everyone was doing before the iPhone came along. The scrollbar is discoverable and it provides visual feedback. Sounds good right? Well it turns out using a scrollbar on a mobile device is a miserable experience. Swipe to scroll turned out to be the vastly superior method, and as soon as you learn to swipe (my 1 year old figured it out watching me) it is trivially easy to operate without any additional visual clutter.

Actually the scrollbar became outdated with the advent of the mouse wheel. What is not outdated however is the presence of the scrollbar - not so you can use it to scroll the page, but as a visual indicator of how far along the page you've scrolled. This makes it easy to see where in a webpage or document you are, so if you can more easily navigate back to it in the future. Like you know the recipe you want in a cookbook is about 1/3rd of the way in. Unfortunately the newest design fad seems to be eliminating this visual indicator scrollbar, or designing web pages which continuously grow longer when you reach the bottom making the scroll indicator useless. Those designers should be forced to live in an apartment building where the elevator buttons are replaced by an infinitely rotatable wheel with no markings, and they have to guess how far to spin it to get to their floor.

Same with other gestures in the iPhone.
Deleting a row in a table. You can put a button on every row to make that discoverable at the cost of high risk of accidental deletion and visual noise, or you can make rows swipe left to expose the delete function. The swipe once learned in 5 seconds is vastly superior for the rest of your lifetime using it.

I can't believe you just wrote up something about scrolling, but you missed the conflict in functionality between swipe to delete and swipe to scroll. Not to mention what happens when you're trying to tap and your finger slips making it a swipe.

That's the fundamental problem with touch interfaces. The tapping vs moving motions are not orthogonal like with a mouse (where they're registered by two separate devices entirely - button and optical sensor). Actions with severe consequences have to be redesigned to compensate for this lack of orthogonality. Every swipe may in fact have meant to have been a tap, so you need extra safeguards in place of an operation like delete, not just blithely assign it to a swipe. (Google's Android apps accomplish this by immediately bringing up the undo option if you swipe to delete.)

Right.

This demonstrates pretty clearly that Hogan either doesn't understand prior art, or is very clever about misleading the PTO about prior art.

One basic fundamental principal of all Patents (well, all utility patents ... I have no idea what they're smoking over on the Design Patent side of things, but I'd like to try some, given a long weekend) is that of not being "obvious to one skilled in the art". The PTO's never been very good with this anyway, since every applicant tries to convince them they've invented something profound, when it's usually pretty ordinary. And obvious. Of course, one fundamental failing of the PTO, particularly at the dawn of software patenting, was the complete lack of examiners "skilled in the art" well enough to even correctly judge this level of obviousness.

One major point of failure is "X, but on Y". So personal computers have had removable storage at least since the PET 2001 by buddy had in 1977. Probably a bit before, but I can personally verify that one, having loaded and even written the cassette tapes myself. Given that pretty much every advanced set top box designed is a somewhat specialized personal computer (having designed personal computers for 11.5 years and STBs for 6, you can trust me on this), there's absolutely nothing not obvious to one skilled in the art about adding any kind of removable storage to an STB. In fact, I had one in the late 1990s that did USB, if not SD cards (in fairness, the original SD Card wasn't released until 2000, and no one would really want to use flash memory for video back then anyway, it was simply too small). Same goes for smartphones, tablets, etc.

Which means the invention might still be patentable, but it has to be implemented in a really unique way -- you need a real invention, not just copying the PC schematic over to a slightly different personal computer design and calling that an invention. But the patent files are full of things everyone did for years, with "on a smartphone", "on the internet", "on a tablet", whatever, pretty much just tacked on. And most applications are terrible about including the obvious prior art everyone knows about, even though that's a filing requirement. Even if it's not patented. I've written a few patents, analyzed dozens for various purposes (prior art, actual infringement, etc)... it's a heinous mess, overall.

And largely not because of clowns like Hogan, but because large companies learned to work the system, years back. They've mastered the art of getting nothing through the system, then claiming it covers everything. And they know, it's regular rubes will be judging the patents in court, much of the time. Look at Apple's '915 patent, which some people think covers all of multi-touch, pinch to zoom, and probably anything anyone's ever done with a touchscreen. But in the legal brew-ha-ha with Elan, the ITC determined that Apple's stuff was very, very specific to the way they did it, wasn't infringing on Elan, and neither were Elan's patents infringing on Apple... though Apple settled for paying them $5 million (pocket change) and a cross-licensing agreement. Given the VAST amount of prior art on touch (going back to the 60s) and multi-touch (early 80s), it's impossible to believe Apple really has anything fundamental here (see http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html). But Apple knows that's rarely brought up in these kinds of cases... and it looks like Hogan did what he could to mislead the regular rubes, perhaps far worse than if know-nothing-specifics were on the case.

