Apple Patent: Translucency

[MacRumors]

On November 5, 2003, Apple filed a patent for an interesting user interface technique entitled "Graduated visual and manipulative translucency for windows".

The interface is described as follows:

Methods and systems for providing graphical user interfaces are described. overlaid, Information-bearing windows whose contents remain unchanged for a predetermined period of time become translucent. The translucency can be graduated so that, over time, if the window's contents remain unchanged, the window becomes more translucent. In addition to visual translucency, windows according to the present invention also have a manipulative translucent quality. Upon reaching a certain level of visual translucency, user input in the region of the window is interpreted as an operation on the underlying objects rather than the contents of the overlaying window.

Such a method would give active windows more visual importance on the user's screen, while unused windows would slowly fade into the background.

[AirUncleP]

I like. Would help students understand the active window concept.

[yoman]

I do hope they get this patent. I'm sick of Microsoft stealing every idea Apple has.

[qubex]

I hope they don't succeed in patenting it.

Prior art exists. For example, if you set Trillian to use transparency, and set the "always on top" option, you can manipulate objects beneath with ease.

The only innovation is the "fading" part, but on a moral basis that doesn't really qualify. Unfortunately, considering the generalised lack of common sense exhibited by the US Patents & Trademarks office, they'll probably approve it.

Incidentally, speaking of Microsoft "stealing every patent Apple has" conveniently ignores the fact that Apple's GUI (which they then proceeded to sue lots of companies over, including Microsoft) was, at the very least, "inspired" by research at Xerox PARC. If suing somebody for copying something you yourself have copied isn't hypocritical, I don't know what is.

Not that I'm against patents. Far from it. But I'm fed up of stupid patents being used as weapons by and between companies, and against third-parties (that in some cases have already implemented the idea).

People here are inclined to always forgive Apple because they percieve Apple to be a "Good Company". Lets face it: Apple Inc. is a profit-orientated organisation and as such, deep down, their behaviour can be just as bad as anybody else's.

[Grimace]

Sounds like something for 10.4 - maybe 10.5

[mgargan1]

yea, i remember a version of AIM for windows that had that same feature...

[cspace]

i think the real question is should this sort of thing be patentable?

[qubex]

i think the real question is should this sort of thing be patentable?
My answer is: "Most definitely not!" I say this as a computer programmer and a company manager - I do both.

Thank God Germany has decided not to sign the new convention on Intellectual Property and Patent Law the EU drafted. Hopefully we Europeans won't fall victim to Software/Biotech Patents and DMCA-type monstrosities after all.

[Squire]

This sounds cool. Now, would this work in conjunction with Expose or replace it altogether?

...Apple's GUI...was, at the very least, "inspired" by research at Xerox PARC. If suing somebody for copying something you yourself have copied isn't hypocritical, I don't know what is.

I thought Steve and his buddies got permission to use the stuff from PARC. (Please fill me in on the facts...really.) If not, why didn't Xerox sue? Or did they? Any Silicon Valley historians out there?

Squire

[jocknerd]

Don't be blinded by your love and devotion to Apple. Software patents are just flat out wrong. They stifle innovation. Just think if companies had been patenting software since the 1980's with the regularity they are doing now. We wouldn't be anywhere near the level of software development we are now. Microsoft and Apple are just taking advantage of the horribly outdated patent system and inadequate Patent Office we have in the United States. Meanwhile, the little developer, whether they are an open source developer, a shareware developer, or trying to sell a product themself, gets screwed. How can you fight Microsoft or Apple in court? They probably spend as much on lawyers as they do on R&D.

[leftbanke7]

My answer is: "Most definitely not!" I say this as a computer programmer and a company manager - I do both.

Thank God Germany has decided not to sign the new convention on Intellectual Property and Patent Law the EU drafted. Hopefully we Europeans won't fall victim to Software/Biotech Patents and DMCA-type monstrosities after all.

If not, then we are going to run into computer programs that are identical. Innovation will cease and computing as we know it will become bland. It's because of patents that Apple has become the trailblazer in modern operating systems and Windows is following behind. If Apple patented nothing they did (or they were unable to do so due to legislation), Windows would just be a x86 version of OSX, assuming, of course, Apple even tried anymore to be innovative. More likely, due to budget issues, Apple would have crapped out a long time ago b/c they couldn't compete with Microsoft's deep pockets. It's innovation that keeps Apple from dying and if Apple can't protect its innovation, then why even try.

As for the small developer, they have as much right to patent their products as do the big boys. As costly as it may be, if I had a legitimate claim to my patent and Microsoft or Apple tried to throw lawyer after lawyer after me, I would still fight. In the end, I know I would win and then the big boys could pick up the tab on my court fees. People give up too easily anymore.

[Schroedinger]

Some of you folks don't seem to understand the purpose of a Patent. Patents aren't granted for world changing inventions only, they provide protection of intellectual property, even if that property is as simple as a refinement to an already existing product. If apple spent time and money developing this interface, and it is sufficiently different to be granted a Patent, then it deserves one.

The way some of you talk, the only patents that should exist should be the printing press and sliced bread.

[kylos]

Sounds interesting. And this is a relatively unique concept for its purpose. They're not patenting translucent windows. They're patenting an implementation. I think its a valid patent in that it describes a unique way of determining a window's hierarchy.

[qubex]

This sounds cool. Now, would this work in conjunction with Expose or replace it altogether?
I think we're looking at Piles-in-the-making. (For those of you who aren't aware, "Piles" was the name of a rumoured 10.3 feature that would have reportedly allowed you to "stack documents".)
I thought Steve and his buddies got permission to use the stuff from PARC. (Please fill me in on the facts...really.) If not, why didn't Xerox sue? Or did they? Any Silicon Valley historians out there?
Numerous renditions exist, depending on whom you ask. It is generally accepted that the interfaces for the Macintosh and Lisa were under development before initial contact between Apple and Xerox. Nonetheless, it is true that many PARC employees left Xerox and joined the Macintosh team - and apparently significantly affected its evolution. So while not outright copying, the situation was less than clear-cut and pleasant.

Of course, if you go searching on Google, you'll find opinions from all spectra, ranging from outright theft to alien computers recovered at Roswell. Make what you want of it. ;)

[Veldek]

I didn’t read the patent, but doesn’t MS Office 2004 have this effect of palettes getting transparent when they’re not used? Is this something completely different?

[niall2]

But isn't this going to be first seen in Office 2004 for the Mac? How is this an Apple inovation if Microsoft is first to press with it?

[Wash!!]

I hope they don't succeed in patenting it.

Prior art exists. For example, if you set Trillian to use transparency, and set the "always on top" option, you can manipulate objects beneath with ease.

The only innovation is the "fading" part, but on a moral basis that doesn't really qualify. Unfortunately, considering the generalised lack of common sense exhibited by the US Patents & Trademarks office, they'll probably approve it.

Incidentally, speaking of Microsoft "stealing every patent Apple has" conveniently ignores the fact that Apple's GUI (which they then proceeded to sue lots of companies over, including Microsoft) was, at the very least, "inspired" by research at Xerox PARC. If suing somebody for copying something you yourself have copied isn't hypocritical, I don't know what is.

Not that I'm against patents. Far from it. But I'm fed up of stupid patents being used as weapons by and between companies, and against third-parties (that in some cases have already implemented the idea).

People here are inclined to always forgive Apple because they percieve Apple to be a "Good Company". Lets face it: Apple Inc. is a profit-orientated organisation and as such, deep down, their behaviour can be just as bad as anybody else's.

Xerox saw the concepts, prototypes they did not wanted any of then "We sell copiers we don't want a paperless office or people been able to print on their desk forget it" it was Xerox loss they wanted nothing to do with..

They had a "garage sale" on the concepts and prototypes Apple (Steve) happened to be there at the right time and saw the future of computers. they took the OS and make it what it is today.

[jocknerd]

"Methods and systems for providing graphical user interfaces are described. overlaid, Information-bearing windows whose contents remain unchanged for a predetermined period of time become invisible. The invisibility can be graduated so that, over time, if the window's contents remain unchanged, the window becomes more invisible. In addition to visual invisibility, windows according to the present invention also have a manipulative invisible quality. Upon reaching a certain level of visual invisibility, user input in the region of the window is interpreted as an operation on the underlying objects rather than the contents of the overlaying window."

I think my chances of getting this patented are pretty good. After all, the U.S. Patent Office pretty much green stamps everything. They leave it up to the courts to decide if a patent is valid or not.

[leftbanke7]

But isn't this going to be first seen in Office 2004 for the Mac? How is this an Apple inovation if Microsoft is first to press with it?

Another part of filing for a patent is to see if one currently exists (ie: PATENT PENDING). If Microsoft (or some small developer) already has this, the patent office will tell Apple this and Apple will either buy rights to use it or just buy out the patent. It's not like as soon as the application is entered, the company gets the rights to it.

[davegoody]

Yep - this does look very similar (in concept at least) to one of the fundamental specifications of Prject Looking Glass (By Sun Microsystems) - this is ostensibly a 3D OS, but the translucency is a very big part of it - NOTHING is new under the sun (no pun intended) - M$ can copy Apple as much as it likes - when M$ produces an OS that is as stable, as good looking (and not just superficially) and can load from scratch from Power-up in 31 seconds as it does on my RevA 17" iMac then we need to start worrying - until then, relax and enjoy your Macintosh experience :p

[kylos]

Don't be blinded by your love and devotion to Apple. Software patents are just flat out wrong. They stifle innovation. Just think if companies had been patenting software since the 1980's with the regularity they are doing now. We wouldn't be anywhere near the level of software development we are now. Microsoft and Apple are just taking advantage of the horribly outdated patent system and inadequate Patent Office we have in the United States. Meanwhile, the little developer, whether they are an open source developer, a shareware developer, or trying to sell a product themself, gets screwed. How can you fight Microsoft or Apple in court? They probably spend as much on lawyers as they do on R&D.

You know, it's fine to have a balanced view of things even though this is a mac-related board. However, this continual barrage accusing people on these boards of blinding bias is really worthless and quite often terribly misguided. People can have well thought out opinions of apple that are favorable of apple without being biased toward apple. Most here at times will disagree with apples decisions and being favorable toward them is not blindness. Its simply agreement. If you feel it necessary to start off on the wrong foot with the members of mr, then you might find a better use for your spare time than posting here.

[qubex]

Don't be blinded by your love and devotion to Apple. Software patents are just flat out wrong. They stifle innovation. Just think if companies had been patenting software since the 1980's with the regularity they are doing now. We wouldn't be anywhere near the level of software development we are now. Microsoft and Apple are just taking advantage of the horribly outdated patent system and inadequate Patent Office we have in the United States. Meanwhile, the little developer, whether they are an open source developer, a shareware developer, or trying to sell a product themself, gets screwed. How can you fight Microsoft or Apple in court? They probably spend as much on lawyers as they do on R&D.
I'm waiting for someone to patent the Operating System. It's not funny.

[szark]

Upon reaching a certain level of visual invisibility, user input in the region of the window is interpreted as an operation on the underlying objects rather than the contents of the overlaying window.

I wonder how you would select the window again? Just using the title bar? :confused:

[reaper]

The thing with patents is that if the invention is novel and non-obvious it will most likely get approved. Even if there is prior art that deals with a portion of the patent, only that piece will be stricken and the rest will go through.

I personally think this is a good thing for Apple. The GUI is one of the most defining characteristics of their OS and if they don't patent inventions like this bad things happen.

- reaper

[TranceMin]

I am also against software patenting. Although I would like it if apple had the edge for gain in the market share. Patenting software code stops innovation.

Remember when amazon tried to patent the cookie?

[qubex]

As for the small developer, they have as much right to patent their products as do the big boys. As costly as it may be, if I had a legitimate claim to my patent and Microsoft or Apple tried to throw lawyer after lawyer after me, I would still fight. In the end, I know I would win and then the big boys could pick up the tab on my court fees. People give up too easily anymore.
"Mr. Small Software Developer, holder of patent XYZ-123 for "Widget Design", Plaintiff, versus Big Software Corporation, Defendants." Or vice-versa - it doesn't matter really. Whoever has the most money will win the confrontation in Court - assuming it gets to a verdict and Mr. Small Developer doesn't go backrupt before the end of proceedings. And so far as I know, the whole loser-pays thing doesn't quite work that way (that said, it's mere hearsay because I don't live in the US and I am not terribly well acquainted with the details of its legal system).

