The New York Times pulled out 313 patents from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office archive that list Jobs among the group of inventors, which often included other familiar names like Jonathan Ives and Philip Schiller.
Most of the patents are for product designs rather than pure technological inventions, like the "ornamental design for a personal computer" resembling 1981's Apple III (patent no. 268,584) or the "ornamental design" of any device resembling the MacBook Air (patent no. 635,566). And Jobs' name is behind patents for many of those intuitive UI nuances, like jiggling desktop icons and drag-and-drop operations. This probably explains why, in part, Apple is so aggressive about protecting its intellectual property. Like any software developer, painter, or journalist, Jobs clearly understands that icky feeling when a rival copies your work without attribution. As the NYT notes, Jobs' name probably didn't add mettle to Apple's many patent applications; he simply played an integral role in Apple's product development.
So what does this tell us? That Jobs, a design expert, had a direct hand in much more than just Apple's famous keynote speeches and marketing campaigns. Jobs also co-invented a lot of the gestures, curves, and form factors that tech users of all operating systems take for granted today. Here we pull out five of the best Jobsian inventions: