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Apple Patent Application Reveals Scrollable Menus and Toolbars

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WildCowboy said:
iSee said:
As an aside: does anyone know what the term "prior art" means?
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Basically, anything relevant to the technology that was publicly known prior to the filing of the patent application.
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Sarcasm fail.

This is a patent travesty. Hopefully apple is doing this in defensive posture and doesn't expect to vigorously defend these.
 
how is this patentable? it's a concept, not an implementation!

scrolling is a natural solution for saving tool space that any developer might easily arrive at in their own original way, but every time someone wants to implement a concept resembling this they have to pay up? software patents != helpful.

edit: not even a software patent, it's a ui mockup! man, i need to just start drawing things and patenting how they'd work if they actually existed. eventually i'll be able to sue everyone :)
 
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mangoduck said:
how is this patentable? it's a concept, not an implementation!

scrolling is a natural solution for saving tool space that any developer might easily arrive at in their own original way, but every time someone wants to implement a concept resembling this they have to pay up? software patents != helpful.
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Patents are for making Microsoft's job harder. Lol.
 
Wondering if i am looking at this long but it looks like a way to make a gesture based menu possible.
You know flick two fingers to the side over the item you are wanting to edit to get context aware menu that shows the possible options for that only.
 
Someone please correct me if I am wrong but didn't NeXTSTEP have detachable menus?
 
American patent rules are absolutely hilarious

brownpaw said:
This is what I was thinking. I can't believe that something so obvious (and minor, really) would be granted a patent! I've seen scrollable toolbars a hundred times before.
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To us here in Germany, American patent rules are absolutely hilarious. But you know, revenues on patents and licenses are the biggest part in America's income, right?

We call this "A Trivial Patent" and hope that this nightmare will never ever come over us developers in good old Europe.
 
Forward thinking! I love it! :D:apple:

Love,
THAT GUY who uses the Apple and grin smilies together. :D:apple:
 
Why in the world is the Patent Office accepting this? This is more of a graphic design idea then a technical invention. We've been making areas scroll-able for years. We've have scrolable menu bars for years too.

Maybe this is a good idea but certainly not something that can or should be patented.
 
Scrollable menus in Command and Conquer from the early 90's!

There must be more to this story.
 
On smaller iOS devices = good
27in screen = no point

Plus everyone gave MS hell for the scrollable menus in their Win7 start menu, but suddenly it's 'genius' to have scrollable lists/menus because Apple patents it?
 
I think as Apple is creating an OS that can span from small devices to large, they want to find a scalable approach that is consistent throughout. Even tho this may not apply to large screens, it would be nice if the UI scaled to smaller devices.
 
Consultant said:
Please, NOT in OS X. There's enough room for the whole menu.
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have you seen the maya interface? it has more than three menu bars, you have to select from a menu to display a certain set of menus.

still, i like having my tools laid out in front of me. This doesnt seem to keep the tedious task of window and interface management down to a minimum. if this were in place i'd have to scroll through a list of tools.


I think they should spend time developing an inexpensive palette monitor rather than making the applications harder to deal with by hiding all the tools. On an iDevice, i can understand but not on OSX.
 
Isn't this just like the multitasking bar in iOS? Maybe I read that wrong....
 
I have like 10 US Patents on fairly complicated software architectures that require pages of formulas and diagrams to explain. And even with those, I often wonder if Patents are the right way to protect such a system.

Over the last two decade or so, I see more and more US Patents filed for things that are not "mechanisms" or "systems" at all, but essentially User Interface Conventions. Concepts that Copy Right law should be used to protect.

This patent makes little sense to me. It's an interesting twist on an information hiding UI concept (variants of which have been around since text based apps in the 80s). It's not something I think we should be patenting.

If the US keeps patenting everything under the sun, it's going to crush innovation -- the very thing patent law was created to protect. The only place real innovation will happen, is in countries with "less stringent" views on Patent Law. (Mental note: Schedule Mandarin Lessons this Winter.)
 
This is already implemented in a number of iPhone Apps, so I'm not sure how this patent will affect apps that use these features. Just a few apps I can think of off-hand:

- Awesome Note (when selecting the Background for a note)
- Facebook (the older version used to use a scrollable bar at the top)
- Pocket Informant (in the Tasks section there's a "Filter" button that uses a scrollable top bar)
 
Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like a poor idea to me:

- Instead of popping up a menu, and instantly tapping the item you want; you have to scrolling to find it. Surely, that's only going to take more time, not less.

- With a normal pop-up menu, you can open each up and visually scan through them to see if the feature you want is in there. With the scrolling menu, this is surely much slower, showing one item at a time.

It makes sense on an iOS device, where there is limited room for buttons and you don't want the user to have to 'drill down' too far. But on OSX? It seems like an unhelpful step to me.
 
Bad thing about this is that you could end up with a horizontal menu bar going across the screen and it still wouldn't display everything you would see in a vertical two column stack. It would make more sense to add a little search bar in there so the user can type the first two letters of the command and even that should be an option and not the default.
 
It's a pretty nasty UI element, but on the plus side at least it might indicate they realise that mobile Safari needs a kick up the arse and some more functionality.

Phazer
 
UlfDunkel said:
To us here in Germany, American patent rules are absolutely hilarious. But you know, revenues on patents and licenses are the biggest part in America's income, right?

We call this "A Trivial Patent" and hope that this nightmare will never ever come over us developers in good old Europe.
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"Patently Apple reports on a newly-published patent application from Apple coming out of the European patent office..."

To us here in America, European patent rules are absolutely hilarious. But you know, revenues on patents and licenses are the biggest part in Europe's income, right?

We call this "A Trivial Patent" and hope that this nightmare will never ever come over us developers in good old America.

;)
 
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