Just for the sake of ranting, CISCO recently began patent applications for patches issued by a public standards board to solve flaws in the TCP protocol.

At some point this must stop - before we're running TCP/IP (c) CISCO, 2004 on top of our Operating System (c) Big Software Corp, 2006. Surely all of you can see the absurdity of this, yes? Like when companies come along and say that they own propietary protocols at the core of the JPEG standard, or GIF standard, and demand payment (the former is happening now, the latter took place a decade ago). And if you think Amazon trying to patent the cookie is bad, how about British Telecom trying to imply one of its patents covers hyperlinking?!

[Veldek]

I wonder how you would select the window again? Just using the title bar? :confused:

I thought of that, too. What if I leave my computer for a while to find out that all the windows have become transparent?

[leftbanke7]

I am also against software patenting. Although I would like it if apple had the edge for gain in the market share. Patenting software code stops innovation.

Remember when amazon tried to patent the cookie?

I wish they would have, then perhaps we wouldn't have so damn many on the internet.

[qubex]

I wish they would have, then perhaps we wouldn't have so damn many on the internet.And if they had, just how would you propose logging into public forums such as these?

[Veldek]

And if they had, just how would you propose logging into public forums such as these?

Manually every time you want to by typing your username and password?

[leftbanke7]

"Mr. Small Software Developer, holder of patent XYZ-123 for "Widget Design", Plaintiff, versus Big Software Corporation, Defendants." Or vice-versa - it doesn't matter really. Whoever has the most money will win the confrontation in Court - assuming it gets to a verdict and Mr. Small Developer doesn't go backrupt before the end of proceedings. And so far as I know, the whole loser-pays thing doesn't quite work that way (that said, it's mere hearsay because I don't live in the US and I am not terribly well acquainted with the details of its legal system).

If in your lawsuit, you specify that as part of the damages you want the offender to pay your legal fees and the judge sees that fighting this in court was damaging to your economic health, so to speak, judges will award you compensation for it.

If you can't show that fighting this in court has hurt you financially, then the judge will probably tell you no deal.

[trek7k]

Another thing to remember, and some have made this point indirectly, is that patents merely establish ownership. For example, many poo pooed Amazon's patent on one-click online checkouts. Apple, however, decided that this technology was worth paying for and now pays royalties to Amazon to use the technology.

If people want others to pay for R&D so they can use the results for free, this doesn't bode well for innovation either. Why invest the money to come up with new innovations when someone is just going to rip it off and use it for free?

[greenstork]

The folks at Slashdot have a pretty good grasp on how and why software patents can completely destroy innovation. I think all of the Apple defenders should take a read at this Slashdot thread (http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/15/1332215&mode=thread&tid=107&tid=155&tid=187&tid=99) before jumping to Apple's defense.

[leftbanke7]

And if they had, just how would you propose logging into public forums such as these?

By logging in using the sign in page.

[Kool]

Doesn't this patent refer to the bevelboxes (windows) that we see when we changing the volume (or contrast, keyboard lightning etc.)?!

If the volume changes, by pressing a key on keyboard, the window comes forth, and after a while it disappears gradually by changing transparency again as its value no longer changes...

[johnnyjibbs]

It'll be nice if Apple can have a patent or two. I'm generally opposed to software patents (especially as it looks as though Europe will go through with it like the US) but Apple may as well have a few, as it is definately one of the most innovative companies in my book. It'll be nice for Tiger to have a couple of features that Longhorn won't. Just hope it works nice and smoothly on my rev B 12" PB...

[MrToast]

This has been on MacNN.com for about 2 days...

http://www.macnn.com/news/24708

Can't you get news any faster? ;)

MrToast

[qubex]

If in your lawsuit, you specify that as part of the damages you want the offender to pay your legal fees and the judge sees that fighting this in court was damaging to your economic health, so to speak, judges will award you compensation for it.
Interesting... so if Big Software Corp., holder of Patent XYZ-123 for Widget Design sues you alleging infringement on your part, they can make fighting against them even more unpalatable by specifying that you'll have to pay for the legal fees of their seven bigshot lawyers? Now there's a true cornerstone of equality!

[whooleytoo]

Doesn't this patent refer to the bevelboxes (windows) that we see when we changing the volume (or contrast, keyboard lightning etc.)?!

If the volume changes, by pressing a key on keyboard, the window comes forth, and after a while it disappears gradually by changing transparency again as its value no longer changes...

Yup, that's what I thought too. It looks like a patent application for these existing features.

[ibjoshua]

Upon reaching a certain level of visual translucency, user input in the region of the window is interpreted as an operation on the underlying objects rather than the contents of the overlaying window.

Does anyone actually understand what this means?
I'll admit I'm struggling. I understand the meaning of the words, 'translucency', 'underlying' and 'overlaying' but what are they describing?

i_b_joshua

[qubex]

By logging in using the sign in page.
I hope you are being sarcastic. Cookies aren't only necessary for "long-term persistence" (i.e. autologin). They're also necessary for short-term persistence: such as remembering who you are after you type your username and password and click "login".

Can you be "logged in" to a webpage without the use of cookies? No. Absolutely not.

[leftbanke7]

Interesting... so if Big Software Corp., holder of Patent XYZ-123 for Widget Design sues you alleging infringement on your part, they can make fighting against them even more unpalatable by specifying that you'll have to pay for the legal fees of their seven bigshot lawyers? Now there's a true cornerstone of equality!

Well, if Big Software Corp. sues me for the cost of their lawyers, they might need to do a little restructuring.

And I could be (and probably am) completely wrong. I am a film major, not a law student so if you want information on Modernist films, I can help you but anything related to law that isn't covered on COPS or America's Most Wanted is not something I know a whole lot about.

My assumption was based solely on it sounds logical to do it this way but court proceedings are often very far from that.

[whooleytoo]

Another thing to remember, and some have made this point indirectly, is that patents merely establish ownership. For example, many poo pooed Amazon's patent on one-click online checkouts. Apple, however, decided that this technology was worth paying for and now pays royalties to Amazon to use the technology.

If people want others to pay for R&D so they can use the results for free, this doesn't bode well for innovation either. Why invest the money to come up with new innovations when someone is just going to rip it off and use it for free?

I don't see how you can reconcile your first paragraph and the second. What R&D revenue went into the concept of one-click purchasing?

[ibjoshua]

Can you be "logged in" to a webpage without the use of cookies?
Yes.
The PHP, perl, ColdFusion, ASP, JSP etc etc webserver creates a unique id and passes it along with all (dynamically created) hyperlinks. It's clumsy but it works fine.

i_b_joshua

[leftbanke7]

I hope you are being sarcastic. Cookies aren't only necessary for "long-term persistence" (i.e. autologin). They're also necessary for short-term persistence: such as remembering who you are after you type your username and password and click "login".

Can you be "logged in" to a webpage without the use of cookies? No. Absolutely not.

And those kind of cookies don't bother me. They have a perfectly good purpose. However, the 99.9% of the other cookies that inidate me with ads for whatever it was I looked up on the internet last week are just another example in computing on how a good thing gets used for horrible purposes.

[qubex]

The PHP, perl, ColdFusion, ASP, JSP etc etc webserver creates a unique id and passes it along with all (dynamically created) hyperlinks. It's clumsy but it works fine.
Granted. That said, cookies can also be appended to URLs, so depending on how the patent was structured, these techniques could have also been covered. Indeed, there isn't all that much difference between a SessionID (sid) and a cookie.

[0 and A ai]

You know, it's fine to have a balanced view of things even though this is a mac-related board. However, this continual barrage accusing people on these boards of blinding bias is really worthless and quite often terribly misguided. People can have well thought out opinions of apple that are favorable of apple without being biased toward apple. Most here at times will disagree with apples decisions and being favorable toward them is not blindness. Its simply agreement. If you feel it necessary to start off on the wrong foot with the members of mr, then you might find a better use for your spare time than posting here.

my xp machine boots in 20 seconds. i don't know what ur talking about. My g5 machine boots quicker. but get serious booting times don't mean much.

[Bad Beaver]

when M$ produces an OS that is as stable, as good looking (and not just superficially) and can load from scratch from Power-up in 31 seconds as it does on my RevA 17" iMac then we need to start worrying - until then, relax and enjoy your Macintosh experience :p

:p I will tell my children to keep watching out for this... if I should ever have any... on my deathbed :D

[hmg]

Ok, well software patents ARE BAD. (we all signed the petition (http://petition.eurolinux.org/index_html?LANG=en), right?)

BUT: other companies have been doing the same. I remember that Gateway bought Amiga some time ago (and sold it later) purely for it's UI patents.

It's sad and bad, but Apple (and anbody else) is forced to do this kind of thing because if they don't they will be stopped from using all sorts of patents by other holders.

I'm in an industry where a competitor will use a patent to stop us from doing something, and then we just throw another patent at them so that they withdraw theirs. It sucks.

[123]

Yes.
The PHP, perl, ColdFusion, ASP, JSP etc etc webserver creates a unique id and passes it along with all (dynamically created) hyperlinks. It's clumsy but it works fine.

i_b_joshua

However, if cookies can be patented, so can and will server-side stored session information. The point is that this is ridiculous.

[123]

Another thing to remember, and some have made this point indirectly, is that patents merely establish ownership. For example, many poo pooed Amazon's patent on one-click online checkouts. Apple, however, decided that this technology was worth paying for and now pays royalties to Amazon to use the technology.

If people want others to pay for R&D so they can use the results for free, this doesn't bode well for innovation either. Why invest the money to come up with new innovations when someone is just going to rip it off and use it for free?

Great example. Amazon's R&D cost for this were about $0.

[ingenious]

I do hope they get this patent. I'm sick of Microsoft stealing every idea Apple has.

i hope they get it too. I hope M$ will have to rewrite that part of LongGoose, I mean Longhorn. :D

[sketchy]

Can you be "logged in" to a webpage without the use of cookies? No. Absolutely not.

yes, you can. you have to pass a variable from page to page with the login and password. It is quite easy in cold fusion. Not all websites use cookies, many internal company websites will pass the login value as a variable from page to page. it is not very efficient, but quite possible.

dave

[qubex]

And yet think of how much money Amazon is unfairly making on OneClick royalties... the mind truly boggles.

Fiddling with Perl for five minutes: $0.50
Patent Application and Lawyer Fees: $5,000.00
Extorting money from everybody: Priceless!
yes, you can. you have to pass a variable from page to page with the login and password. It is quite easy in cold fusion. Not all websites use cookies, many internal company websites will pass the login value as a variable from page to page. it is not very efficient, but quite possible.
Now, forgive me for being pedantic, but how does this process differ in a significant conceptual manner from that of a cookie? Isn't an SID a cookie by any other name? I think that for most purposes, SIDs and cookies are one and the same.

[mullmann]

Does anyone actually understand what this means?
I'll admit I'm struggling. I understand the meaning of the words, 'translucency', 'underlying' and 'overlaying' but what are they describing?

i_b_joshua

I think they are saying that after a certain period of time, the window "on top" is no longer regarded as being on top. That is, even if it is hierarchically first in a stack, after a period of time (and translucency) if you type or click in the body of the window the OS will assume you are actually interacting with whatever object is underneath that window.

[BobVB]

And if they had, just how would you propose logging into public forums such as these?

You would allow your local software to sign you in automatically from a central account password vault like keychain on a page by page basis. The code writers would have compensated for this and made it transparent. As it is now cookies are doing all sorts of things you many not realize they do or would even want them to do if you were aware of it.

[sketchy]

Yes.
The PHP, perl, ColdFusion, ASP, JSP etc etc webserver creates a unique id and passes it along with all (dynamically created) hyperlinks. It's clumsy but it works fine.

i_b_joshua

!@#!@!@!!@ someone beat me to it...

do any of you work for amazon? I highly doubt their one click system was written ten min. It is always easier to copy something that has been established then to create something from the ground up. And even when you think you are being original there is a good chance that you are plagiarizing anothers work.

[jholzner]

I hope they don't succeed in patenting it.

Prior art exists. For example, if you set Trillian to use transparency, and set the "always on top" option, you can manipulate objects beneath with ease.

The only innovation is the "fading" part, but on a moral basis that doesn't really qualify. Unfortunately, considering the generalised lack of common sense exhibited by the US Patents & Trademarks office, they'll probably approve it.

