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Comment by collyw | Hacker News Reader

I am sure I have seen spring loaded equivalent on gates, that will lock themselves.

This is all mostly irrelevant though, and all of this discussion involves ex post facto analysis. The test for patentability is would a person skilled in the art come to the same solution without an inventive step - is the claimed invention what someone familiar with the art of human computer interaction do without doing something new. I would argue that the answer is no: there are many well known mechanisms for unlocking an electronic device (a pin, a password, a fingerprint, an identifying card or dongle, and so on) - using an analog of something that exists in the physical world such as a latch is not what someone skilled in the art WOULD do, there is some invention in taking the physical and bring it into the digital.

> a pin, a password, a fingerprint, an identifying card or dongle

Those are all examples of authentication. Not at all the purpose of the slide-to-open.

The earlier dumb-phones used to have a key-lock functionality where you would have to press a certain combination of keys in quick succession. Or just open a physical lid.

My primary point still stands - the test isn't whether physical analogs exist, it is whether someone WOULD be lead to reach the same solution to the problem. I'm not sure I agree that someone, at the time, would have been lead to the same solution when the existing art revolved around physical mechanisms such as buttons and switches, and did not involve interaction with the screen which the mechanisms has previously been in place to prevent.

Designers/developers other than and including those at Apple have used skeuomorphism for this very reason. You want people to know where to drop files, you show them an image of a floppy or a folder. Want to print, click the printer icon. Want to unlock your phone, slide it unlocked.

Using physical analogs has LONG been common.

The other day I used ProComm (yeah, I know, right!?). To close the connection, I clicked the phone icon and it animated showing the phone being placed back on the hook.

Also, let's not forget that Apple were not the first phone company to have a touch screen device that used the swipe to unlock process. They were just the first to patent, and the other company went bust...

If this were true, then the patent is obviously invalid. But since this has never been the argument in court, I'm guessing your assertion mostly false. If you have proof that there was another company who had a product with this idea before the priority date of the patent, then I'd love to see it.

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