Microsoft Engineering Bill Buxton has this nice collection of multitouch systems going back to the early 80s. Pinch to zoom dates back as early as 1982. This collections of prior art makes it plainly obvious that people "skilled in the art" not only would find something like pinch to zoom obvious, the in fact did and implemented it long before the iPhone ever existed.

Was it implemented on a computer you could hold in your hand? No, simply because the technology was not small enough to fit in your hand. But just because Apple was the first to implement it in your hand, does not mean they were in anyway inventing something novel, unique, and non-obvious that deserves patent protection. Apple made a logical, obvious, iteration to a decades old technology. I don't see how this is possibly a point of contention, and the fact the jurors went the other way on this leads me to believe the headline is 100% correct, or something else fishy is going on.

there was a foreman who was an engineer and has multiple patents. And led the juries, to protect the patents because he'd want "his" patents protected.

More precisely, he is a patent troll who patented the DVR several years after ReplayTV and Tivo released their DVRs to market. He probably recognised a kindred spirit in Apple, which thus managed to get confirmed patents such as pinch-to-zoom (first implemented by Myron Krueger in 1983) and slide-to-unlock (a trivial, obvious gesture but actually patented three years before Apple by Swedish company Neonode).

Additionally, he's been going around grandstanding, giving interviews where he reveals that he instructed the other jury members not to actually read their deliberation instructions because he acted as an expert witness for them in interpreting the law (thus being an expert witness giving testimony to the jury yet unavailable for cross-examination by Samsung). Mistrial material right there.

Are you saying it is impossible to build a phone without pinch-to-zoom or scroll bounce-back?

No, I'm saying pinch-zoom and scroll bounce back are both obvious and natural ways to interact with devices and should not be patentable. Akin to click-drag, pinch zoom is one of the most natural gestures for zoom, and in fact has plenty of prior art, the earliest pre-dating the iPhone by over 20 years. Aside from Samsung's own expert testimony on coll bounce prior art, it is also natural and obvious, as any spring loaded mechanism contains the exact same feedback the iPhone's emulates on the screen. Same goes for slide to unlock.

But the jury didn't even consider the patents validity in their decisions. They went so far as to say such matters bogged down the process, and proceeded diligently as if the patents were valid, as instructed by a patent-holder foreman.

With such copious examples of prior art and physical analogs, these patents are analogous to Apple patenting the placement of speakers and microphones in a phone. Sure you could make a phone without a speaker on the top and a microphone on the bottom, but it would be completely counterintuitive. If the patent system is designed to encourage innovation and not obviousness, yet we have patents on obviousness, the patent system is completely fucked.

Work on multi-touch and mutli-touch gestures date as far back as the 1980s and 1990s.

Abstract - A prototype touch-sensitive tablet Is presented. The tablet's main innovation is that It Is capable of sensing mare than one point of contact at a time. In addition to being able to provide position coordinates, the tablet also gives a measure of degree of contact, independently for each point of contact. In order to enable multi-touch sensing, the tablet surface is divided into a grid of discrete points. The points are scanned using a recursive area subdivision algorithm. In order to minimize the resolution lost due to the discrete nature of the grid, a novel interpolation scheme has been developed. Finally, the paper briefly discusses how multi-touch sensing, interpolation, and degree of contact sensing can be combined to expand our vocabulary In human-computer Interaction.

Video

This stuff wasn't new in 1998, and it certainly wasn't new in 2006 with the release of the iPhone. Apple has proven to be litigious enough as of late, so why haven't they taken these multi-touch patents out of the war chest? Is it because they expect them to be summarily struck down due to the copious prior art?

The original patents on multi-touch belonged to a company founded back in 1998 called Fingerworks

That's interesting, since actual multitouch systems predate Fingerworks by almost 2 decades.

