On April 24, 2008, the US Patent & Trademark Office published a series of iPhone/iPod Touch related patents covering six distinct aspects of the iPhone’s functionality. This report briefly covers how the iPhone deals with documents, its soft keyboard and deletion operations.

Patent: Portable Electronic Device, Method, and Graphical User Interface For Displaying Structured Electronic Documents

Apple’s Patent Background As portable electronic devices become more compact, and the number of functions performed by a given device increase, it has become a significant challenge to design a user interface that allows users to easily interact with a multifunction device. This challenge is particular significant for handheld portable devices, which have much smaller screens than desktop or laptop computers. This situation is unfortunate because the user interface is the gateway through which users receive not only content but also responses to user actions or behaviors, including user attempts to access a device’s features, tools, and functions. Some portable communication devices (e.g., mobile telephones, sometimes called mobile phones, cell phones, cellular telephones, and the like) have resorted to adding more pushbuttons, increasing the density of push buttons, overloading the functions of pushbuttons, or using complex menu systems to allow a user to access, store and manipulate data. These conventional user interfaces often result in complicated key sequences and menu hierarchies that must be memorized by the user.

Many conventional user interfaces, such as those that include physical pushbuttons, are also inflexible. This may prevent a user interface from being configured and/or adapted by either an application running on the portable device or by users. When coupled with the time consuming requirement to memorize multiple key sequences and menu hierarchies, and the difficulty in activating a desired pushbutton, such inflexibility is frustrating to most users.

In particular, it is slow and tedious to navigate in structured electronic documents (e.g., web pages) in portable electronic devices with small screens using conventional input devices (e.g., 5-way toggle switches). Moreover, it is cumbersome to control and view multimedia content within such documents on portable electronic devices.

Accordingly, there is a need for portable electronic devices with more transparent and intuitive user interfaces for viewing and navigating structured electronic documents and multimedia content within such documents. Such interfaces increase the effectiveness, efficiency and user satisfaction with activities like web browsing on portable electronic devices.

Apple’s Abstract: A computer-implemented method, for use in conjunction with a portable electronic device with a touch screen display, comprises displaying at least a portion of a structured electronic document on the touch screen display, wherein the structured electronic document comprises a plurality of boxes of content, and detecting a first gesture at a location on the displayed portion of the structured electronic document. A first box in the plurality of boxes at the location of the first gesture is determined. The first box on the touch screen display is enlarged and substantially centered.

Patent: Portable Multifunction Device with Soft Keyboards

Apple’s Abstract: A portable multifunction device displays a first icon and a second icon on its touch screen display. In response to a sequence of finger movements across the first and second icons, wherein the finger stays in contact with the touch screen display during the movements, the portable device highlights the first icon for at least a predefined time period if a parameter associated with the finger’s position relative to the touch screen display meets a first predefined condition and then highlights the second icon for at least the predefined time period if the parameter associated with the finger’s position relative to the touch screen display meets a second predefined condition.

Apple’s patent FIG. 6 noted above is a flow diagram illustrating a second process for visually distinguishing some key icons over other key icons of a soft keyboard in response to finger contacts with the soft keyboard in accordance with some embodiments.

Patent: Deletion Gestures on a Portable Multifunction Device

Apple’s Abstract: Deletion gestures for use on a portable multifunction device with a touch-sensitive display are disclosed. In some embodiments, a computer-implemented method for use in conjunction with the portable multifunction device comprises displaying a list of items on the touch-sensitive display, detecting a first gesture on the touch-sensitive display to edit the list of items, responding to the first gesture by displaying a first icon next to each deletable item in the list, detecting a second gesture on the touch-sensitive display to select one of the deletable items, and responding to the second gesture by displaying a second icon next to the selected item. If a third gesture on the second icon is detected, the selected deletable item is deleted. If a fourth gesture on the first icon next to the selected deletable item is detected, the second icon is deleted.

NOTICE: MacNN presents only a brief summary of patents with associated graphic(s) for journalistic news purposes as each such patent application and/or grant is revealed by the U.S. Patent & Trade Office. Readers are cautioned that the full text of any patent applications and/or grants should be read in its entirety for further details.

Written and researched by Neo.