Incidentally, speaking of Microsoft "stealing every patent Apple has" conveniently ignores the fact that Apple's GUI (which they then proceeded to sue lots of companies over, including Microsoft) was, at the very least, "inspired" by research at Xerox PARC. If suing somebody for copying something you yourself have copied isn't hypocritical, I don't know what is.

Not that I'm against patents. Far from it. But I'm fed up of stupid patents being used as weapons by and between companies, and against third-parties (that in some cases have already implemented the idea).

People here are inclined to always forgive Apple because they percieve Apple to be a "Good Company". Lets face it: Apple Inc. is a profit-orientated organisation and as such, deep down, their behaviour can be just as bad as anybody else's.

Apple didn't STEAL it from Xerox. They bought it from them/was given to them. Xerox didn't think the technology had a future. It was all legal.

[ropbo]

Incidentally, speaking of Microsoft "stealing every patent Apple has" conveniently ignores the fact that Apple's GUI (which they then proceeded to sue lots of companies over, including Microsoft) was, at the very least, "inspired" by research at Xerox PARC. If suing somebody for copying something you yourself have copied isn't hypocritical, I don't know what is.


Totally different situation. Apple didn't steal the GUI from Xerox PARC as you wrongly suggest.

Steve Wozniak's comment on this:

"Steve Jobs made the case to Xerox PARC execs directly that they had great technology but that Apple knew how to make it affordable enough to change the world. This was very open. In the end, Xerox got a large block of Apple stock for sharing the technology. That's not stealing outright.*

Apple didn't get any stock from Microsoft. Nor was Apple dealt with openly in this area by Microsoft.* "

http://www.woz.org/letters/pirates/12.html

[qubex]

Apple didn't STEAL it from Xerox. They bought it from them/was given to them. Xerox didn't think the technology had a future. It was all legal.
Not to sound confrontational, but have you bothered to read my subsequent posts?

[ibjoshua]

...there isn't all that much difference between a SessionID (sid) and a cookie.
I'm not sure if I agree with that. They seem quite different to me. The only reason you'd normally use a session id on a complex site that needed some form of persistent state would be with a POST or GET alternative in case users have cookies turned off. I'm sure the patent for the cookie mentioned a small id file stored on the client's PC, I doubt it mentioned including it in HTML.

That said, who cares. I agree with 123. If Cookies can be patented what's to stop someone patenting POST GET, HTTP etc etc and clamping everthing down.

i_b_joshua

[SiliconAddict]

Repost from another thread:

I have mixed feeling over this. On one hand I'm sick of Apple getting screwed over by MS in terms of copying their features. A few threads back I was defending MS's login screen as being the first to the market in terms of that "look" Diving further into the subject it was OS X 10.1 that came out with that look so it does look like MS copied Apple and its a forgone conclusion that this isn't the first time they did that at least in recent history. We all know about the original battle between MS and Apple.

However it works both ways. What if MS patented fast user switching? They had it first. Apple wouldn't have that feature right now. And that is the other end of the spectrum I'm feeling. Copying someone shouldn't be seen as a crime against humanity. It allows other OS's to adopt feature that in a litigious world would never make their way to that OS or if nothing else a company would most likely end up paying through the nose for a feature. Lets be real. If Apple had to pay MS to license fast user switching in all likelihood they would say screw that and we'd have never seen it.

I'm all for giving a company credit for a feature but not at the cost of stifling innovation. What if a company had a new and innovative method of using fast user switching but couldn't use it because they couldn't afford it?

No I don't think companies should be allowed to patent software techniques or if nothing else have a limited patent. Say 5 years?

Apparently Germany and I feel the same way:

Germany decides not to support the EC on software patents (http://arstechnica.com/news/posts/1084553492.html)

"Under no circumstances do we want American procedures in Europe, Hucko vowed with regard to the US patent process. A patent must be "a fair reward for a bona fide invention and not abused as a strategy to bludgeon competitors."

[Kid Red]

I hope they don't succeed in patenting it.


Incidentally, speaking of Microsoft "stealing every patent Apple has" conveniently ignores the fact that Apple's GUI (which they then proceeded to sue lots of companies over, including Microsoft) was, at the very least, "inspired" by research at Xerox PARC. If suing somebody for copying something you yourself have copied isn't hypocritical, I don't know what is.


That was a pre OSX argument. It's old and holds no water now. XP has stolen some flavors from OSX. So this is a new chapter with no prior history other then MS still takes cues from Apple.

[BobVB]

Great example. Amazon's R&D cost for this were about $0.

But they still thought of it and patented it. Patents and copyrights are to help people that do creative things to be able to do more creative things for our benefit as per the constitution. Though copyrighting has gotten totally out of hand, patents are still very time limited in comparison and a just reward for creativity. If you try and charge too much for your patent people will just do something else and wait your patent out if it has the legs for it.

[Analog Kid]

I hope they don't succeed in patenting it.

Prior art exists. For example, if you set Trillian to use transparency, and set the "always on top" option, you can manipulate objects beneath with ease.

The only innovation is the "fading" part, but on a moral basis that doesn't really qualify. Unfortunately, considering the generalised lack of common sense exhibited by the US Patents & Trademarks office, they'll probably approve it.


You've read the full patent and claims then? The little blurb attached to the lead article on this thread is hardly enough to claim that prior art exists...

Actually, from the blurb, most of us can't figure out what it's even describing... It's almost certainly from the opening text of the patent (perhaps a preferred embodiment) and not from the claims themselves.

[MorganX]

This has been used by many people. Including Trillian and Office 2003 (outlook notifications).

Apple still doesn't believe it can build a better mouse trap so it wants to try and patent it.

[ibjoshua]

I think they are saying that after a certain period of time, the window "on top" is no longer regarded as being on top. That is, even if it is hierarchically first in a stack, after a period of time (and translucency) if you type or click in the body of the window the OS will assume you are actually interacting with whatever object is underneath that window.
Thanks Mullmann, but I still don't see the logic. Why would you have a window in the foreground that you weren't using?

i_b_joshua

[Mr_Ed]

I am also against software patenting. Although I would like it if apple had the edge for gain in the market share. Patenting software code stops innovation.

Remember when amazon tried to patent the cookie?

Patents cut both ways. If there is some concept or mechanism you want to use for your product and someone else has a patent to it, you have to either:
1) Pay some kind of licensing fee to the patent owner and use it
2) Come up with something on your own.

I would say option two clearly does NOT discourage innovation. Neither option is ALWAYS the correct course of action in every situation, but to make a blanket statement that basically "all software patents are bad" ignores the realities of what it takes to develop and successfuly sell a product. I think most successful companies that develop products (not just software related) are probably good at knowing which option (of the ones above) to take given the situation. They understand that in some cases it may be better for them in the long term to just pay a fee and use someone else's idea. They also do not hesitate to patent their own ideas when they have the opportunity so they can have a chance to be at the other end of that equation :)

[ropbo]

Personally speaking, I think that's nice but nothing that special. To me, it's just a cosmetic thing to make the new OS more attractive. But, well, it's cool anyway.

But, if you want to see a truly innovative GUI, take a look at this:

http://wwws.sun.com/software/looking_glass/details.html

[Hattig]

I hope you are being sarcastic. Cookies aren't only necessary for "long-term persistence" (i.e. autologin). They're also necessary for short-term persistence: such as remembering who you are after you type your username and password and click "login".

Can you be "logged in" to a webpage without the use of cookies? No. Absolutely not.

Yes you can, if the website is dynamic, like a forum and most online stores these days.

You just have to add something like "&userid=2845&sessionid=284f8ac823ef" to each URL and the functions to process these, which isn't hard in any way. You'd encode the IP address into the session id somehow as well for security reasons. It also makes logfile analysis *much* more powerful, you can see where a single user has browsed just by grepping their userid in the logfile!

Heh :)

[Tulse]

I think they are saying that after a certain period of time, the window "on top" is no longer regarded as being on top. That is, even if it is hierarchically first in a stack, after a period of time (and translucency) if you type or click in the body of the window the OS will assume you are actually interacting with whatever object is underneath that window.

This seems like an idea that sounds cooler than it would actually be in practice. First off, the notion of slowly "fading" a window with translucency would be nice eye candy, but if at some point the window actually changes state from active to non-active, such a gradual change in translucency won't provide a clear cue as to when that point is reached. In other words, the window can be in one of two states, but the translucency change is continuous, and doesn't map directly to the dichotomous window state. (I suppose that the translucency maps to something like "window age", but that information isn't all that critical -- what matters is whether the window is topmost or not.)

More fundamentally, I think the notion of fundamental aspects of the UI changing over time without user input runs contrary to most good UI principles, and user expectations. Things shouldn't change their functionality unless the user specifies they should.

[qubex]

That was a pre OSX argument. It's old and holds no water now. XP has stolen some flavors from OSX. So this is a new chapter with no prior history other then MS still takes cues from Apple.
It's good to know that the past lies in the past and that all is forgiven. I'm sure Apple is on the verge of returning the monies it recieved as settlements from those it sued. (This is a polite way of saying your line of argument is exceptionally weak.)

Make no mistake, I'm as avid an Apple user as anybody else on this forum. But just because I like their products, and just because overall I consider Apple Inc. to be a reasonably good corporate citizen, does not mean I condone every action they take - especially when I consider those actions to be morally misguided and even deceitful.

[sketchy]

Now, forgive me for being pedantic, but how does this process differ in a significant conceptual manner from that of a cookie? Isn't an SID a cookie by any other name? I think that for most purposes, SIDs and cookies are one and the same.

cookies are files stored on a local machine containing information pertaining to infomation entered into a website. Local machine is the key idea of the patent. A seperate patent would need to be filed to own variables passed through a server.

And you main argument -- patents restrict innovation. Why should we have patents for anything then? No one would develop software if they knew anyone could freely copy it. companies would stop developing processors if they knew that the competition could blatently copy it.

Having something new or unique generates profit, all companies strive for profit. Patents create competitive advantages, knowing that competition cannot copy designs without repercussions encourages companies to compete, thus innovate.

Why would nVida build a new card to compete with ATI if ATI can just carbon copy the nVida card when it comes out?

[Analog Kid]

Incidentally, speaking of Microsoft "stealing every patent Apple has" conveniently ignores the fact that Apple's GUI (which they then proceeded to sue lots of companies over, including Microsoft) was, at the very least, "inspired" by research at Xerox PARC. If suing somebody for copying something you yourself have copied isn't hypocritical, I don't know what is.


IIRC the Apple/MS suit wasn't about the concept of a GUI-- it was that MS was appropriating the MacOS "look and feel" which is a much more nuanced but broader ranging charge.

The argument wasn't that Windows had a mouse and clicked on things, it was how that similar functionality was implemented. To the extent that MacOS differed from the Xerox Smalltalk interface, they had a unique implementation. To the extent that Windows reproduced the MacOS interface, they were copying the Mac "look and feel".

As with the arguments about how there is prior art defeating the patent in question here, you'd have to look at the actual court documents to determine what Apple was claiming.

[klaus]

Yes you can, if the website is dynamic, like a forum and most online stores these days.

You just have to add something like "&userid=2845&sessionid=284f8ac823ef" to each URL and the functions to process these, which isn't hard in any way. You'd encode the IP address into the session id somehow as well for security reasons. It also makes logfile analysis *much* more powerful, you can see where a single user has browsed just by grepping their userid in the logfile!

Heh :)

Sure that can easily be done without cookies, but that's not what cookies are primarily used for..

A cookie is a file stored on the client's computer that holds important information specific to that user on a specific website. So, for example, if I register today at Amazon, and log in to my account, Amazon will place a cookie on my hd, so when I visit amazon.com again tomorrow, I will be logged in automatically, without having to re-enter my password.

The method described in the above post only works when you are shifting from page to page when staying in a specific website. If you close that browser window, and open it again, you'll still have to login, cause there is no way the browser knows your login & pass without the use of cookies

Klaus

[whooleytoo]

More fundamentally, I think the notion of fundamental aspects of the UI changing over time without user input runs contrary to most good UI principles, and user expectations. Things shouldn't change their functionality unless the user specifies they should.

I think there are certain (limited) exceptions, when time-outs are acceptable - or even desireable. Menus closing if the user doesn't select anything for a long period of time, for instance.

If - as someone previously has speculated - this patent applies to windows such as the volume/brightness translucent windows, then it's better for these controls to "auto fade away", than require user input to dismiss them.

[ingenious]

Personally speaking, I think that's nice but nothing that special. To me, it's just a cosmetic thing to make the new OS more attractive. But, well, it's cool anyway.

