So Clay Bavor did _not_ invent that

"A year ago over the holiday break, I created a large-scale digital “canvas”" posted December 27, 2015

https://www.claybavor.com/blog/a-canvas-made-of-pixels

He claims to have invented it prior to Apple, but he didn't publish before they got their patent in.

What makes him think they didn’t invent it earlier? It takes time to publish a patent.

People like that are the worst. The sorest losers. I have unfortunately known quite a few of them and they tend to overestimate their abilities by a lot.

There is no such claim on the blog post: instead, a commenter here is making that case.

Anyway, I hate the use of "invent" here: people come up with similar ideas all the time — mostly because the tooling and technology of an era makes a set of problems solvable in a "novel" way that was not possible beforehand. Who gets to patent anything does not necessarily mean they "invented" it.

Good point. Clay at no point used the word "invent" - that was entirely me. My rather rudimentary understanding of law means that prior art would invalidate any patent. Had Clay published his design when he claimed to have built the device (Dec 2014) it would seem to have rendered Apple's patent worthless, or nearly so.

A patent is a form of intellectual property protecting an invention. An invention is a unique or novel device, method, composition or process.

If it was a invention worthy of patent in March 2015 - according to Apple - then it was an invention worthy of patent in Dec 2014, when Clay claimed to have devised and built the device.