Microsoft Patents Grouped Taskbar Buttons 714
I_am_Rambi writes "According to the US Patent office, patent #6,756,999 belongs to Microsoft. The patent this time is grouping taskbar icons processes. This is included in Windows XP, and some prior art in X. Looks like it was accepted two days ago."
BeOS had that in 1999 (Score:5, Informative)
BeOS' Tracker had that in 1999 before anyone else. All windows/instances from the same application are showing grouped in the BeOS Deskbar, under the same sub-menu.
Not exactly the same (Score:5, Informative)
"The system organizes like application files and clusters the corresponding taskbar buttons and, upon reaching a threshold limit, creates and displays a group button that contains the like application files and removes the like taskbar buttons from the taskbar. Further, upon reaching a second threshold limit, the system ungroups the application taskbar buttons, displays them on the taskbar and removes the group button from the taskbar."
Big difference? Probably not, but enough for it to be 'new'...
Prior Art (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Patented Taskbar Grouping? (Score:2, Informative)
I disagree. The annoying part about it is that it's not predictable. Depending on how many instances I have open of any given application, they may or may not be grouped.
The XP PowerToys [microsoft.com] allow you to set the minumum number of items before they're grouped to 2. That way, any given app always takes the same amount of space on the toolbar, as long as at least one instance is running. I think that's a great UI improvement.
Patentable? Not sure.
Re:Another one for the EFF to bust. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:OK, so MS has had this since winXP... (Score:3, Informative)
I'm typically a Linux user, though I use neither GNOME nor KDE, and didn't start using a system tray until this past fall with xfwm4 and the xfce taskbar -- and none of the apps I've used need any grouping.
The patent application dates to 2001; it may possible be valid.
Re:GNOME did this before Microsoft... (Score:3, Informative)
Prior art has to beat the invention date which is probably no later than 1999 in this case, possibly earlier.
Re:Not exactly the same (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wow.. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:OK, so MS has had this since winXP... (Score:5, Informative)
BeOS. Since 1998, and probably much earlier.
Schwab
grouped buttons.... eeks.... (Score:2, Informative)
anyway, what i do when i have too many things on my task bar is to move it to the right instead of leaving it at the bottom - in that way i can squeeze more buttons in and still read some of the text.
Re:BeOS had that in 1999 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:USPTO and time elapsed between filing and grant (Score:5, Informative)
It mostly depends on the field of art. Because there has been a huge boom in computer patents, there is a backlog in that department
Once the patent is examined on the merits, the examiner often makes rejections, to which the applicant answers with arguments/ammendments, and that may repreat several times, until the examiner agrees on a version of the application that is patentable. That part may take several years as well.
Three years is not really a long time to get a patent. I have seen some patents that have been languishing for 5 years. And sometimes the delay is not due to the PTO, rather it is the applicant's fault.
Re:Another one for the EFF to bust. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wow.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:BeOS had that in 1999 (Score:5, Informative)
By the way, here [google.com] is a USENET post from 1998 discussing the deskbar.
Re:Another one for the EFF to bust. (Score:5, Informative)
The regulations are that prior art disqualifies a patent if and only if it was in use or on sale or had a description published before the latter of the invention date (which might be hard to prove) or one year before the filing for the patent. (35 USC 102 [cornell.edu].) Because we are not sure of the invention date, we need to go off of the one year previous rule.
Re:Wow.. (Score:3, Informative)
Yes You Can! (Score:3, Informative)
If you really want it to be nice like 2k, under Start, Settings, Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Services, disable the Themes service.
Re:Wow.. (Score:3, Informative)
Well then you're still partially wrong. They bought it off Xerox and drastically improved it.
And the mouse was invented by someone else I believe prior to Xerox.
Re:This isn't obvious (Score:3, Informative)
It's the kind of thing that I can imagine the developers of said configurable desktop might not actually have explicitly programmed into it in the first place. I can imagine one or more smart power users figuring something like this out for themselves and telling their friends how to do it. Who is infringing on such a patent now?
It's not so much a technology patent as it is a patent on a particular *use* of a technology. Do you really want people to be able to patent the way you use things? Or use patents to prevent others from making flexible and configurable things for users who like that kind of power?
This is just the kind of patent that ought to be waking people up to the idea that software patents are perverse and egregious thieves of diversity,creativity and individual liberty.
Re:Wow.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Uh okay (Score:2, Informative)
Re:BeOS tracker (Score:1, Informative)
It's not the concept that is patented, it is the implementation, and this implementation is different than BeOS.
