By Joel Cheong
On 5 October 2011, the world lost a brilliant visionary and entrepreneur whose legacy includes a half-eaten piece of fruit, a computer animation studio whose mascot hates the letter ‘i’ with a passion, and prohibitively expensive consumer electronics products beginning with the letter ‘i’. Born on 24 February 1955, Steven Paul Jobs was a constantly hungry non-Malaysian who’s known as the other Steve from Apple who doesn’t really code or build a product.
In spite of the fact that he lacked the programming or engineering prowess of Wozniak, Gates, or Musk, he was nonetheless a prolific designer whose relentless demand for perfection resulted in a great number of iconic Apple products. It comes as no surprise, then, that there are hundreds of registered designs for products which he designed or co-designed. What’s less known is that he also contributed to the invention of many useful technologies that gave Apple products a leg up on the competition.
So as Apple carries on his legacy with amazingly designed products such as spermatozoon-shaped wireless earbuds, sleek professional grade display stands which are the almost the price of a brand new MacBook each, and utilitarian CPU cases that look like they can also grate cheese, let us have a look at some of the more practical technologies which were (co-)invented by the legend himself.
US 6,957,395 B1 – Computer interface having a single window mode of operation
Today, as we stare at our office PC monitors and agonize internally as the operating system (OS) takes an eternity to boot due to the productivity tracking and web blocker bloatware launching at startup, some of us may recall a simpler time when early computers used to have a more primitive command line interface where programs were launched in response to commands typed into the computer as opposed to clicking icons on the graphical user interface (GUI) screen using a mouse which opens up a program window. Or wish we were still in bed.
In spite of the fact that their OS is named “Windows”, Microsoft was not the first to feature a GUI having all these program windows. The honour goes to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center which produced the Alto, the world’s first personal computer with GUI that has a price tag which is the equivalent of a millennial’s annual budget for smashed avocado toast and mermaid logo coffees (or in Apple terms, about 5-6 iMac Pros).
Inspired by the Alto, Apple jumped aboard the GUI train with their Apple Lisa and Macintosh product lines, and saw some commercial success with the latter. Sensing the potential billions that could be made and donated to charity through a foundation named after himself and his wife, William Henry Gates III joined the fray soon after with the Windows 1.0 OS and dominated the GUI scene ever since.
The issue with GUIs is that when too many program windows are open, the screen becomes overly cluttered and instead of being able to quickly Alt-Tab away from the photo of a shirtless David Hasselhoff to a word document you were supposedly working on as the boss-man passes by, you may end up enlarging the minimized video of a “Knight Rider” episode which you forgot to close when the boss-man swooped past earlier.
Possibly aimed at chronic multitaskers, US 6,957,395 B1 discloses a user interface which presents an active program window on the desktop while placing inactive program windows out of view, and allowing quick access to these minimized program windows via icons located at the bottom of the screen. To switch from one program window to another, one may simply do so by selecting the appropriate icon. As a result, screen clutter is eliminated and desktop zen is achieved. Now one can admire David Hasselhoff in his full masculine glory at work while peacefully sipping a cup of green tea without the boss-man being the wiser.
US 7,345,671 B2 – Method and apparatus for use of rotational user inputs
Before the days of syncing your Bluetooth earphones to your phone and pressing “play” on your Spotify, iTunes, or Zune app (wait, is that thing still around?), folks used to carry their music on their shoulder in the form of portable radios with oversized speakers called boomboxes and blast sonic waves at their unfortunate neighbours.
OK, that’s probably too far back into the past, so let us backtrack a little and go back instead to the days when a song about consensual physical abuse sung by a not-a-girl-not-yet-a-woman who couldn’t wear a prep school uniform properly was a chart-topping hit and John Wick went by fancy 90’s alias “Neo” and was having difficulty confronting the reality of life. People who wanted to listen to music on the go were transitioning from Walkmans and Discmans to MP3 players.
MP3 players, which were thankfully not called Flashmans after their flash memory storage used for storing MP3 files, had an advantage of being able to store more music than a compact disc or cassette tape could. The issue with them, however, is that since so many songs could be stored in an MP3 player, they required a huge number of button presses to get to that song which you wanted to hear. So, if “Truly, Madly, Deeply” was song no. 156 in your collection of 365 songs, well, better get clicking then.
This may not be an issue with techies who are used to fiddling with their fancy CASIO CA53W-1 calculator watches, but for regular folks in general, it’ll be great if we don’t need to press “menu” once, “forward” 3 times, “enter” once, and then “forward” 156 times just to reach that particular song which may or may not have been downloaded via Limewire.
US 7,345,671 B2 discloses a really practical solution for such a situation in the form of a rotary user input. The rotary user input is either a rotary dial which can be rotated or a touch-sensitive ring-shaped pad which can detect your finger motion. A button placed in the middle of the pad allows you to make your selection. iPod Classic owners would definitely recognize this rotary user input as the click wheel located under the screen at the front of the device. Instead of having to make so many button presses, all one needs to do is just scroll to whatever it is one wishes to select. Convenient!
US 7,479,949 B2 – Touch screen device, method, and graphical user interface for determining commands by applying heuristics
Today, we take it for granted that our smartphones with their one-drop-only fragile touch screens and potential flight hazard short-lived batteries are able to respond to various finger gestures on the touch screen, such as tap-to-select, hold-to-highlight, reverse-pinch-to-zoom, slide-to-answer and kiss-floor-to-shatter.
But back in the days when battery lives could last a century with a single charge, and phones with more than 30 physical buttons and a proprietary messenger software with encryption technology were considered a status symbol, being able to interact with a phone in such a manner was unheard of. The most one could do was jab at the screen with an easily misplaced stylus and wait for a couple of seconds before the phone decided to cooperate.
So when a bespectacled guy in his signature mock-turtleneck-jeans-sneaker combo introduced “an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator” to the world, it took a while before the audience could actually comprehend that he was not referring to three separate devices, but a revolutionary mobile phone that could perform all three functions. One contributing factor to the iPhone’s game-changing ability was the multi-gesture touchscreen technology that came with the first phone of its kind.
US 7,479,949 B2 discloses the underlying technology which enables the iPhone to be controlled via its touchscreen. In the patent specification, the hardware, system, and several heuristics which detect each gesture input and produce the intended outcome are described. To understand the impact of this invention, consider this: in 2009, two years after the first iPhone was launched, BlackBerry’s global market share was 20%. As of the fourth quarter of 2016, BlackBerry’s global market share was almost the same as the percentage of alcohol in a bottle of Heineken 0.0 – 0.0481%.
From making point and click computers available for every home to creating a new market segment for tablet computing, Steve Job’s design and innovative genius have made Apple products the trendsetting tech that people often play catch-up with. And if he was not the first to do it, then he was the one who made it better (with the help of his talented, lesser-known colleagues, of course).
While one may joke about him being and staying hungry because he had only one bite out of the apple or that he thinks differently thanks to psychedelics and eastern mysticism, one cannot argue against the fact that he had the knack for taking seemingly impractical and complicated technologies and making them simple and a joy to use for the average user. That, in itself, makes for a really great invention.
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