Here's an example of the pinch gesture being used in 1988: http://youtu.be/dmmxVA5xhuo?t=4m32s

Why isn't Apple suing every phone manufacturer in existence? I'm quite sure Apple doesn't want its acquired patents to face their day in court.

pinch-zoom gestures that originated with the iPhone.

Nope, that was a knock-off too, and Apple knew it. Mutli-touch touchscreens, gesture recognition, and pinch-zoom has been around since the 1980's.

That is the least of it. This article about multi-touch from Bill Buxton at Microsoft Research shows lots more. Things to note; Capacitive interfaces in 1985; touch based smart phone in 1992; Starfire the movie from 1992 (note hand drawn picture showing grid interface)

"Good Artists Borrow, Great Artists Steal" - Steve Jobs, 1996 - apparently stolen from Picasso

BTW; apparently there was a commercial deal between Xerox and Apple related to the WIMP interface; that becomes a contract issue rather than a theft issue.

http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html

  It was

The relevant factor is whether or not it was called 'multi-touch' by anyone before Apple.

Here's a paper from 1984: http://www.billbuxton.com/leebuxtonsmith.pdf

Satisfied?

Trademark and patents are different things. Its not enough to show a single reference to prior art. Its a question of whether the term is in general use. In this case it has become so in the time since the trademark was applied for. At the time the term multi-touch wasn't in widespread use. Touchscreen was everywhere, but not multi-touch. It was a stretch for Apple to attempt to get the term trademarked, but not entirely unreasonable.

The relevant factor is whether or not it was called 'multi-touch' by anyone before Apple.

Here's a paper from 1984: http://www.billbuxton.com/leebuxtonsmith.pdf

Satisfied?

Yes. But you can't take a pre-existing word in use by multiple people to describe a particular technology, trademark it, and then prevent those same people using the word they've been using for longer than you to describe the stuff they invented. (Here's some of that UToronto work the OP was talking about, if you're unsure as to whether they were using the same term to describe it).

Before the iPhone, almost no one used the term "multi-touch".

But *almost* no one is not good enough. In order for it to be a valid trademark, they would need to show they were the first to use it as a term for a similar type of system. As this paper from 1984 seems to predate any work Apple did using such technology, it seems unlikely they were the first.

How many times do I have to say this: Apple's patent completely agnostic to the input technology. It 100% has to do with the physical gestures of 1) tap and drag 2) pinch and zoom. That is to say, if I built a device entirely based on Krueger's 1988 technology, I would be in violation of Apple's patent. This is absurd.

To take your car analogy, it is like patenting pressing the gas pedal to make the car go forward. It doesn't matter if you have a piston engine or a rotary engine; if you're pressing a pedal to make the car go forward, you're violating the patent. To suggest that competitors should have different gestures to pan and zoom is as ludicrous as suggesting different car manufacturers should have different throttle interfaces.

Finally, the video you linked violates the patent: "a frame displaying a portion of frame content, and other content of the web page, comprising content of the web page other than the frame content; detecting a translation gesture by a single finger on or near the touch screen display; in response to detecting the translation gesture by the single finger, translating the web page content to display a new portion of web page content in the stationary application window on the touch screen display, wherein translating the web page content includes simultaneously translating the displayed portion of the frame content and the other content of the web page."

Translated: touch the screen with a finger, move the finger, things move under finger. Known to us mere humans as moving things with our hands. We do it every day. Babies do it before they even know how to talk or read. It's so obvious and intuitive and it's been implemented time and time again.

certainly.

http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html

A full screen multi touch iPod was the number 1 rumor for years before the iPhone came out. Putting a GSM radio in it doesn't make it completely unexpected. Further, multitouch devices have been around for decades, including the associated (and obvious) gestures. See http://billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html

Ugh. Where to start?
Here's just the tip of the iceberg:
1. rectangular electronic devices with/without rounded corners
2, icons: either in rows & columns or all over the place
3. cell phones
4. devices with touch screens
5. multi-touch
6. pinch to zoom
and perhaps the biggest:
7. thinking they invented everything

Engadget has an interesting article that covers some of this: http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/28/apple-vs-palm-the-in-depth-analysis/
And one other interesting article: http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html

> One has to wonder...

Actually, no, there is no need to wonder. The only innovation in the iPhone is taking ideas and technology from other people and companies and putting it on a smart phone.

The multi-touch you seem to think everyone stole from Apple, guess what... Multitouch Overview.