But, if you want to see a truly innovative GUI, take a look at this:

http://wwws.sun.com/software/looking_glass/details.html

Rodrigo Otavio Paes de Barros Otaviano

I personally think that project looking glass is ugly. Unfortunately, I think that M$ has done a better job with their style of expose' than Sun has, but apple beats them all. I do like the way M$ has the windows at that angle, but its not very intuitive and kinda cumbersome. I liked that piles pic on that .Mac homepage as well.


I am starting to agree that software patents are a bad idea. They do seem to discourage competition at first. So maybe a better idea would to not patent the general idea, but the way that idea works. i.e. the differences between M$'s and Apple's FUS. I personally like Apples much better. I dont have to click *start* to switch users (which i dont do on my PC ne more cuz it didnt work very well.... too much overlapping. Apple is soo much better with this feature.)

[gorkonapple]

Not that I'm against patents. Far from it. But I'm fed up of stupid patents being used as weapons by and between companies, and against third-parties (that in some cases have already implemented the idea).

People here are inclined to always forgive Apple because they percieve Apple to be a "Good Company". Lets face it: Apple Inc. is a profit-orientated organisation and as such, deep down, their behaviour can be just as bad as anybody else's.

I am with ya! There's nothing patentable here. This is NOT a innovation worthy of being patented. In fact, I BET that there's probably already prior art on this in the open and closed source community.

[qubex]

cookies are files stored on a local machine containing information pertaining to infomation entered into a website. Local machine is the key idea of the patent. A seperate patent would need to be filed to own variables passed through a server.
You and I understand cookies and SIDs. I happen to consider them more alike than you do, but that is an academic argument. What I'm trying to argue is this: through the eyes of nontechnically trained legal professionals - lawyers, and more crucially, judges - it is likely that the fine distinction of cookies existing on a local machine's hard drive and SID's existing in a local machines main memory while it browses the site (because indeed they do reside in local memory) would most likely be lost. Or if it wasn't lost, then certainly some lawyer would gloss it over to his or her client's advantage.

And you main argument -- patents restrict innovation. Why should we have patents for anything then? No one would develop software if they knew anyone could freely copy it. companies would stop developing processors if they knew that the competition could blatently copy it.
I have a patent myself ironically, but not software-related (it deals with mechanical gyroscopes). I most certainly do not oppose patents. However, as I said earlier on, I oppose stupid patents, roughly defined as patents that do not incorporate significant innovation and are most likely to end up being used in an offensive capacity to claim ownership of blatantly obvious concepts already incorporated into a plethora of devices. For a stupid example: If Pratt&Whitney wish to patent a "jet engine", that's fine. However, if Pratt&Whitney attempt to patent "spinning or rotating components within a cylindircal object", that is not ok. Why? Because it incorporates jet engines, sure enough - but it also covers computer-case fans, food mixers, certain kinds of computer media, etc. etc. etc. You get the idea.

Incidentally, software is already covered (and, I may add, in a far more sensible capacity) by copyright law. Giving software a double-prongued protection under both legal mechanisms isn't only redundant, wasteful, cumbersome and potentially harmful, it's also damned unethical. Why does software deserve to be covered by a patent, when I can't patent a novel? And yet, they're both text, aren't they? Aren't they both the inovative outcome of a creative process, and don't they both enshrine a fundamental "functional" element? (Reductio ad absurdum.)

All I am saying is that patents are very powerful indeed, because they basically grant a temporary monopoly to their holder. These things shouldn't be handed out helter-skelter.

But then again, I can't really fault Apple for applying for the patent. What really annoys me is that the Patent Office is stupid enough to grant it to them, and that they applied fully aware in the knowledge that pretty much anything they try to patent will be granted. That's the real problem here.

[gorkonapple]

Another thing to remember, and some have made this point indirectly, is that patents merely establish ownership. For example, many poo pooed Amazon's patent on one-click online checkouts. Apple, however, decided that this technology was worth paying for and now pays royalties to Amazon to use the technology.

If people want others to pay for R&D so they can use the results for free, this doesn't bode well for innovation either. Why invest the money to come up with new innovations when someone is just going to rip it off and use it for free?

Let me explain something to you. Let's say we have two websites. Both have the same feature in mind and both are developing it. One uses PHP for the site and another uses say ASP. To the web user, the feature is the same and works the same but they were both developed at the same time. One company decides to write a vague patent that would make the other website a violation. How is this fair? WHat you are saying is that you can establish ownership on IDEAS! Patents work pretty decently on something's. An example on soemthing that it works well on is CPU's. This is like trying to sue for plagarism on someone else who wrote instructions on how to wipe your butt. It just does not work!

[Analog Kid]

Don't be blinded by your love and devotion to Apple. Software patents are just flat out wrong. They stifle innovation. Just think if companies had been patenting software since the 1980's with the regularity they are doing now. We wouldn't be anywhere near the level of software development we are now. Microsoft and Apple are just taking advantage of the horribly outdated patent system and inadequate Patent Office we have in the United States. Meanwhile, the little developer, whether they are an open source developer, a shareware developer, or trying to sell a product themself, gets screwed. How can you fight Microsoft or Apple in court? They probably spend as much on lawyers as they do on R&D.

A patent has two purposes-- to protect innovation and to instruct the public. By disclosing an invention, others can learn the mechanics of it and build upon it. By barring others from making unlicensed use of the invention for a period of time they encourage innovation over waiting and mimicking.

By forcing lateral thinking to avoid existing patents it encourages new ideas into the marketplace. Look at Canon. It was generally deemed impossible to create a photocopier without tripping a Xerox patent, but Canon set out to do it and succeeded. Along with their accomplishments came new techniques that pushed the state of the art forward.

Alternatives exist, of course. IBM issues several volumes each year of innovations they've chosen not to patent so that others can't patent them later and sue IBM. This is yet another example of how the patent laws can encourage the spread of innovation.

Much more practically, we live in a world where patents are important to business. To suggest Apple just unilaterally stop patenting things, and to disparage the company for protecting themselves, is to suggest that Apple simply cease to compete.

Yes, there are cases where the little guy gets hammered by possibly invalid patent threats from a bigger competitor. But there are also times when the little guy survives because a larger player can't just feed off of their innovation. If the little guy is, in fact, trying to produce something that unlawfully incorporates the R&D from another company they still have no right to produce it.

There are certainly improvements that can be made in the US patent system, such as a more comprehensive review of applications by the USPTO or maybe adjusting the enforcement period as the rate of innovation accelerates.

This has absolutely nothing to do with being blinded by devotion to Apple and starting a post with such rubbish tends to signal that meaningless flame baiting is to follow...

[jcshas]

My first thought was that this has a striking similarity to Expose. The obvious difference between the two is that the Expose function is invoked by the user where as this does something similar to that, but seemingly on its own. Either way, this sounds way cool! :cool:

[dizastor]

The way some of you talk, the only patents that should exist should be the printing press and sliced bread.

I'm really glad that there is no patent on sliced bread... imagine how expensive it would be if only one company was making it?

[Analog Kid]

This actually sounds like what I'd been asking them to do with Clock.app... The clock is nice, but I can't find a place to put it where it won't get in the way of something else I want to click. Making it transparent helps me to see behind it, but it almost always covers a control I want to access or text I want to select.

I can see using a technique where I could drag the clock into position and then once I've settled on a location I could click through it. If I wanted to move it again, I'd hit the Dock icon or something to reactivate it.

Not something you'd want to do with every window, I don't think, but useful in certain circumstances...

Kinda hard to tell from the little bit of text though...

[wdlove]

If Apple spent the time & money on R&D then they should get a patent. We need to protect ourselves from Microsoft.

[whooleytoo]

By forcing lateral thinking to avoid existing patents it encourages new ideas into the marketplace. Look at Canon. It was generally deemed impossible to create a photocopier without tripping a Xerox patent, but Canon set out to do it and succeeded. Along with their accomplishments came new techniques that pushed the state of the art forward.

Wow.. just imagine if they hadn't wasted months "reinventing the wheel", and had instead spent that time improving the Xerox method?

How can spending months trying to duplicate another company's product's functionality and circumventing a patent, be considered innovation?

[Diatribe]

This has been on MacNN.com for about 2 days...

http://www.macnn.com/news/24708

Can't you get news any faster? ;)

MrToast

You just need to look all over this site. Some news take a while to get from the subforums to the news page. :D

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=71938

[Mitthrawnuruodo]

Software patenting is just plain wrong. Of course companies should get protection when innovating, but this should be done with ordinary copyright legislation (or similar protection of interlectual work). This would protect ANYONE who creates an innovating piece of software, and not just those who can pay the stiff fees that a worldwide patent will cost you. Patents should be reserves for inventions, NOT innovating...

[cubist]

Some of you folks don't seem to understand the purpose of a Patent. Patents aren't granted for world changing inventions only, they provide protection of intellectual property, even if that property is as simple as a refinement to an already existing product. ...

And you don't understand it either. The patent's purpose is to allow people to DISCLOSE and LICENSE the invention, not to use it exclusively themselves - the latter is an abuse of the system.

Software patents are in direct contradiction of the original patent law which said that "mathematical formulae" could not be patented.

Further, there is a huge amount of prior art. I haven't heard of a patent granted in the last ten years that I thought was truly innovative. Why, some bozos have just gotten a patent for putting fake songs on P2P networks under false names! What gross idiocy and stupidity on the PTO's part.

[Mitthrawnuruodo]

By the way, take a look at the not quite historical correct, but still pretty close history of Apple and Microsoft in the early days: Pirates of Silicon Valley (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122/). This is the film mentioned in the article on wos.org that someone referred to earlier.

[chuckiej]

Patents are a necessary part of innovation. IF you have no chance of getting something for your work, why bother??



Can you be "logged in" to a webpage without the use of cookies? No. Absolutely not.

You can pass the person's login info around your site with the querystring. Inefficient, yes. Doable, yes again.

;)

Edit: sorry, didn't realize Sketchy covered this.

[baby duck monge]

Why, some bozos have just gotten a patent for putting fake songs on P2P networks under false names! What gross idiocy and stupidity on the PTO's part.

actually, that could be a really good thing. the RIAA has been doing things like that, so this could be a way to stop them from harassing poor, innocent file sharers :D

if the RIAA wanted to continue, they would have to pay. extorting the company that is extorting you... EXCELLENT ;)

[makkystyle]

Don't be blinded by your love and devotion to Apple. Software patents are just flat out wrong. They stifle innovation. Just think if companies had been patenting software since the 1980's with the regularity they are doing now...

Just to clear things up a bit, patents are GOOD. They are what promote invention and innovation. Anyone who has taken Econ 101 knows that the free market economy is driven by invention and innovation. These create competitive advantage i.e. a reason to purchase an Apple product over some competitor's. Without Patents it would be nearly impossible to sustain competitive advantage because everyone could just copy the product that someone else created. This would make invention and innovation redundant and cause the collapse of the market i.e. all of you programmers, engineers and developers would have no company that would want to pay you for your work because your work does not create any added value to the organisation. Anyone out there who wants to try a Socialist economy is certainly welcome to do so, but the track record of others does not bode well for your future.

On another note, I have been waiting for click through transluscent windows so that my desktop clock doesn't block the scroll arrows of my windows anymore.

[Windowlicker]

this is one of the things i've bee waiting for.. i love translucensy. for example I really like the way I can make the Adium contact list transparent so that I only see the names floating on my desktop.

[savar]

I am also against software patenting. Although I would like it if apple had the edge for gain in the market share. Patenting software code stops innovation.

Remember when amazon tried to patent the cookie?

No offense or anything, but this is a completely stupid and uneconomical argument. (And I'm not singling you out, a number of people are saying this...)

Ask yourself: if you had a brilliant idea but you know as soon as it was out of your mouth all your hard work implementing it would be stolen and mass produced by a corporate giant, would you bother implementing it at all?

No.

What if you could protect your intellectual property so that when the big corporate giant came along it had to pay you money to use your idea?

Well that's what Apple's doing. Everybody comes here and talks about Xerox PARC, the truth is few people know exactly what happened and throwing that in everybody's face everytime they cheer on Apple versus Microsoft is a dated cliche.

