Apple Patents Swipe Gestures for Cell Phone Texting

It is unknown what Apple truly wanted for Christmas, but we know of one item that Santa Clause brought them – a new patent for improving touch screens.  The patent, granted by the USPTO on Christmas day, allows someone to insert spaces, uppercase letters, or line breaks by swiping the screen rather than pressing keys.

The invention relates generally to “input systems, methods, and devices, and more particularly, to systems, methods, and devices for interpreting manual swipe gestures as input in connection with touch screen keyboards.”  As the patent states:

Systems, methods, and devices for interpreting manual swipe gestures as input in connection with touch-sensitive user interfaces that include virtual keyboards are disclosed herein. These allow for a user entering text using the virtual keyboard to perform certain functions using swipes across the key area rather than tapping particular keys. For example, leftward, rightward, upward, and downward swipes can be assigned to inserting a space, backspacing, shifting (as for typing capital letters), and inserting a carriage return and/or new line. Various other mappings are also described. The described techniques can be used in conjunction with a variety of devices, including handheld devices that include touch-screen interfaces, such as desktop computers, tablet computers, notebook computers, handheld computers, personal digital assistants, media players, mobile telephones, and combinations thereof.

The patent was originally filed on June 22, 2007.  It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes for this technology to actually be installed on the iPhone.