Apple is not even close to being the inventor of multi-touch and it is not even that difficult to discover this fact if one simply does a quick google search before making false assumptions and writing a paragraph based on those false assumptions.

The iPhone is a pretty cool device but lets not get carried away and start making suggestions that other manufacturers and developers are lifting ideas from Apple without first checking to see if the ideas actually came from Apple in the first place.

Contrary to popular belief Apple didn't invent multi-touch

[...] my group at the University of Toronto was working on multi-touchin 1984 (Lee, Buxton & Smith, 1985), the same year that the first Macintosh computer was released, and we were not the first. [...] Wayne Westerman, co-founder of FingerWorks, a company that Apple acquired early in 2005, and now an Apple employee

Microsoft borrowing ideas from Apple again?

Yes, seems that way.

Bill Buxton isn't just some random Microsoft employee, he's one of the pioneers of the industry, and has been working with multi-touch systems since back in the early eighties.

Contrary to popular belief Apple didn't invent multi-touch

Multi-touch technologies have a long history. To put it in perspective, my group at the University of Toronto was working on multi-touchin 1984 (Lee, Buxton & Smith, 1985), the same year that the first Macintosh computer was released, and we were not the first. Furthermore, during the development of the iPhone, Apple was very much aware of the history of multi-touch, dating at least back to 1982, and the use of the pinch gesture, dating back to 1983. This is clearly demonstrated by the bibliography of the PhD thesis of Wayne Westerman, co-founder of FingerWorks, a company that Apple acquired early in 2005, and now an Apple employee:

Westerman, Wayne (1999). Hand Tracking,Finger Identification, and Chordic Manipulation on a Multi-Touch Surface. U of Delaware PhD Dissertation: http://www.ee.udel.edu/~westerma/main.pdf

In making this statement about their awareness of past work, I am not criticizing Westerman, the iPhone, or Apple. It is simply good practice and good scholarship to know the literature and do one's homework when embarking on a new product. What I am pointing out, however, is that "new" technologies - like multi-touch - do not grow out of a vacuum. While marketing tends to like the "great invention" story, real innovation rarely works that way. In short, the evolution of multi-touch is a text-book example of what I call "the long-nose of innovation."

Microsoft borrowing ideas from Apple again?

It's probably the other way round. Nice troll though.

Bill Buxton, Multi-Touch Overview :

Multi-touch technologies have a long history. To put it in perspective, my group at the University of Toronto was working on multi-touch in 1984 (Lee, Buxton & Smith, 1985), the same year that the first Macintosh computer was released, and we were not the first. Furthermore, during the development of the iPhone, Apple was very much aware of the history of multi-touch, dating at least back to 1982, and the use of the pinch gesture, dating back to 1983. This is clearly demonstrated by the bibliography of the PhD thesis of Wayne Westerman, co-founder of FingerWorks, a company that Apple acquired early in 2005, and now an Apple employee:

Westerman, Wayne (1999). Hand Tracking,Finger Identification, and Chordic Manipulation on a Multi-Touch Surface. U of Delaware PhD Dissertation: http://www.ee.udel.edu/~westerma/main.pdf

In making this statement about their awareness of past work, I am not criticizing Westerman, the iPhone, or Apple. It is simply good practice and good scholarship to know the literature and do one's homework when embarking on a new product. What I am pointing out, however, is that "new" technologies - like multi-touch - do not grow out of a vacuum. While marketing tends to like the "great invention" story, real innovation rarely works that way.

...

any idiot who has watched any sci-fi

Sigh. No need to bring that in to it and gloss over the real people involced. HCI researchers have been researching multitouch since the early 80s, or even before.
http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html

They did all the real hard grunt work making it actually work. Now a bunch of companies want to swoop in and claim the inventions as their own simply because they want to market it.

For what it's worth, I do not think that pinch zoom obvious. In 1984. When it was invented. By now, since multitouch is so old, to anyone versed in the HCI world, yeah, this stuff is a mix of pretty obvious and been done before.

But they didn't patent the concept of multitouch technology. They even point out that that's covered by a different patent. They covered the concept of using multitouch to do certain things and for certain purposes.

Basic multitouch tech, including capacitive, is decades old. Here, look at this:

http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html

He points out that capacitive touchpad tech predates personal computers, having been used in music synth before the advent of personal computing. And he discusses a working multitouch display in 1984. And there was a capacitive multitouch pad for computers in 1985.

