Adjacent HCIL work. Touchscreens in 1987 selected on first touch — land-on — so parallax made them notorious, and textbooks said targets could not be smaller than a fingertip. HyperTIES needed to select individual letters in an index.

The lift-off strategy: draw a cursor slightly above the finger, highlight what it is over, act on lift-off, let the user slide to correct. Only the cursor position mattered. Selecting a single character was now possible. Time-dependent position averaging got targets down to roughly 1mm².

Ben Shneiderman's actual statement is "the iPhone uses a lift-off strategy" — not that he invented the iPhone keyboard. Separately, Plaisant and Wallace's 1990 touchscreen toggle work has been cited as prior art against Apple's Slide to Unlock patents. Apple sponsored HCIL from 1988 to 1993. Jobs visited in 1988, the same visit as Sun Founders Big Heads.