Re:Funding (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wow.. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Wow.. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:This is silly... (Score:3, Informative)
Actually I am remembering now. It was the concept of having a window fade when not in use, and fade more as it is not being used, patented by Apple. This combines time and variable transparency. Other examples already existed where putting the window in the background made the window more transparent but the Apple folks apparently were awarded a patent simply for fading it with respect to time. To reiterate: they took a preexisting idea, took the next logical step, and now own a patent on it. There was no advancement made by this in any way with the (very slight) possible exception that the UI itself can be said to be improved, and I think that'd be a hard case to prove.
Watch someone patent rotating desktop backgrounds based on the weather. To my knowledge it hasn't been done, so by the logic of the patent office it deserves a patent to protect it's.. uhh.. umm. money?
Re:Wow.. (Score:5, Informative)
The GUI was invented aways back in the 1960s. At first, it was just a cursor, but it was definitely driven by a puck with a button on it. There's you're mouse, years before PARC. PARC, which was a research center, by the way, not a product development center, created a graphical interface for performing actions featuring windows and icons. This was brought to the attention of Steve Jobs, who thought it was neat and traded several million dollars worth of Apple stock to Xerox in exchange for a "field trip" with his developers to PARC. Apple didn't license the technology per se -- there was nothing to license at that point, there was no product yet -- but they also didn't use Xerox's idea. They took the interface for performing actions and used the basic premise to create an interface for managing objects. They turned icons as verbs into icons as nouns, inventing in the process such things as the first Desktop, the first file management system (Finder) and the first graphical forms, controls and alerts (Xerox's interface was basically a CLI in a window with buttons).
Microsoft's "patent for double clicking" pertains only to hardware buttons on palm sized devices, and only to the specific use of timed accesses. Sounds like double clicking, but it isn't -- the patent is on using one hardware button on a handheld to perform three distinct actions using three distinct input methods, not on any of the three methods. Want to avoid the patent? Make sure YOUR handheld device only uses two of the three methods. Of course, this doesn't make for quite so sensational an article as "OMG M$ Patentz dbl click," which is probably why you don't know about it. Or, like Mr. Levy, do you prefer spreading colorful and entertaining fictions so long as the outline is correct?
Re:Did Apple ever sue MS for the "Recycling Bin"? (Score:3, Informative)
That was the whole Apple/Microsoft lawsuit thingy.
Re:Another one for the EFF to bust. (Score:5, Informative)
Then again, I could be wrong.
-Rusty
Re:Another one for the EFF to bust. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Another one for the EFF to bust. (Score:4, Informative)
Sorry.
Re:Another one for the EFF to bust. (Score:2, Informative)
Poor guy. Some hints for him:
1. Use Firefox's tabbed browsing, preferably with the Tabbrowser extension. You can still keep a couple of browser windows open, but you can open related pages in tabs within the same browser window.
2. If you use Windows, you should consider installing a tray minimizer to get rid of those programs that you recognize by the icon anyway but that take you hours to find in the task bar if they're stuck between 30 browser windows. At work I use a tray minimizer for Outlook (for work mail), the Novell Application Launcher, Mozilla Mail (for private mail) and PuTTY (the SSH client). The added advantage of putting them there is that they are gone from my Alt+Tab list, which means I can tab between the windows I'm actually *working* with. This is the one crucial feature that I still haven't found a replacement for in Linux -- applications still have to support minimizing to the tray themselves, so it's not always possible to minimize the applications to the tray that *I* want to put there.
3. If that doesn't help enough, extend the size of your task bar by a row, so that you can better see what's there.
4. Put the taskbar on the left/right of your desktop. This takes a bit more screen real estate, but at least you can control precisely how many characters of each window's name you can read.
Re:This isn't obvious (Score:5, Informative)
From the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure, section 706.02(j):
"To establish a prima facie case of obviousness, three basic criteria must be met. First, there must be some suggestion or motivation, either in the references themselves or in the knowledge generally available to one of ordinary skill in the art, to modify the reference or to combine reference teachings. Second, there must be a reasonable expectation of success. Finally, the prior art reference (or references when combined) must teach or suggest all the claim limitations. The teaching or suggestion to make the claimed combination and the reasonable expectation of success must both be found in the prior art and not based on applicant's disclosure. In re Vaeck, 947 F.2d 488, 20 USPQ2d 1438 (Fed. Cir. 1991). See MPEP 2143 - 2143.03 for decisions pertinent to each of these criteria."
