Apple Patent: Translucency

[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.

 

[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 Microsoft and Apple are just taking advantage of the horribly outdated patent system and inadequate Patent Office we have in the United States.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.

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!"

 

[theahnman]

Please don't launch me into a discussion on security

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]

Back to the windows

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]

Longhorn

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]

Slashdot?!

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 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.

[Edit] - or maybe not! Perhaps I should patent this idea... [/Edit]