I would love to have just *one* really cool feature of OS X that MicroSoft doesn't steal so that when my non-technical friends ask what makes macs better, I can say.."hey watch this"

[Roller]

Sounds like something for 10.4 - maybe 10.5

I can see a tie-in between this feature and the code name of the OS X release that includes it... Cheshire Cat. :)

[elo]

I'm strongly in favor of software patents and hope this trend continues throughout the industry. Patents are a way that a company can make a claim to an invention. They aren't the last word (as some people seem to think), but they do provide helpful legal documentation of a company's claim. They also don't prevent others from innovating, even where the innovations are inspired by a patented aspect of someone else's software.

The intent is to protect ideas, while avoiding litigation. Should litigation be required, however (either offensively in the case of someone stealing a patented idea or defensively if Apple is sued by someone else who alleges the idea is theirs), then the existence of patents is helpful in making a case and reduces costs.

It does occasionally happen that a patent is granted where it shouldn't be (although the patent office does a pretty good amount of research), but these can be challenged where necessary. Companies should try to get them though, if for no other reason to protect themselves from those who would unscrupolously take their ideas for themselves.

elo

[qubex]

Ludicrous patents such as this one are not the only way to avoid litigation and thus allow defensive use of one's Intellectual Property.

As was mentioned, IBM issues several volumes of "developed" but unpatented technology every year, to avoid future litigation.

So generally, summing it all up: this patent sounds absurd, encumbered by Prior Art, and gratuitous. Let us all hope it is defeated. For the good of everybody.

[savar]

I'm really glad that there is no patent on sliced bread... imagine how expensive it would be if only one company was making it?

Argg...If there was a patent on sliced bread:
1) It would have expired a long, long time ago.
2) Even when it was pertinent, there's no way that only one company would have produced bread...patents are a way of protecting intellectual property, not keeping out of everybody's hands. If I had the patent on sliced bread, I wouldn't even make sliced bread, I'd just collect royalties from all the companies who know how to make bread.

Maybe this sounds like two trivial arguments, but they elucidate two key points of patents that nobody seems to be considering here.

[ingenious]

I'm really glad that there is no patent on sliced bread... imagine how expensive it would be if only one company was making it?

it'd be as expensive as milk! or gas for that matter. :rolleyes:

[ingenious]

If Apple spent the time & money on R&D then they should get a patent. We need to protect ourselves from Microsoft.

yes if you read one of my posts above it will explain this better, but this is my opinion:

Companies should be able to patent the way something works (i.e. fast user switching.), but not the entire idea to where it prohibits or inhibits innovation. When companies like Xerox try and put that kind of patent on an idea, it harms the entire industry, including themselves.


I do agree tho that M$ needs to have some special restrictions, not unlike the restrictions imposed on AIM/AOL until last year or so. That way it would give the rest of the market a chance to grow. They shouldn't be allowed to copy so blatantly!

I probably sound really confusing.... when I read through this it looks like I have differing view points.... but I'm still confused about this a tad. :confused:

[Fukui]

Don't be blinded by your love and devotion to Apple. Software patents are just flat out wrong. They stifle innovation. Just think if companies had been patenting software since the 1980's with the regularity they are doing now. We wouldn't be anywhere near the level of software development we are now. Microsoft and Apple are just taking advantage of the horribly outdated patent system and inadequate Patent Office we have in the United States. Meanwhile, the little developer, whether they are an open source developer, a shareware developer, or trying to sell a product themself, gets screwed. How can you fight Microsoft or Apple in court? They probably spend as much on lawyers as they do on R&D.
Hmm, lets flip things the other way and look at it. I'm a small developer, but I came out with some groundbreaking Idea that could make me lots of money. Now MS and Apple are always looking out for things (especially MS), now if I patented my idea, when MS copies it, I HAVE PROTECTION, do I not? This can be used to help the smaller company take down the larger one by protecting my ideas, does it not? If patents didn't exist, MS could,with thier tens of Billions copy my hard work in a short time...

[LethalWolfe]

Wow.. just imagine if they hadn't wasted months "reinventing the wheel", and had instead spent that time improving the Xerox method?

How can spending months trying to duplicate another company's product's functionality and circumventing a patent, be considered innovation?

How can everyone using the same tech be considered innovative? Or even a good idea? I think we all can agree that consumers "win" when companies compete against each other. What would the CPU world look like if there was no Intel v. AMD "war"? Also, w/o patents how will your protect your millions of dollars and years of R&D? Why go to all that time and effort to create a product that will never generate a profit for you because your competition can just copy your work and sell it significanly cheaper because they have no R&D costs to recoup?

As another poster said patents are good things. Bad patents are bad things.


Lethal

[ThomasJefferson]

Sounds like eye candy. First time I saw the window shrink effect, I had to go back to the mac.

Bring it on Steve.

[SiliconAddict]

The patent was a typo. Its really transparent aluminum. That Mac Scotty was typing on must have been sent to Apple in a recycling program, an engineer found the formula and Apple patented it. :eek:

We now know what the next PowerBook shell is going to be made out of.

[JGowan]

On June 15th, 2002, the US Congress officially recognized that the italian inventor Antonio Meucci is to be credited for the invention of the telephone, and not Alexander G. Bell, as so far claimed.

This was the end of a long controversy, started when a poor italian immigrant in New York sold the prototypes of his invention to a Telegraph company, that later gave them to Alexander G. Bell, who in turn patented the invention of the phone.So, It was Meucci that we owe our thanks to for the phone and not Alexander Graham Bell. But should we slight Bell for being smart enough to see the grand scheme of things? No. Meucci was short-sided and settled for far too less than he should've.

Apple has got to protect their innovations (whatever they might be) so that they don't become a modern-day Meucci.

Think about the computer mouse... although the inventor (Douglas Engelbart) has a patent for the invention, does he get a single penny for every one that exists? I doubt it. I never even heard of the guy until I googled the poor shmuck.

You can have all the great innovations in the world and have patents on all of them,... you must also be willing to go to court to protect yourself. Apple has that strength and they shouldn't be faulted for it.

[Fukui]

Repost from another thread:

I have mixed feeling over this. On one hand I'm sick of Apple getting screwed over by MS in terms of copying their features. A few threads back I was defending MS's login screen as being the first to the market in terms of that "look" Diving further into the subject it was OS X 10.1 that came out with that look so it does look like MS copied Apple and its a forgone conclusion that this isn't the first time they did that at least in recent history. We all know about the original battle between MS and Apple.


Actually, that login screen was in OS 9...whenever that came out, I remember seeing it on someones iMac...it had the pictures for each user like the rubber duck (also appeared in XP), baseball, flower etc...
I think if MS patented fast user switching that would of been great for them, if they came out with it first.
I think that software patents are OK, but they last too long, software moves at such a high rate of change that it can become too hard to build on prior work, maybe 3-5 years would be the max time for a soft-patent...no? People should be potected for thier ideas for at least some time...

[areyouwishing]

Wow.. just imagine if they hadn't wasted months "reinventing the wheel", and had instead spent that time improving the Xerox method?

How can spending months trying to duplicate another company's product's functionality and circumventing a patent, be considered innovation?
I think apple did something like this when they implemented PDF print in OS X... they did it without paying adobe.... it was either that or Quartz... i forget which.

My 2 Cents on this issue...
I sure hope you can turn this feature off. Why would anyone want to waste CPU and VPU time rendering transparencies that you won't see... imagine if safari is full screen, and you have windows in the back fading in and out for no reason. This is big waste of cycles... Is this part of Quartz Ultra Extreme???

<rant>Everyone that I know that uses expose' has windows and palettes all over the place and doesn't work very clean to begin with. PERSONALLY i didn't see a need for expose' and I don't see a need for this either... I just want a window to appear... it doesn't need to scale, it doesn't need to zoom or fade... I don't care about those things, I care about speed and performance... my clients could care less what my GUI windows look like, but they do care that it takes milliseconds more time to open a window and pushes their deadlines back!!!!</rant>

[Analog Kid]

Wow.. just imagine if they hadn't wasted months "reinventing the wheel", and had instead spent that time improving the Xerox method?
Just imagine if no one had to spend months reinventing the wheel-- where would the barrier to entry be? There wouldn't be one. The smart money would be on the people with no ideas themselves but who just duplicate other peoples efforts. Same product, no investment.

Why would they bother to improve on the Xerox method if Xerox could just duplicate what Canon had done without cost? That would be pretty foolish methinks...

How can spending months trying to duplicate another company's product's functionality and circumventing a patent, be considered innovation?

By definition. Not sure how you're defining innovation if it isn't doing something in a way no one else has done it before...

[Penman]

You know, it's fine to have a balanced view of things even though this is a mac-related board. However, this continual barrage accusing people on these boards of blinding bias is really worthless and quite often terribly misguided. People can have well thought out opinions of apple that are favorable of apple without being biased toward apple. Most here at times will disagree with apples decisions and being favorable toward them is not blindness. Its simply agreement. If you feel it necessary to start off on the wrong foot with the members of mr, then you might find a better use for your spare time than posting here.

Don't criticize another board members dissent under the guise of reason. It is and can only be censorship via peer pressure.

Dissent, argue and criticize. I think that the people who care about Apple most, like good patriots, criticize most.

Some people's desire to agree and justify here is laughable. My new Powerbook crashed repeatedly yesterday while trying to play a DVD - nothing's perfect.

[titaniumducky]

Who cares about the patent?! The feature sounds awesome!

[Windowlicker]

I think we're looking at Piles-in-the-making. (For those of you who aren't aware, "Piles" was the name of a rumoured 10.3 feature that would have reportedly allowed you to "stack documents".)

hmm. got an idea. actually just copying a bit of this transparency stuff and the ui Sun was presenting on that video clip.. what if you could define a place on your screen where idle windows would go. first they get transparent and then create piles. so that you could then choose really quick the window you wanna bring to front. the windows could also resize to say 300pxl so that it would actually be pretty exposé-like function..

did you get my point? i wasn't too accurate were i? :Q

[mullmann]

Thanks Mullmann, but I still don't see the logic. Why would you have a window in the foreground that you weren't using?

i_b_joshua

Well, I understand "what," but I never said I understand "why!" :D

[theahnman]

I'm not sure if I agree with that. They seem quite different to me. The only reason you'd normally use a session id on a complex site that needed some form of persistent state would be with a POST or GET alternative in case users have cookies turned off. I'm sure the patent for the cookie mentioned a small id file stored on the client's PC, I doubt it mentioned including it in HTML.

That said, who cares. I agree with 123. If Cookies can be patented what's to stop someone patenting POST GET, HTTP etc etc and clamping everthing down.

i_b_joshua

Please don't get me started on Session IDs and Cookies and similarities. They have NOTHING to do with each other. Session IDs are authenticating, time-sensitive tickets used with SSL/TLS security. E.g. like the system used on your banking site(s).
Cookies are simply some sort of combination of unique, identifiable data (typically some combination of processor serial number and operating system on a Wintel machine...AMD doesn't use processor IDs) placed by a website onto your computer in PLAIN TEXT . All a cookie does is that it lets the web server know that you've been on the site before. Sometimes, the previous visit information will be stored on your computer, or (more often) a visit ID/Timestamp is placed in plain text in the file, which corresponds to data on the web server.

I would be highly concerned, even paranoid if secure transactions were carried out using cookies.

And yes, I DO know what I'm talking about...

[whooleytoo]

As another poster said patents are good things. Bad patents are bad things.

The system can work both ways.

Patents that describe a specific, original method or innovation are good - in particular if a degree of time & resource investment was necessary to conceive it. They encourage companies to invest in R&D, because they know they can reap the fruits of that innovation, without the fear of being copied.

"Bad" patents - which I would see as any patent too vague or general; that's not original, or (in particular) just an obvious, incremental evolution of an existing concept - are worrying. They allow a company to stifle the competition, and in doing so, stifling innovation.

[kylos]

Don't criticize another board members dissent under the guise of reason. It is and can only be censorship via peer pressure.

Dissent, argue and criticize. I think that the people who care about Apple most, like good patriots, criticize most.

Some people's desire to agree and justify here is laughable. My new Powerbook crashed repeatedly yesterday while trying to play a DVD - nothing's perfect.

I mentioned nothing of his dissent. I criticized his unfounded, flame-inciting tone. That does nothing for this board.

I do criticize apple at times as do many of those who post here. Blanket statements like jocknerd's are not appreciated.



As far as this thread's topic, I feel that a patent is better applied to software than copyright laws. A patent is not about look and feel and such. A patent is about a process. A copyright covers the overall effect or end product.