The basic multitouch tech isn't really an issue, there is too much prior art that is too old and well-documented. Seems like this is all about using multitouch in certain specific ways. It seems to me that this is more like the Amazon one-click patent -- it's not about patenting "clicking a button once", but "clicking a button once as a part of this elaborate process we're discussing".

I have been following this story since April of 2009. This link http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html is the best explanation of how multi-touch technology was created.

It's funny how people trapped by the reality distortion field will assert that two wrongs make a right as long as the second wrong is by Apple!

Summarising the exchange without the Apple goggles, Apple was once a nice company that did good work and contributed useful advances to the world of technology. They are now a company of mostly designers and lawyers that make Microsoft's embrace extend extinguish look like a model of speculative R&D. They use standards designed to correctly identify classes of technical device to enforce an anti-competitive business model.

Seriously, they now offer nothing of use to people who know how to create their own "oooh shiny" experience that "just works" without needing to be locked in to the expensive bloated crud that is iTunes/Appstore. Even the multitouch patent is of questionable validity considering it goes back to the early nineteen eighties. (but that link's from someone at microsoft research and who wants to listen to dweeds from there when... oooh shiny!)

I strongly suggest, jo_ham, that you do not cross the road at night. I fear shiny headlights of oncoming vehicles would render you incapable of moving or thinking independently.

I dug a little and found this ... http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html

Bill Buxton's multi touch history (in particular, check out 1992 onwards, starting with a system called "Starfire")..

I don't mind protection of truly novel ideas, but multitouch seems to me like one of those things that would be pretty obvious to any half-decent geek who's been presented with a piece of hardware capable of accurately reading such things.. (witness Jeff Han et. al).. Hell - the movie 'Minority Report' was released before the patent was claimed - doesn't that count as prior presentation of the idea?

It seems to me that iPhone-esque multitouch is the sort of thing that has probably been discussed over beer & pizza by literally thousands of wannabe dreamers who lack only the [ materials science background / electrical engineering knowledge / financial backing / time / etc / etc ] to pull it off...

*sigh*

for anyone gullible enough to think that Apple invented any of this stuff, rather than wait 20 years for the technology to catch up to the theory:
Multi-Touch Systems that I Have Known and Loved .

Don't know about Image composing software, but the concept of 'Surface' has surfaced plenty of times before Microsoft. When I saw this, I immediately remembered back in my days at the UofT, I think I took the HCI class in 97, that's when I first saw the multi-touch screen concept, with ideas of dragging/dropping various windows on the table, overlaying various 'filters', for example one filter would be used for zoom function, another filter would OCR text, another filter would convert file formats etc.

As is usually the case, the Apple fanboys who think Apple invented multi-touch have no understanding of its actual history. A good overview is presented by Bill Buxton here: http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html

I really admire Steve Jobs's marketing skills. He's even been known to not only present as "new" features in Mac OS X that were in Windows first, but in some cases even to convince Mac users that they're unique to OS X, or that Microsoft copied them from OS X.

The reality of course is that commercial products rarely if ever include cutting-edge research, as it typically takes years if not decades for new ideas to reach a tipping point. Even so, Apple tend to be more daring than most firms in terms of putting their business model at risk to commercialise technologies copied from competitors or from the research community. The Mac, for example, basically destroyed Apple's existing business (built on the Apple II), and almost ruined the company, but Apple did at least manage to break away from the Apple II legacy.

In terms of design, Apple's long been a market leader, and Steve Jobs has always had a knack for design, even if he's not as technically proficient as someone like Bill Gates. Overall, I like Apple's products, and have considered buying some of them, though I've always managed to find technically superior products at lower prices from competitors.

They are right that multi-touch has been around for decades. For a quick and dirty primer refer to Bill Buxton's article on the history of multi-touch.

http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html

Basically there is a lot of confusion among non-specialists regarding what is new and what is old. This article is very useful in dispelling any misunderstandings.

Oh yeah, that and all of this tech has been predated by other work out of Xerox Parc by a least 17 years. (See "Digital Desktop" - 1991 - at that link)

It goes back to before there were any demos, as far as I know. It goes back to the 80's, to research done by Bill Buxton (whose overview of multitouch history is very informative). In fact, it may even go back further to 1982, according to "Tog" (see the section on "Multi-Touch Interface History"). So, there's no way Apple could have any (legitimate) patents on this particular gesture.

