FYI: Apple’s pinch to zoom lets you rotate and drag not just zoom.

This kind of subtle differences matter quite a bit from a UI perspective. You could have a punch to zoom system where a pinching motion always resulted in fixed changes to zoom levels. You could describe both implementations as “pint to zoom” but one is a lot more user friendly than the other.

I can't rotate web pages in Safari, there's plenty of situations in Apple's first party apps in iOS where pinch to zoom is purely a zoom thing.

In any case, the rotation thing is also just pretty rudimentary trigonometry/linear algebra.

Safari lets you drag and zoom so it’s still more than just a zoom function.

Also, Boxed already replied by complaining about rotation in the Map app imagine the hate if Safari did let you rotate. Removing features is just as critical for UI design as adding them.

I agree that Safari would be much worse if it allowed rotation, I think most of the places where Apple currently allow rotation (such as in the photos or files apps) would be better if rotation wasn't allowed, but we're not discussing my taste or yours in UIs here.

Didn't the Microsoft surface table project that predated apple multitouch already show rotation?

The original Surface was unveiled a few months (May 30, 2007) after the iPhone (January 9, 2007). Not sure who implemented the idea first in the lab, but probably neither of them.

Yea, Apple got most of this by buying a company that started working on this stuff in 1999. You can argue about the patents, but in this case it was beneficial for a small innovative company.

Also, the original idea for pinch zooming dates back to 1985, but I have no idea what that UI was actually like.

This MS patent predated Apple's earliest, had most of multitouch but I think rotation was a fixed gesture by a set number of degrees

https://patents.google.com/patent/JP2013117985A/en

They also didn’t invent the rotation bit (or cosine, etc).

Are you saying there’s no grounds in a patent if it uses math, because no one can patent math? The patent isn’t even about math. It’s about user interface innovations.

I'm saying that other people had already invented, demoed, and published the user interface inventions (concretely, pinch zoom + rotate) before Apple even considered building a computer with a touch screen, and that, as a workaround, Apple's lawyers patented using high-school trigonometry to implement the prior work.

I wonder of they also patented their auto complete.

I wish Apple didn't do the rotate thing though. I never ever want to rotate the map, and I do it by mistake a lot. It's infuriating and useless.

I wish the rubber band effect could be disabled. When scrolling, I always have to wait a second for the bouncing effect to stop before I can tap on things. It happens in every app.

Android's equivalent can be disabled with the "reduced motion" toggle in the accessibility settings. You also lose a bunch of other totally extraneous animations in the process, boo hoo. Perhaps the same is possible on iPhone?

It comes in very useful in other applications, though. Particularly when you’re drawing, you need to zoom in rotate the canvas.

Oh yea, for sure. And I guess some people do use the maps rotation feature. I'd just like an option to turn it off. I'd even accept it as an accessibility feature :P