In this case, the proposed patent is a method for managing windows. It does not claim translucency. It claims that translucency is used for managing windows in a certain way. This must be understood. This patent is not about translucent windows or even translucent windows fading. It is about using transparent windows fading to manage windows. It is very specific in scope, and it would be pretty hard to successfully claim much more.

[swexplorer]

Am I lost in all the thread, but what about Synergy? does it do exactly what Apple patent says? Fading transparent window etc etc?

[mullmann]

Incidentally, software is already covered (and, I may add, in a far more sensible capacity) by copyright law. Giving software a double-prongued protection under both legal mechanisms isn't only redundant, wasteful, cumbersome and potentially harmful, it's also damned unethical. Why does software deserve to be covered by a patent, when I can't patent a novel? And yet, they're both text, aren't they? Aren't they both the inovative outcome of a creative process, and don't they both enshrine a fundamental "functional" element? (Reductio ad absurdum.)

Good post; thanks. Not completely sure I agree with it, but I appreciate the thought behind it. Hmmm... code is text, to be sure, but there multiple ways of implementing (coding) an idea, so isn't it the realization of the idea that's the important part in this case and not the coding of it? But maybe this is like saying you should be able to copyright a screenplay (which you can) but patent a movie (which of course you cannot). Interesting.

[Fukui]

I sure hope you can turn this feature off. Why would anyone want to waste CPU and VPU time rendering transparencies that you won't see... imagine if safari is full screen, and you have windows in the back fading in and out for no reason. This is big waste of cycles... Is this part of Quartz Ultra Extreme???

That would never happen. There is a thing called Z-Buffering which prevents the sides of obscured polygons from being rendered, it wouldn't need to do anything to obscured windows....that said, I don't know if fading windows is a good idea, I have enough trouble with apps that goble the mouse cursor when it stops moving...

[dcmurrin]

Have any of you seen Longhorn (Microsofts new OS update). This has been in development for quite some time. An early alpha has was released last fall and the screen shots look like they lifted a lot from OSX. It is heavy into transparancy.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1588197,00.asp

Look at the slide show link.

[Doctor Q]

Someone please explain (or speculate on) how the described feature would work.

Suppose you click the title bar of a background window to bring it forward. Does that reset the timer that controls fading?

If the answer is YES: Something's fishy, because when the frontmost window finally reaches the point where clicks are passed to the window behind it, the window behind it must have been inactive even longer, so it too should have faded to the click-through point.

If the answer is NO: Something's fishy, because I've just shown my interest in the newly frontmost window yet it may still fade out very soon. Since some windows hold read-only information (nothing to click on in the window), how would you keep such windows from fading if clicking to make them frontmost wasn't enough?

[whooleytoo]

Just imagine if no one had to spend months reinventing the wheel-- where would the barrier to entry be? There wouldn't be one. The smart money would be on the people with no ideas themselves but who just duplicate other peoples efforts. Same product, no investment.


Lower barrier to entry.. more competition.. cheaper prices. That's assuming everyone just repeated Xerox's ideas. If companies such as Canon spent any money on R&D, it would be on added, not existing, functionality.


By definition. Not sure how you're defining innovation if it isn't doing something in a way no one else has done it before...

I suppose it's innovation from the company's perspective. But since the end product is the same (a photocopier in this case), I doubt any user would consider it innovation.

p.s. in case you think I'm entirely against patents, I'm not. I'm just making the case they can encourage, but also deter, innovation.

[Colonel Panik]

This seems like an idea that sounds cooler than it would actually be in practice. First off, the notion of slowly "fading" a window with translucency would be nice eye candy, but if at some point the window actually changes state from active to non-active, such a gradual change in translucency won't provide a clear cue as to when that point is reached. In other words, the window can be in one of two states, but the translucency change is continuous, and doesn't map directly to the dichotomous window state. (I suppose that the translucency maps to something like "window age", but that information isn't all that critical -- what matters is whether the window is topmost or not.)

More fundamentally, I think the notion of fundamental aspects of the UI changing over time without user input runs contrary to most good UI principles, and user expectations. Things shouldn't change their functionality unless the user specifies they should.

Aye, I can agree with you, but you must remember that we are coming from the patent text and trying to concoct whatever Apple has done. Whereas, I believe that it is possible that Apple have some already working model and they have found the perfect application for this. I'd be surprized if they are patenting something that lessens the user experience.

What about Expose. Is that patented? Or the pop-up tabs in OS 9 (which I for one still miss). Is Microsoft's Start button patented? Anyone know?

[hulugu]

The folks at Slashdot have a pretty good grasp on how and why software patents can completely destroy innovation. I think all of the Apple defenders should take a read at this Slashdot thread (http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/15/1332215&mode=thread&tid=107&tid=155&tid=187&tid=99) before jumping to Apple's defense.

Not that I agree or disagree with regard to software patents, but a thread on Slashdot is just about the last place I'd go to find information or a coherent opinion on anything. I would actually suggest Groklaw.

[Colonel Panik]

I just had a thought. Lots of folk like to have RSS feeds somewhere on their screen. Let's say stocks, or news, or weather, or ebay auction results, or some other status screens, and so on. And if these windows could be set to be on top, but through-clickable, then that's good. I can think of lots of things that I'd like to be able to see all the time, but ignore by focusing through them. It's a bit like the speedometers on some cars, which reflect on the inside of the windscreen, so you are able to look at the road, and check your speed.

But isn't that too much like the widgets from that program, Konfabulator? If it had been stable, I might have kept them, but the unstability and the sheer number of badly constructed widgets made me want to trash the lot, which I did. But I don't think that they were through-clickable.

- or maybe not! Perhaps I should patent this idea...

[hulugu]

I think apple did something like this when they implemented PDF print in OS X... they did it without paying adobe.... it was either that or Quartz... i forget which.

My 2 Cents on this issue...
I sure hope you can turn this feature off. Why would anyone want to waste CPU and VPU time rendering transparencies that you won't see... imagine if safari is full screen, and you have windows in the back fading in and out for no reason. This is big waste of cycles... Is this part of Quartz Ultra Extreme???

<rant>Everyone that I know that uses expose' has windows and palettes all over the place and doesn't work very clean to begin with. PERSONALLY i didn't see a need for expose' and I don't see a need for this either... I just want a window to appear... it doesn't need to scale, it doesn't need to zoom or fade... I don't care about those things, I care about speed and performance... my clients could care less what my GUI windows look like, but they do care that it takes milliseconds more time to open a window and pushes their deadlines back!!!!</rant>

Expose is a great feature if you know how to use it, I flip between various windows so often that it was slightly more time consuming to find the window I needed and then flip back. I care about speed too, but more often than not my machine is fast enough for my current needs—I'm sure I could justify a G5 though—and I care about usability more.
Not everyone works the same way you do.

[gunnmjk]

This has been used by many people. Including Trillian and Office 2003 (outlook notifications).

Apple still doesn't believe it can build a better mouse trap so it wants to try and patent it.

it's used in Microsoft Office 2004 as well for the formatting palette :eek: . The palette fades transparency when you stop focusing on it, and start working on your document. It reappears 100% when you mouse over it.

[dontmatter]

This talk is driving me nuts.

OK, lets take a clear look at the world, and then play a little game and say, what would happen if patent law went to either extreme-either no patents, or patents for the tiniest, most superficial of innovations, that restrict all rights so much that only the patent holder can use the technology, for all time.

First, the world of no patents, since that's what people are arguing for:

I've got a great Idea that will provide signifigant gains for human life, increasing efficinecy, ease of use, etc. it's going to take a lot of money to make it work, though, work out kinks, make some prototypes, figure out how to make it user friendly, and put it on the market. So, I do so. Soon as I do it, other people pick it apart, figure out how it works, in just a couple of weeks with a couple of bucks, and make a cheaper version themselves, and I make no money. So, next time I have an idea, I simply don't implement it. The only reason in this world to innovate, is if it gives you a marketing edge by coming into the market first, and if its' significantly hard to copy, so it will take a while for freebee clones to come out. But, if you run a company, it's just smarter to let somebody else take on the cost of devoleping ideas (particularly b/c most ideas will be busts), and then because you dont' have that cost, you can sell cheaper, and get the market share.

Clearly, there's a reason the founding fathers set up strong patent laws, and it has helped to make this country the leader in so many technologies and provide so many of the world's innovations. Patents make it profitable to invent, because until your idea is old hat, you make money off of it, and others pay if they want to use it, and so effectively pay for R&D, just that they subcontract it off to someone else by paying liscencing fees.


Now, the world of all restrictive patents:

In this world, there is no competition. If you make something, of any sort, you're the only one who can make it. Nobody's going to take your market share, if nobody is allowed to make another product doing the same thing, so you have no incentive to make it better, and no access to other people's ideas to make it better, for that matter. If you patented the internal combustion engine, you're going to be the only car maker for the rest of all time. We'd barely get beyond the model T in this world, because it's always cheaper to stick with your market, raise prices, and make no investments for the future, because the future can't really bring you any more money than it already does.


So, lets see. What do we want? I'd say, we want something quite close to our current system. We want patents. We want them to expire, though, and allow for competition, but still give the inventer an advantage over moochers. This is particularly important with computers, because the computer world moves so fast, and it is so easy to copy someone else's ideas or just copy the software directly. If you make a new kind of car, it's going to take a long, long time for people to figure out how to copy it, and get it into procuction. In that time, you've lost money to R&D, but you still have advantages of market share, being able to move on to the next technology by the time the others have caught up, etc. At the very least, you can get a niche market. But, with software, if you don't have protections...you'll be halfway to recovering your R&D costs before you've completely lost the market to people who have made the same thing for free. We must have patents for software, but they also must expire quickly, because innovations become old commodities so quickly with computers.

[Jookbox]

I do hope they get this patent. I'm sick of Microsoft stealing every idea Apple has.

i try not to be a jerk here, but that's the lamest thing i've read today.

[Toreador93]

According to my Philosophy professor, and a few of his collegues and lawyer friends, patents are beginning to hinder development.

Yes a patent can help a small company, but they can also hurt it. There are people in big companies whose sole job is to think up ideas, and patent them. They may never use them, but if someone else comes up with it, or even uses part of it, they're out of luck. Either pay an outlandish price and go out of business, or be sued and go out of business.

This is true especially for software. Patents last for 20 years. 10-20 year old software should not still be protected. A software's life is probably about 5 years. After that, it is just inhibiting developement.

Patents used now were never meant to be used for software. It is a whole different technology, and fits a different set of rules.

Also, if something goes to court, many times the ruling is in the hands of a jury. Juries are made up of average people. The average person doesn't know anything about programming. Why would you rely on them for determining if there is a patent infringement??

Patents have gotten so out of hand, entire business models have been patented. Have you heard of Netflix? Have you heard of any competition? I doubt it, because every part of that company is patented. I believe Walmart is going to start something similar, but it will undoubtedly go to court.

[MetallicPenguin]

Patents have gotten so out of hand, entire business models have been patented. Have you heard of Netflix? Have you heard of any competition? I doubt it, because every part of that company is patented. I believe Walmart is going to start something similar, but it will undoubtedly go to court.

Actually, I think that about 2 companies that are doing the same thing just sprung up out of nowhere, I bet something will happen, or already has.

-just useless trivia that does not add to the content of this topic really.

[Sveto]

For all the history about the subject with dates get "Dealers of Lightning: Xerox Parc and the Dawn ..."
Than you can learn day by day how everything started. At the end of the book you can find a few words for every participant and will be surprised that most of the guys involved went to Microsoft and not Apple.
Many things were dicovered at Xerox as basic ideas, but the huge benefit of creating a package like the OS has to be given to Apple. Don't forget that!

[ibjoshua]

Please don't get me started on Session IDs and Cookies and similarities. They have NOTHING to do with each other. Session IDs are authenticating, time-sensitive tickets used with SSL/TLS security. E.g. like the system used on your banking site(s).
Cookies are simply some sort of combination of unique, identifiable data (typically some combination of processor serial number and operating system on a Wintel machine...AMD doesn't use processor IDs) placed by a website onto your computer in PLAIN TEXT . All a cookie does is that it lets the web server know that you've been on the site before. Sometimes, the previous visit information will be stored on your computer, or (more often) a visit ID/Timestamp is placed in plain text in the file, which corresponds to data on the web server.

I would be highly concerned, even paranoid if secure transactions were carried out using cookies.

And yes, I DO know what I'm talking about...

