Christmas was quite a busy time for former Fingerworks founder Wayne Westerman, because he's just made us a present: improved use of the iPhone. According to the patent application which made its way to The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the modifications would allow users to “perform certain functions using swipes across the key area rather than tapping particular keys.”

The innovation looks to have quite a bit of potential. It's practical and, even it sounds like something which only advanced iPhone users might appreciate, it's not by any means impairing to novice users.

Basically, Westerman's “swipe gestures” over the iPhone's keyboard are a sort of shortcuts for a series of commands which are normally available by the pressing of keys. Only this way, it would all work faster – if you get used to moving your fingers in a certain way.

For instance, by making swipes to the left and to the right you actually get the same result as if you'd have pressed Space and Backspace. These swipes are meant to provide alternatives to this kind of keys, the ones which are very frequently used. So, a downward swipe would mean Enter/Return, and swiping up would activate Shift/Caps.

Besides single swipe gestures, there are also multi-swipes when you use two fingers instead of just one. Instead of deleting only one letter with the leftward single swipe,  you could take out the entire word with a two finger swipe, or even the entire line with a three-fingered one.