Re: Meh
Will I ever make something like the iPhone in my life...
Of course I won't you dullard I'm not a major manufacturing concern.
But I do work in a small software development company.
Will I write creative software? Yes.
Will I write new GUI elements? Yes.
Will I write things like slide to unlock? Yes.
Will I write things that suggest interaction with a real world object on a touchscreen? Yes
Will I want to hypertext-ualize content in text if I recognize it? Yes.
Will I want to implement visual cues for recognizing the end of a list? Yes.
Will I want to implement multi-touch gestures for achieving x? Yes
Will I want to implement a billion other frikking things? Yes.
Will I want to implement a search that looks at multiple data-sources? Yes.
Will I want them to run on a phone? Yes.
Will I probably be doing this until I retire? Yes.
IF IT'S STILL ARSING POSSIBLE GIVEN ALL THIS LUDICROUS SOFTWARE PATENT SHIT THAT PEOPLE LIKE YOU SEEM TO THINK IS A GOOD IDEA.
You may never have done anything remotely creative in your entire life except decide which apple product to buy next but a lot of us do and we've done it almost our whole lives, and this crap is going to kill everybody in this industry with less than a billion dollar legal budget.
Every time I "independently" (quotes because I understand that everything is filtered by what I've seen before) implement any form of GUI element I should not have to live in fear that someone else has done it before and who happened to have a team of lawyers in the room next door and a company policy of "patent everything, sue everybody, see what sticks".
Software patents, especially when tied to easily independently arrived at solutions to trivial problems (such as slide-to-unlock, pinch-to-zoom and a myriad others) are clearly wrong and utterly devastating to competition and creativity.
I am totally bewildered that so many people who post to this site, who clearly have more than a casual interest in IT/Software/Development, can not realize this.