Some others have suggested that these patents wouldn't be a big deal, as one could always use different gestures. The problems with this suggestion is that not all gestures are equal. Some are more natural than others. The pinch gesture, for example, is as natural as it gets: it's merely a logical extension of dragging, as what you're really doing is just dragging two points with two fingers. It doesn't feel like a "gesture", but simple direct manipulation. Look at how successful this gesture has been. It may even have been invented several times independently. I, for one, would not give up the "pinch". Thankfully, Apple has no legal ground to stand on with respect to that gesture.

While the first mass-media use may have been in Minority Report, research on multi-touch systems goes back at least to the mid-80s, and quite possibly before. http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html

What are the issues in designing an interface that is clean, easy to understand, and easy to use? What are things to be considered? What are things to be avoided? What are good over-all philosophies of UI design? Reading the questions posted, I'd recommend becoming familiar with the broader principles that inform nearly any sort of design; then narrow your reading and research to specific GUI-oriented design. Developing a healthy sense and understanding for what makes an effective user experience is important to any sort of consumer design work (and effective UI design definitely is about understanding your consumer/target audience); "usability" as a discipline has yielded to the larger field of Experience Design (XD) as a key area of study for GUI-designers. Let's start from the 10,000-foot view: Books I'd recommend for your conceptual skills are: --Bill Buxton's *Sketching User Experiences: Getting the design right and the right design*. Bill's background at Xerox PARC and later at SGI/Alias|Wavefront (creators of the Maya 3D CGI software, among others) have made him a pretty revered figure in the industry. This book's a terrific primer on the process of thinking about design. --The upcoming O'Reilly release, written by Adaptive Path, *Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World*. What's the distinction between product and service? Adaptive Path--the outfit from which came Jesse James Garrett's seminal white paper on Ajax three years ago--started thinking about this as they examined the success of the iTunes and iPod experience; the book grew from there. Moving down to 5,000 feet: For best-practices from the usability perspective (hey, an easy-to-use site usually has a well-designed GUI), it's hard to beat the two canonical books: --Steve Krug's *Don't Make Me Think!* (now in its second edition) --Jakob Nielsen's *Designing Web Usability* Both books arrived as website usability emerged as the successor to the David Siegel School of "third generation web design" in the late 90's. Nielsen codified usability best practices through a research-intensive method, and Krug made usability accessible for the creatives who thought Nielsen a bit pedantic. Solid, foundational material that hasn't needed radical revising in nearly 10 years. Ground-level: Here's where you and/or your team go to work, and I heartily recommend you check out another O'Reilly title, *Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design*, by Jenifer Tidwell. There are several solid tutorials out there on in-the-trenches GUI design, but I've still seen nothing as effective as this one. Hoping this helps, --Steve Weiss Executive Editor O'Reilly Media Links: http://www.billbuxton.com/ http://adaptivepath.com/ http://www.useit.com/ http://www.sensible.com/ http://jtidwell.net/

Jeff Han lead project at NYU to produce multi-touch display technology and some demo applications.

Check this link out: http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html

http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html

What a bunch of hypocritical ninconpoopery. Although, that's only to be expected when reading SlashDot and Microsoft in the same sentence. I was impressed to see a few people actually backing the 3v1l suxx0rz, however. I haven't read all the posts and this one won't get read either, but I couldn't not put something down.

Bill Buxton recently spoke at CSCW 2006 and had a great talk. One of the things he talked about was his recent hiring by Microsft Research. He took a lot of flak when he moved there, but here he presented the reasons he joined. Basically, Microsoft funds and embraces research, and they encourage people to publish what they find. This can be seen in reality when you look at the mass of publications that come from or are touched by Microsoft Research at many of the academic conferences I attend regularly (like SIGCHI, CSCW, UIST, etc...). I have known many people who have done many internships at MSR, why would they go back if it is so terrible?

A good example of research personified is the new side-bar in Vista. This idea was not stolen from anywhere. It was originally published here and in that paper you'll see the original prototype was written by a research intern, who was inspired by work he and I were doing together at the time in our graduate programs (and that work is cited by this paper as well). Am I peeved that MS hasn't bought out my MSc Thesis? No! Is he peeved that MSR furthered and then included his prototype in a shipping product several years later? No! Most of the numpties here would be peeved, though. Whatever. We work at the same company now, and I can honestly say it's a discussion we've never had.