Yo're quoting the wrong guy in this thread. I know what you're talking about AND I agree with you. But thanks for backing me up. :)

i_b_joshua

[ibjoshua]

Someone please explain (or speculate on) how the described feature would work.

Suppose you click the title bar of a background window to bring it forward. Does that reset the timer that controls fading?

If the answer is YES: Something's fishy, because when the frontmost window finally reaches the point where clicks are passed to the window behind it, the window behind it must have been inactive even longer, so it too should have faded to the click-through point.

If the answer is NO: Something's fishy, because I've just shown my interest in the newly frontmost window yet it may still fade out very soon. Since some windows hold read-only information (nothing to click on in the window), how would you keep such windows from fading if clicking to make them frontmost wasn't enough?

Thanks Doctor Q, the patent argument is getting very boring and circular. This is what I have been trying to work out. A lot of people have been talking about transparency/translucency being an old (and worn out?) idea. I think it's the method of implementation that the patent is talking about.

That said, I still can't work out how they want to implement it. If somebody could mock up or give us a blow-by-blow of how they think it would work, that would be cool.

i_b_joshua

[areyouwishing]

Expose is a great feature if you know how to use it, I flip between various windows so often that it was slightly more time consuming to find the window I needed and then flip back. I care about speed too, but more often than not my machine is fast enough for my current needs—I'm sure I could justify a G5 though—and I care about usability more.
Not everyone works the same way you do.

Like I said.. "Personally i..."

I usually never have more than 5 windows open in a particular application at a time. With Cmd + Tab to switch between applications, control + ~ to switch between the current application windows, I didn't like pressing f9 to watch an animation, then try and determine what window i wanted from 15 different windows between the finder and all of my open applications.

I also dropped a hundred bux on Quickeys to be able to customize my keyboard shortcuts beyond Panther and the CS apps... which includes pressing Command+Esc to go to my finder and hiding all applications... which means that if i accidentally click on the outer edge of my desktop, i don't get some un-wanted app.

I agree with you in that my machine is fast enough for my needs too. I really don't want apple introducing more features that are going to inflate my needs... as long as you can turn it off... im a happy camper.

[chabig]

I didn’t read the patent, but doesn’t MS Office 2004 have this effect of palettes getting transparent when they’re not used? Is this something completely different?

The Apple application seems to exactly describe the behavior of Office's new palettes. However, just because Office does this does not make it prior art. The right to patent goes to the first to invent, not the first to use or the first to file.

Chris

[Doctor Q]

With Cmd + Tab to switch between applications, control + ~ to switch between the current application windows...So nobody gets misled, a slight correction: Command-Tab to switch between applications and Command-~ to switch between windows of the current application.

[chabig]

Someone please explain (or speculate on) how the described feature would work.

Certainly. It's well described in the patent application. But that type of text can make for tedious reading. Here goes...

The example given in the patent application refers to floating palettes. And the one they refer to specifically is the Speech Recognition palette. If you're not using speech recognition, this palette does nothing but obscure what's beneath. So Apple dims the transparency of the palette to show the desktop or document beneath it. Clicks on the palette are assumed to be targeted at the desktop or document as long as the speech palette is not being used. However, if you hold down the hot key to tell the Mac to listen to your voice command, the palette will regain it's opaqueness and come back to the front. If you then don't use the spoken interface for a while, that palette will fade back into a translucent state.

That's really the only implementation described.

Chris

[theahnman]

Yo're quoting the wrong guy in this thread. I know what you're talking about AND I agree with you. But thanks for backing me up. :)

i_b_joshua
my bad
:D

[ibjoshua]

Certainly. It's well described in the patent application. But that type of text can make for tedious reading. Here goes...

The example given in the patent application refers to floating palettes. And the one they refer to specifically is the Speech Recognition palette. If you're not using speech recognition, this palette does nothing for you but obscure what's beneath. So Apple dims the transparency to show the desktop or document beneath it. Click on the palette are assumed to be targeted at the desktop or document as long as the speech palette is not being used. However, if you hold down the hot key to tell the Mac to listen to your voice command, the palette will regain it's opaqueness and come back to the front. If you then go without using the spoken interface for a while, that palette will fade back into a translucent state.

That's really the only implementation described.

Chris

Ta Chris. Good explanation.

i_b_joshua

[Analog Kid]

Lower barrier to entry.. more competition.. cheaper prices.
no differentiation... no profit... no incentive...

That's assuming everyone just repeated Xerox's ideas. If companies such as Canon spent any money on R&D, it would be on added, not existing, functionality.
Which would be foolish since Xerox and everyone else would just steal the little innovation you just spent 2 years and $100m developing. Since Xerox already has the market share, they'd get credit for your work.

I suppose it's innovation from the company's perspective. But since the end product is the same (a photocopier in this case), I doubt any user would consider it innovation.
That's kinda like saying iPhoto is just a picture book... It is so incredibly rare that innovation involves doing entirely new things. It's almost always about doing the old things in a different way, evolving towards a better way. Evolution only occurs when there is differentiation and diversity.

People romanticize inventions too much. They think inventing is coming up with discontinuous leaps in logic that bring a whole new era to the world. It's not-- it's a series of incredibly boring incremental changes.

We tend to set milestones for past inventions. The Wright Brothers invented the airplane, for example... Do you have any idea how little they added to existing aircraft designs? They tweaked existing designs. The end product, as you say, was the same. Performance improved just enough though that it was capable of much more than the earlier designs.

p.s. in case you think I'm entirely against patents, I'm not. I'm just making the case they can encourage, but also deter, innovation.

The problem isn't patents, the problem is the enforcement of patents, and maybe some specifics. 20 years is an obscene amount of time in the software industry right now, and holding exclusive rights to an invention for that long seems like too much. There are other issues with how they're awarded and litigated.

Patents themselves though are good. Actually, they were considered to be of enough importance to be specifically mentioned in the US Constitution:
The Congress shall have power to... promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

Article I, Section 8.

The Constitution is such an incredibly terse document that anything deserving specific mention was considered critical to the nation. I think the implementation is open to discussion, but the concept is a good one.

[areyouwishing]

So nobody gets misled, a slight correction: Command-Tab to switch between applications and Command-~ to switch between windows of the current application.

actually, i use control, but you are right, the default is command...

I switched in in panther because command-~ in photoshop is show all channels... this way control-~ works in all programs.

[mcs37]

I highly doubt this can be patented. While it sounds like a cool idea that no one has done entirely, it's not exactly an innovative concept but rather an extension of the state of the art. Essentially what this boils down to is a timer on each window that increases trans(par|luc)ency as the timer increases and isn't reset. There is nothing here which is non-obvious or novel, although it's certainly a useful addition to a GUI. Due to prior art of transparency combined with the natural extension of state of the art, the patent office will not grant Apple's application.

Damn, I should be an IP lawyer.

[chabig]

Unless prior art is found, I suspect this patent will be granted. A patentable idea has to be novel (not been done before) and unobvious to one skilled in the art. If you are the first to do something, then it's novel. And while ideas often seem obvious in hindsight, the fact that it seems obvious once you've been told about it doesn't mean it was obvious at the time of conception. Finally, the burden the patent office has to meet to reject claims on the basis of obviousness is rather high.

Chris

[gerardrj]

I hope they don't succeed in patenting it.
Incidentally, speaking of Microsoft "stealing every patent Apple has" conveniently ignores the fact that Apple's GUI (which they then proceeded to sue lots of companies over, including Microsoft) was, at the very least, "inspired" by research at Xerox PARC.

ARG! Please, this has been gone over and over.
1. Apple ASKED to see and use the ideas from XP
2. The OS Apple saw there bears the absolute minimum resemblance to Macintosh. It's like saying the builders of the QM2 stole the look and feel from the a rowboat design down the street.

Can somebody please post the video clips that show what the OS at XP looked like when Apple saw the thing so we can end these uneducated comments once and for all.

[J-Squire]

Certainly. It's well described in the patent application. But that type of text can make for tedious reading. Here goes...

The example given in the patent application refers to floating palettes. And the one they refer to specifically is the Speech Recognition palette. If you're not using speech recognition, this palette does nothing but obscure what's beneath. So Apple dims the transparency of the palette to show the desktop or document beneath it. Clicks on the palette are assumed to be targeted at the desktop or document as long as the speech palette is not being used. However, if you hold down the hot key to tell the Mac to listen to your voice command, the palette will regain it's opaqueness and come back to the front. If you then don't use the spoken interface for a while, that palette will fade back into a translucent state.

That's really the only implementation described.

Chris

It took 138 posts, but someone finally gave a reasonable interpretation based on some actual insight.
If this really is all that it gets used for, then I would say that it will be a feature that I have little need for.

UNLESS.....10.4 has made some large advancements in User Voice control. I wouldn't be suprised if Apple has come up with some sweet as features that employ voice recognition, and actually make vocal commands useful and easy. This could be a big step forward in human-computer interaction. They were already hamming up the fact that the next major OS release would have this feature, but maybe we didn't take as big a deal as it will be

[qubex]

10.4 has made some large advancements in User Voice control. I wouldn't be suprised if Apple has come up with some sweet as features that employ voice recognition, and actually make vocal commands useful and easy. This could be a big step forward in human-computer interaction. They were already hamming up the fact that the next major OS release would have this feature, but I maybe we didn't take as big a deal as it will be
Ah, but we already know 10.4 contains great voice control enhancements - Apple already announced as much officially. The report was on Page One of this site, barely two months or so ago. I have to agree with the next post: personally I hadn't considered it a big deal - and I still don't - but perhaps there will be people for whom this is useful.

1. Apple ASKED to see and use the ideas from XP
2. The OS Apple saw there bears the absolute minimum resemblance to Macintosh. It's like saying the builders of the QM2 stole the look and feel from the a rowboat design down the street.

Can somebody please post the video clips that show what the OS at XP looked like when Apple saw the thing so we can end these uneducated comments once and for all.
"Uneducated" yourself, my dear sir! Just because you disagree with me, which is all fine and well, does not give you any licence to be rude.

Regarding the substantive issues of the debate, as I mentioned in subsequent posts, there are a number of different accounts of what exactly took place. Depending on whom one believes, the GUI was either developed entirely independently at Apple, under prior development at Apple but floundering until an influx of Xerox PARC researchers, under prior development at Apple and fully in sway until a modest influx of Xerox PARC researchers, entirely "ripped off" from Xerox PARC by Apple, etc. Unlike you would have it, I am not "uneducated" in such affairs, and I accept a plurality of views. As many have argued, however - it is not the copying that lies at heart of the Software Patent issue - it is the First Inventor. So even if Apple did develop the GUI entirely independently, under the current terms of Software Patents that they are taking advantage of, their prior actions would have been contrary to the IP held by Xerox. Whether they copied it or developed it independently is irrelevant because Xerox was the First Inventor.

Get it now? Or are you going to call me "undecuated" another time? Do you see what I'm getting at? If yes, good. If no, nevermind. Just try to be polite.

[J-Squire]

Ah, but we already know 10.4 contains great voice control enhancements - Apple already announced as much officially. The report was on Page One of this site, barely two months or so ago.

...yes, which is why...

They were already hamming up the fact that the next major OS release would have this feature, but maybe we didn't take as big a deal as it will be

[Analog Kid]

Don't criticize another board members dissent under the guise of reason. It is and can only be censorship via peer pressure.

Dissent, argue and criticize. I think that the people who care about Apple most, like good patriots, criticize most.


Somehow I don't think you meant to contradict yourself quite so directly... :)
Still not clear if bringing this up means I'm trying to censor you or I'm a patriot...

[Analog Kid]

Certainly. It's well described in the patent application. But that type of text can make for tedious reading. Here goes...

The example given in the patent application refers to floating palettes. And the one they refer to specifically is the Speech Recognition palette. If you're not using speech recognition, this palette does nothing but obscure what's beneath. So Apple dims the transparency of the palette to show the desktop or document beneath it. Clicks on the palette are assumed to be targeted at the desktop or document as long as the speech palette is not being used. However, if you hold down the hot key to tell the Mac to listen to your voice command, the palette will regain it's opaqueness and come back to the front. If you then don't use the spoken interface for a while, that palette will fade back into a translucent state.

That's really the only implementation described.

Chris

Any way you can link to that patent app?

I think the key here is that this is a technique to be used sparingly... Either for top windows you want to position once (the clock, load monitors, etc) or for controls you can easily regain a handle to (such as the hot key for speech, or maybe context sensitive tool pallets that come alive when they're in context and fade out when they're out of context but you still know where they are.)

