I am against patents in general. But this is perfectly in line with past hardware patents. For example compare to 1950s radios where the volume control was also the on/off switch. Pull it out, and the radio was on, push it in, it was off, and it remembered the volume that you wanted. That button design was patented.

I don't see a difference in kind on that patent and the double-click patent.

This isn't art--even a cursory exploration of the solution space with vague constraints should get you there.

Well I didn't say that they were... but I'm not sure I agree with your statement anyway. Do you have any evidence that that isn't what they were intended for?

Incidentally I think that there was some ingenuity there. When Jacob Rabinow created the pull-button, he had been asked to improve a push-button tuner. (A review of the source informs me that when you pulled it had the station, not the volume. My bad. I have not seen one of these radios in decades...) His reason for switching is that he knew the problems with existing push-button tuners, and could design a better pull-button tuner. The manufacturer he invented it for did not want to accept it because nobody else was building them.

Incidentally the inventor of that was Jacob Rabinow. Take a glance at http://museum.nist.gov/exhibits/rabinow/patents.html to see all of his patents. Given how many inventions he had, he clearly did not spend long on each. But his claim would e that without the patent system he would have had no incentive to invent them, and would have worked on other stuff.

I'm not defending this either way. Merely stating the official view of what the patent system is supposed to have been for. (And my personal feelings are the other way.)

We're heading towards a world where all the money is getting funneled towards patent lawsuits and away from building products. This is not a good thing.

And since software has such low barriers to entry, this really does not help progress.

Excuse me, what on earth is non-obvious about that?

When enumerating the alternatives to the pinch-gesture (the awkwardness of which becomes obvious within the first few days of use) then you end up with a rather short list of 10-12 items - and that's counting rather esoteric ones like a physical jog-dial.

Apple chose double-tap, just like anyone else in their right mind (other than Sony) would.

If that's not textbook example for a trivial "invention" then I don't know what is.

See http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s..., in the comments: "I remember when Larry was doing that testing. One of the things he tested was the three-button mouse, which is what Xerox had used. He found out that inexperienced computer users (the market that Lisa was aimed at, believe it or not) got too confused -- they couldn't remember what each of the buttons did. Same problem with a two-button mouse. So the one-button mouse was born. Of course, that meant that we needed double-click and triple-click, but that's another story..."

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s... shows screenshots of the UI that had the first double-click interface, in 1980 or 1981.

And they don't, so why bring it up.

> or that double-click doesn't logically follow from the reduction in mouse button count.

Lots of things "logically follow", but only a few make sense. Figuring that out seems to actually be fairly difficult as the state of the art shows.

It's the difference between going to the patent office with an idea for "an engine that runs on steam" and actually designing a steam engine. See how much broader in scope the first one is?