OSNews

exactly. only gallery.apl is affected. It's all about the way the gestures and so work on this particular thing.

That's the only thing. Nothing to worry about. And also the reason why android 3.x isn't affected -- it does it in a different way.

Anyways, patents suck and the judge luckily dismissed all oher things as well. fsck apple. Stay in your fruit basket.

The judge dismissed all others things *but* accept that a *software* patent is valid in EU, whose deputies chamber AFAICT said software patents are not valid.

Which is, I fear, a bit sad side-effect.

It's called killing by a thousand cuts. Apple put an enormous amount of work and development into making version 1 of iOS very polished for a first release. It's what Apple does - sweat the details. And they patented those details and they will try their hardest to get the Android devices makers to remove them. One by one. And if they succeed Android will still be around and will still work more or less the same in terms of basic functionality but all the really nice little touches, the little things that make an interface or an object very nice to use instead of just plain mediocre, will be missing. That's what Apple wants and they may well achieve it.

U.S. Patent No. 7,469,381 on "list scrolling and document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touch-screen display" is a good example of this. Apple are already deploying this patent in several legal cases and seem to have a strong case. The patent covers so called 'rubber banding' where when you scroll to the bottom of a long list on a touch screen and you reach the end and the scrolling action doesn't just stop, instead it overshoots a little and bounces back. Anyone who has used an iOS device will know what I am talking about.

The point about this feature and this patent is that removing this feature doesn't take away the basic functionality of finger scrolling, it just makes it feel a little bit less intuitive. Without this feature novice touch users are not sure, just for moment, what has happened when they reach the end of a list and the screen just abruptly stops scrolling and they often respond by pressing the screen harder and trying to make it move. With this feature in place a little bit of the UI tells the user, very subtly but very clearly, 'you have reached the end of the list'.

It seems a small feature, this rubber banding, but it's the sort of small feature that Apple excels at and by which they seek to differentiate their products from their competitors.

So Apple are happy with every little victory that chips away at the Android interface, knocking off features taken from iOS one by one, because at the end Apple know they will have the polished UI that delights and Androids UI will plod.

If Apple can stop their competitors from actually selling devices that feature such stolen pearls then that would suit them just fine but it's not the main goal, the main gaol is to make sure that the iOS experience is always superior to the Android experience.

It's telling by the way that Google's Nexus phones have, to the best of my knowledge, been carefully designed to not infringe such Apple patents.

Of course the remedy for all Android device makers and for Google is straightforward, come up up with equally neat and well designed UI ways to do the same thing. That may, however, be harder than it appears.

The rubber-band patent was filed in December 2007. Compiz, the Linux compositing manager, has such an effect. Compiz was released at the beginning of 2006, so almost two years before.

Also CyanogenMod7 uses a different overscroll effect, which I actually prefer to rubber-banding.

Though you do make a good point. There was always that certain something about Apple interfaces, in OSX already, even before iOS. It's subtleties in the animations. If you remove those, it's as you say - the functionality is the same, but the feel is different.

Edited 2011-08-24 16:42 UTC

The problem is that Apple is not the only boy in town that can come up with good design. Look at the new notification sytem in iOS, that they have copied from Android, or the Command Shell in OS-X Lion that they copied from Gnome Shell, or the new Lion account settings panel that they copied from KDE.

If companies start to fight over such trivialities we will end up with products that have less than optimal user interfaces regardless if they com from Apple or someplace else.

The level for what should be unique and patentable must be raised or both the consumers and the manefacturers will suffer.

All good points. I have no doubt that is Apple's strategy. But now that Google has Motorola's 24,000+ mobile patents, Google's going to turn around do the exact same thing to Apple, to the point of rendering iPhones utterly useless.

But ultimately, it will all be cross licensed, or settled out of court ("lets call a truce"), and they'll get back to the important business of making great products.

A) That is NOT Android core feature. Samsung TouchWiz != Android.
B) Android 2.3 responce to bounceback is the highlight effect, it's as visually indicative as the bounceback effect. The bounceback effect is just bling from a certain point.
C) Again, different != inferior. Apple however really tries to convince that their is superior and different is inferior.
D) The Nexus line does exactly what it does, tries to come up with best solution differently. And so far, I've not seen a phone working radically better then my Nexus S. iPhone4 or any of the WP7 phones are pretty much the same in performance...

Hey guys am I mistaken or that fancy gallery app is what ALL Android phones come with by default and I am talking about AOSP Roms? Or am I totally mistaken? So that means that Samsung is not the one at fault, but rather Google and Android? Can some one please clarify this for me?

Just checked on my Nexus S, the default galery app does not have a bounceback effect. And it never had it. I actually had a thorough review of the code of the Cooliris gallery app starting with Android 2.1.

They should take a pge out of Cooliris design and make where bounceback is a 3D turn....

PS: Picturen on Android does violate that patent BTW. As well as a bunch of other apps....

Edited 2011-08-24 23:49 UTC