As far as knowing when you can manipulate them and when you can't I'd guess there are three states: opaque, semi-transparent and transitional (fading). You can manipulate it in the opaque and bring it back to life if you grab it while it's fading, but once it stabilizes at semi-transparent you'll have to find another way of kicking it awake again.

I can certainly see the utility of it, I just wouldn't position it over the "delete my work" button...

[juanito]

This sounds cool. Now, would this work in conjunction with Expose or replace it altogether?



I thought Steve and his buddies got permission to use the stuff from PARC. (Please fill me in on the facts...really.) If not, why didn't Xerox sue? Or did they? Any Silicon Valley historians out there?

Squire

I think they sued, but anyway they sorted out the details.

[whooleytoo]

no differentiation... no profit... no incentive...

Don't underestimate the importance or value of being first to market.


That's kinda like saying iPhoto is just a picture book... It is so incredibly rare that innovation involves doing entirely new things. It's almost always about doing the old things in a different way, evolving towards a better way. Evolution only occurs when there is differentiation and diversity.

...diversity which can't happen if patents lock out the competition. What if Canon hadn't been able to work around the Xerox patent for photocopying, what incentive would Xerox have had to innovate then, with no competition?


People romanticize inventions too much.

Can't help, it, I'm Irish. Romanticizing is in my jeans - sorry!- genes.. ;)


They think inventing is coming up with discontinuous leaps in logic that bring a whole new era to the world. It's not-- it's a series of incredibly boring incremental changes.


I agree wholeheartedly, it tends to be a game of leapfrog, where everyone takes an idea and moves it on a little. Which is difficult when the person in front decides he doesn't want to play with the others any more.


We tend to set milestones for past inventions. The Wright Brothers invented the airplane, for example... Do you have any idea how little they added to existing aircraft designs? They tweaked existing designs. The end product, as you say, was the same. Performance improved just enough though that it was capable of much more than the earlier designs.


a) I'd have thought the end result - heavier than air flight - would justify it's description as more than a "tweak"!
2) The Wright brothers' tweaks were significent enough that no one had managed powered, heavier than air flight yet, hence I'd have no problem with their patent. (I know, the Wright brothers was just an anecdotal case.)


The problem isn't patents, the problem is the enforcement of patents, and maybe some specifics. 20 years is an obscene amount of time in the software industry right now, and holding exclusive rights to an invention for that long seems like too much. There are other issues with how they're awarded and litigated.

You're spot on there, 20 years in the software industry is longer than the lifecycle of the vast majority of programs. For that reason, we have to be very, very careful how/when/where they're awarded.

[PaisanoMan]

Doesn't this patent refer to the bevelboxes (windows) that we see when we changing the volume (or contrast, keyboard lightning etc.)?!.

I think that the more appropriate example is Motion's new "Dashboard" feature:

http://www.apple.com/motion/workflow.html

That sounds like it matches the patent application reasonably well.

[MacBram]

I just had a thought. Lots of folk like to have RSS feeds somewhere on their screen. Let's say stocks, or news, or weather, or ebay auction results, or some other status screens, and so on. And if these windows could be set to be on top, but through-clickable, then that's good...

I was thinking pretty much the same thing. When I am doing research and writing, I just want a vague notion of what I was reading from one document to hover in front, but be able to continue writing underneath without going back and forth between windows/documents/programs. Shortcuts and Exposé are easy enough but they don't help the flow of thought.

The windows' frames or tab bars don't need to be transparent or click-thru, so they can be moved or reactivated with ease.

And I'd love to see something like Tom Cruise used in Minority Report.

[basil30329]

U.S. Patent 6,670,970, Granted December 30, 2003
Filed December 20, 1999

Title:
Graduated visual and manipulative translucency for windows

Abstract

Methods and systems for providing graphical user interfaces are described. overlaid, Information-bearing windows whose contents remain unchanged for a predetermined period of time become translucent. The translucency can be graduated so that, over time, if the window's contents remain unchanged, the window becomes more translucent. In addition to visual translucency, windows according to the present invention also have a manipulative translucent quality. Upon reaching a certain level of visual translucency, user input in the region of the window is interpreted as an operation on the underlying objects rather than the contents of the overlaying window.

[basil30329]

Here is an image from the original patent. Note the date in the image is March 10, 1998.

[iPost]

The patent system was never intended to create ownership of concepts. And this is what software patents are doing.

Consider the example of the turn signal on an automobile.

No one can patent the concept of a turn signal. However, you can patent the mechanism by which you construct a turn signal. For example, how a stick interacts with gears or sensors to trigger a pulsating light can be patented. But you cannot patent the concept of a turn signal, or even the concept of using a stick to trigger a turn signal.

But this is the kind of thing that software patents are doing, and it should not be allowed.

Take this concept of transparent windows and apply it to real objects, say paper for example. Suppose I came up with an idea that if haven't touched a piece of paper on a desk for a given amount of time, then that piece of paper will become transparent and allow me to see what is under it.

The patent office will not grant me a patent for that idea! However, if I came up with a way to make paper become transparent over time based on not being touched, perhaps by using some kind of embedded sensor which triggers a chemical reaction in the paper, I can patent that technique. But this business of patenting an idea (which Apple is doing) is absurd and is not what the patent system was designed for.

Patenting ideas stifles innovation. For example, I just patented the idea of manned space travel to other planets. Now nobody can travel to another planet without licensing my patent! I'm going to make a fortune from NASA ;-)

[Fukui]

The patent system was never intended to create ownership of concepts. And this is what software patents are doing.

Except that software inverts this equation. In real material things, its easy to copy the results, but the implementation of something is hard to reproduce. In software, there are a multiple of ways someone could implement something and get similar or the same results. If I come up with a way to compress an image that is by far the best way (not just algorithims but a set of proccesses) that is not obvious, then I should be able to have my "idea" patented. I agree that patenting too many obvious things is bad, and that it can stifle innovation, thats why I think they should still grant soft-patents, just make thier duration shorter...but by definition, a patent is a "new" idea, so how is it that people racing to have new ideas stifling innovation? Maybe for the ones who cant think of anything...

[chabig]

I tend to agree with the previous poster. Software patents should be OK, but because the art moves so quickly, I think a shorter patent term would be appropriate. Perhaps years from filing would be more appropriate than the current 20 years. That allows for approximately 3 years for issuance, and a 5 year term after issue.

Chris

[iPost]

[QUOTE=Fukui]If I come up with a way to compress an image that is by far the best way (not just algorithims but a set of proccesses) that is not obvious, then I should be able to have my "idea" patented.QUOTE]

I think people get confused over the "idea" vs. the actualization of that idea.

In your example, the "idea" is "image compression." The idea of image compression is not something that you can patent. However, if you come up with a unique process to do image compression, then you can patent that. People have the mistaken idea that patents protect ideas. They do not. They protect inventions to realize ideas.

In another example, say in 1995 I had the idea to develop computers with colorful, translucent cases. I cannot patent that idea. Other companies would still be able to produce computers with colorful, translucent cases, even though I thought of it first. What I could patent is the way to make that colorful, translucent plastic that I use for my casing. So, if someone wanted to compete with me in the colorful, translucent computer market, they'd have to figure out their own way to create that translucent plastic. If they used my method (or just copied it, as patents are publicly available to read), they would be infringing.

Along these lines, Apple (or anyone else) should not be allowed to patent the "idea" of windows being translucent due to lack of use. They might be able to patent their technique of determining when a window has not been active, or the technique to make the window translucent, but since GUI-based operating systems have been doing these things (determining window activity and offering translucent effects), I doubt that they have anything that they could patent.

But software patents are given for such things all the time. And, it's an abuse of the patent system. The patent system is actually supposed to encourage competing implementations of an idea. And, it's having the opposite effect in the world of software.

[Fukui]

Along these lines, Apple (or anyone else) should not be allowed to patent the "idea" of windows being translucent due to lack of use. They might be able to patent their technique of determining when a window has not been active, or the technique to make the window translucent, but since GUI-based operating systems have been doing these things (determining window activity and offering translucent effects), I doubt that they have anything that they could patent.
I agree, but the patent does seem to go into some detail as to how and why (behavior) of a translucent window, not the translucent window itself. But yes, things can get out of hand.

[theahnman]

If you want to see what (I think) they're talking about, check out the formatting palettes in Office for Mac 2004. If you don't have it yet, check out the test drive. The palettes basically fade if you don't use them for a while, allowing you to view and subsequently edit documents that were covered in previous versions of Office for Mac.
Apologies if this has already been pointed out by another person. I am too lazy and tired to go through all the messages again...

[MacQuest]

...Incidentally, speaking of Microsoft "stealing every patent Apple has" conveniently ignores the fact that Apple's GUI (which they then proceeded to sue lots of companies over, including Microsoft) was, at the very least, "inspired" by research at Xerox PARC...

I am so tired of people excusing Monopolysoft's blatant immoral and illegal action of "reverse engineering" an existing product to be used as a competitive product in the same manner and in the same industry.

I was a former Xerox network administrator and I have been to Xerox Document University in Leesburg, Virginia. http://www.xeroxdocu.com/

Lots of the professors there have been with Xerox for over 25 years, therefore they have told me the story first hand.

BOTTOM LINE: Xerox sold it's PARC developed technology because it did not make their Xerox copiers any better. PERIOD!

They did not have the foresight to see how that technology could be implemented in anything other than a copier. That's why they patent the crap out of anything that they develop nowadays.

It's like inventing the wheel and not knowing that if you roll it, you can do a lot of other things with it.

There is a big difference between Apple using Xerox's technology in an entirely different manner, and Micrapsoft using Apple's technology in the same manner.

The difference is theft.

[aswitcher]

I had a thought ;) so you are warned...


One thing that I would find useful is being able to quickly see recently used or open icons in a folder without resorting to date sorting or scrolling.

This thread gave me an idea. What if parameters could be specified so that when I open my folders (when I finally get my mac :( ) I could quickly see which ones had been last or recently or open or all three, used by some use of transparency or colour or size or pulsing or combo there of...

I cant say what the best formulae would be. Some options to personalise such viewing in icon mode should probably be fine for everyone to find what works for them. Even in normal column mode these distinctions would be helpful I think.

Personally I think document folders sorted by default by name but visually sorted by recent access by leaving recently used ones normal looking (perhaps a bit bigger 25/50%) and slighly greying out or making translucent less used ones would allow me to quickly see what had been going on in the directory/folder.

And what if you could do this for browser bookmarks - have icons not just a alpha sorted list...but icons with a date and time that they were last accessed, with frequently used ones 25-50% bigger to make them easier to spot and easier to hit with the mouse quickly...

And what if currently open documents were also clearly visually highlighted with pulsing :)

[MacFan26]

I think that eventually all of this software patenting will be sorted out. This is just too new a concept for our patent offices. Same thing with the licensing, like when Sun was going to charge anyone for making a program with Java. Obviously that idea was shot down. Despite the debate, I've used translucency in Adium, and I've really enjoyed it in that app. Seems like it will be a cool feature of Tiger. :)

[shivers]

Filed for in December 1999, awarded Dec 2003 (if I'm reading the page right).

Go here for the full patent:

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,670,970.WKU.&OS=PN/6,670,970&RS=PN/6,670,970

[~Shard~]

I think this transparency addition to the OS could be a lot more useful than some people think, and I’d love to see it incorporated into Tiger when it comes out next year. Depending how Apple implements it, it could definitely be akin to Expose – initially, some people thought of Expose and more of a fun novelty than anything, before realizing how beneficial it actually was.

As I said before though, there are going to have to be a lot of additional worthwhile features incorporated into Tiger to make me get rid of my Panther. But I guess we’ll all have a better idea once WWDC rolls around in a month. :)

[mikegyver]

Wrong. If we abolish the patent system today, then we'd have no desire to innovate because we'd know that the day we introduce a new idea it'll be copied.

Patenting CREATES innovation... How can Patenting stop innovation? Sounds like you are trying to say patent software prevents me from COPYING....

[~Shard~]

Patenting CREATES innovation... How can Patenting stop innovation? Sounds like you are trying to say patent software prevents me from COPYING....

This is a very good point, and one which I believe quite a number of peoploe have a common misunderstanding about. (I wonder how many of them have actually filed patents and are aware of the procedures involved!) Just because you patent something does NOT prevent anyone else from essentially copying your design anyway.