It was amazing to see the zealots in the CSCW community turn on Buxton. Buxton is long resepected and almost revered in this research area, but the overpowering hate of MS broke through even his passionate and relevant points. It's almost as bad as religious extremism. During the question period, one attendee called out MS (using Bill Buxton as the face) for not releasing easy ways for him to get projects he was working on in after school programs with kids onto the XBox. "Why can't I compile and run this stuff on an XBox without paying lots of money to MS? If MS is so great, why don't they enable people to use their stuff?" Bill said "well geez, contact me after the conference and I'll look into it." Anyways, it's unrelated to Bill, how about this??? And a month after his talk, no less. MS knows that enabling people on their systems is the way to go, and they work towards that. Slashdot will accuse them of stealing the idea from OSS, I can't wait.

(Now) classic Slashdot riff: "PS3 is teh suxx0rz! My XBOX 360 pWns! Gonna get a Wii too!" followed by a post in the next article by the same person "M$ is teh suxx0rz! Evil evil bad horrible!" Again, if you don't want to use MS products, then don't! It's that simple! I run Windows because I don't have to think about it. It has the tools I want, accessible and running. I run a Linux file server, because it's inexpensive (cost: a bunch of hard drives and an old pc I'm not using) and it works just for what I need. This is hardly Gap or Nike or Enron or McKesson (personal experience dictates I say that here :D) we're talking about, here.

A point about OS's. The classic definition of OS has changed and evolved over the last few years (greatly simplified): An OS initially was a human operating a loom. Then it evolved to a series of cards running a loom. Then it was a bunch of cards running a census tabulator. Then it was a bunch of cards running a bunch of vaccuum tubes (pop!). Then it was a bunch of cards running big mainframes. Then it was an incr

Hi,

Here's a big list of pointer device alternatives:
http://www.billbuxton.com/InputSources.html

You might want to consider using a glove - although they're not cheap. There are also some projects that work with a camera and a set of colorerd markers on your head (such as glasses) so that you move the pointer by moving your head, the so called Head-Pointers. Examples:

http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/headpointer

Cheers, - J

While interesting, this isn't exactly earth shattering; Bill Buxton has worked for MS before. In 2005 he had a stint at the Cambridge, UK research lab as a visiting researcher. This article is entirely a PR scoop and really has no place pretending it's news.

Secondly, the research division and product divisions at MS are separate and a lot of what the research teams do, doesn't find its way into products. Bill Buxton will be in the research division. I very much doubt that they would have him working on anything as near-term as UI for Office or Windows. It's much more likely that he will be involved in blue sky thinking and research about making ubiquitous computing a reality, or perhaps about ways in which movie techniques and music can become integral to the ways in which we work with computers, so that they are immersive, or (quite likely) bringing 3D to mainstream user interfaces.

Bill's homepage is here. It has a great deal of info about his interests and work.

I'm not generally one to be dick about these kinds of things or so nit-picky, but if you're hailed as a major 'UI guru' and have Microsoft hire you and get a fucking mention on the old /. then please have a clue. Incidentally, I was always under the assumption is was important to practice what you preach or at very least let your outward work do your talking, not your PR skills.

Pardon, any oddities in my spelling/grammar as it's late and I've had a couple Guinesses already.

This guy has too many patents to be honest.
Ref.

Hosted by in2net, who also offers MS-Windows boxes.

Keep up the good choices, Mr. Buxton!

I just assumed it was so good that I didn't understand it;-)

TFA is remarkably uninformative. Do not bother with it, if it becomes slashdotted.

This article (PC or people--who's the boss?) has an interview with him today.

Bill Addresses his Microsoft transition on his home page: http://www.billbuxton.com/

He is cited in the Wikipedia article about Human-computer interaction.

They've learned from "less is more"...

There was a great panel at this year's CHI conference featuring Sutherland and others who worked at Lincoln Labs in the 1950s and 60s. Bill Buxton talks a bit about this on his web site. At the panel, they showed videos of Sutherland drawing with a light pen and having the shapes be recognized and squared up. Other demos included a graphical programming interface (20 years before NeXT's) and user-trainable gesture recognition. Given the computers these guys worked on (look at the pictures), the work they did was amazing.