Apple Patent Application Reveals Scrollable Menus and Toolbars

[MisterK]

Not crazy about this one.

This is a bad idea. I hope Apple doesn't implement this in OS X. At least, not without a REALLY good rationale.

This reminds me of the piss poor UI in Windows Phone 7, where you are constantly scrolling blindly through options. It's absolutely NOT "great typography", as many half-assed designers have told me. It's bad design pure and simple. There's no sense of context. You don't know if the option you're on is going to be the best one or if the best option is 5 icons away.

For example, let's say you are looking for printer settings and the icon you're on says "Peripherals", do you select that or do you scrub to the right 8 times to land on something that MIGHT say "Printer Settings"? With only a couple icons shown at once, there's no way of knowing if you're in the best place or not.

The PS3 has the same sort of bad design, where there are no labels showing besides the icon I'm currently on and some are even off screen. I need to know what my options are, not a label for just the cryptic icon I'm currently on.

 

[iWonderwhy]

Chances this appears in Lion?

 

[CommodityFetish]

Why is this patentable? What has the world come to where simple ideas like this can become one company's intellectual property?

 

[slackpacker]

Looks sort of stupid and iMovie is not going to win any interface awards so showing its use with that app makes me worried

 

[Winni]

Patents, especially software patents, should be banned. They only serve big companies with huge legal departments and hinder innovation and make it almost impossible for small companies to compete and stay in business.

It gets even more disgusting when a company gets a patent for something as trivial as this thing here - "scrollable menus" - and when the application comes from somebody who has stolen a lot of user interface ideas from tiny software companies, as Apple has repeatedly done - and then used their arsenal of trivial patents to squash unwanted competition. Heck, they once even threatened to sue Wil Shipley, they guy who wrote "Delicious Library". And now just go and have a look at Apple's iBooks and wonder where Apple stole the design from...

 

[randname]

Only an application

It seems the patent examiner mentions two documents in the search report, and none of the claims in the application involves an inventive step in light of either (see the last two pages of the original document):

http://v3.espacenet.com/publication...126782A1&KC=A1&FT=D&date=20101104&DB=&locale=

The application is an international application with a US priority and EPO was only the international searching authority.

 

[jb510]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/8B117)



Sarcasm fail.

This is a patent travesty. Hopefully apple is doing this in defensive posture and doesn't expect to vigorously defend these.

I was laughing at the sarcasm fail too... I do wish Apple (and every other software company) would stop trying to patent ideas so blatantly covered by prior art. A patent travesty it is...

 

[iSamurai]

How 'bout MS' ribbon interface?

 

[kalsta]

1) this is a patent? scrolling menus?

2) what a terrible idea.

that diagram of final cut or whatever there makes me cringe. obviously its SO much easier to find your button in a tiny window that you have to scroll through... rather than just clicking the button.

and everyone saying "oh, there's too many buttons".... this is so, so much worse. it helps to see only ONE button at a time, in a tiny scrolling list? REALLY?

Right. Some of these patents really are absurd.