Apple patents page-turn animation →
Everyone keeps asking me about this New York Times post:
Apple argued that its patented page turn was unique in that it had a special type of animation other page-turn applications had been unable to create.
They didn’t patent all page-turns — just page-turns that look (and, presumably, work) like iBooks’.
And I don’t think this is going to cause any problems for Instapaper or any other iOS app. Instapaper implements the iBooks-style page-turning with Apple’s own UIPageViewController API, available since iOS 5 for exactly this purpose. Patents on it are no more problematic than iOS apps using Apple’s patented multitouch gestures or the scroll-bounce effect that comes “for free” with the use of other standard iOS components.
It sucks that the patent system works the way it does, but given that we’re probably not getting rid of it in any of our lifetimes, it’s also very important that Apple, like any big tech company, plays the patent game by filing as many as they can. I don’t see any big problems with this one in particular.