This should be read, first. This patent is not for pinch-to-zoom.
FingerWorks did not invent multi-touch. In fact, if you actually read Westerman's 1999 thesis that you linked to, it contains tons of references back to such things in the 1980s. For example, this section on page 39:
"
Rubine [129, 130] reports seeing another multi-touch tablet demonstrated at AT&T in 1988 (note:invented in 1983) by Robert Boie which could detect all ten fingers. It boasted a 30-39 fps frame rate and resolution of 1 mil (.025 mm) in lateral position and 10 bits in pressure. Possibly it measured sensor capacitance with the synchronous detection technology in a 1995 patent by Boie et al. [17] that briefy mentions multi-touch tablets as an application."
Or if you're in a rush, just read
Buxton's piece on multi-touch history.
Perhaps for mass produced handhelds, but capacitive screens had been around:
Bsides the 1980s reference above, if you went to an Indian casino starting in the early 1990s, and played on a video touch machine, then you likely were using a capacitive screen on a distributed system running my code. Casinos have more money than God, and we got to build almost anything we wanted. A few years later, they were making flat portable versions.
It's true that its time had come for phones. Everyone and their brother was showing off capacitive screens and bodies in 2006.
That's because they'd never seen it before. Many of us had, and some very famous names in the UI field immediately pointed it out. For example, ex-Appler Bruce Tognazzini, who noted that he had done
pinch zoom back in the 1990s for a Sun demo.
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Neither Apple nor Fingerworks invented multi-touch, or pinch zoom, or most of the other stuff you probably think they did.