The basic notion is that there must be some prior art, or combination of prior art, that "teaches" EACH AND EVERY claim element in the later patent -- PLUS there has to be a "motivation" to combine them. Just because there is prior art, or because something seems "obvious" to a user, doesn't mean that it meets the LEGAL definition of "obvious" relevant to the USPTO.
Just thought I would mention that...
Re:Windows 95 (Score:3, Informative)
This is the feature that when you open 20 different IE windows it will show only one taskbar icon for the group, and pop up a submenu once you click it.
Re:BeOS had that in 1999 (Score:4, Informative)
The entire toolbar was dynamically generated, and could contain various assortments of tools, images, palettes and so forth - and there were a number of other dynamically instantiated things there too, such as proportional controls, buttons, text entry widgets and so forth. Various classes of things always grouped together. The toolbar itself could auto-hide and pop up when you moused down to it, or it could pop in and out based upon a right-click. And in fact, we had implemented both auto-hide of the toolbar, and auto-hide of contextually inapropriate and not recently used tools in May of 1990, in an earlier product called "reg-paint", now that I think about it.
The fact that the toolbars in Imagemaster were totally dynamic and context-sensitive with the specific aim of being reductionist was actually a selling point for the program, well beyond the convenience of having the UI configure itself for what you were doing at the moment. This was because the Amiga had a limited amount of what was called "chip" memory (1 or 2 mb), which was basically the only memory that could contain drawable graphics, playable sounds, and some other system stuff. So the fact that the program's huge number of controls, windows and so on were dynamically generated and accessed by a panel that only contained what you needed, as you needed it, was a pretty big deal. That made the panel itself a very stingy consumer of chip memory, and that was the primary inspiration for a lot of what it did.
Imagemaster was shipping in February of 1991. Tons of supporting documentation, magazine articles, manuals, users, you name it. Way too much to get lost in the sands of time. Very popular application, too. Imagemaster brought out the very first implementation of morphing on a desktop PC. Imagemaster shipped until Commodore's demise and for a little while thereafter, and that toolbar existed in every version.
So Billy can bite me. Either Pete Patterson and myself came up with the idea first, or someone before us did (which would be fine, I could care less), but it sure as heck wasn't Microsoft. Or Be. :)
Sideways remark: We used to say that if Commodore owned the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, they'd market it as "lukewarm, dead bird." The Amiga was amazing for its time. I still miss the machine at times. But I sure don't miss Commodore.
Re:Another one for the EFF to bust. (Score:3, Informative)
There are several SuperKaramba themes you can use to do this under Linux. Some are even virtually identical to what you have in OSX.
Re:KDE... (Score:5, Informative)
Of course I was surprised to see that Microsoft seems to patent something that is closely built after my thoughts mentioned on the kde-look mailing list in 1999 already.
One of the problems with considering my thread as prior art is that unfortunately it was implemented by Matthias Elter some months later. It only turned out during implementation that task grouping only becomes interesting if
- the user doesn't use virtual desktops already (because he already organizes his tasks himself already)
- the tasks are only grouped after a certain thresholded is reached.
It doesn't take to be a genius to get that threshold idea because it's just the logical next step once you implement it but it seems that Microsoft actually implemented my idea before we did and therefore realized this tiny step before us.
Anyways it's interesting to see how Microsoft seems to monitor the KDE mailinglists since 1997.
E.g. I had the idea to create kpersonalizer which featured a dialog with a slider which you could easily use to configure the amount of eyecandy versus performance in KDE.
It was funny to see a very similar dialog in XP Betas two months later which contained almost the same wording in some places
So much for cross-polluting ideas between KDE and MS developers
Re:The patent was filed one day (Score:2, Informative)
Confirmation of this can be found in gnome-core/applets/tasklist/tasklist_applet.c, version 1.83 (Jan 24 2001):
static gboolean
is_task_really_visible (TasklistTask *task)
{
g_return_val_if_fail (task != NULL, FALSE);
if (!task->tasklist->config.enable_grouping)
&nbs p; return is_task_visible (task);
if (task->group && g_slist_length (task->group->vtasks) > task->tasklist->config.grouping_min)
return FALSE;
else if (task->task_group)
return g_slist_length (task->vtasks) > task->tasklist->config.grouping_min;
return is_task_visible (task);
}
Here's the link:
http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gnome-core/ap
(remove the spaces between "app" and "lets" + "mark" and "up")
Not only does the task list perform grouping, but it also uses a threshold to determine whether windows of the same application shall be grouped or not.
PS: Sorry that
Also Patented by Microsoft (Score:3, Informative)
Why don't you take a look at this:
Windows tabs [uspto.gov]
Thumbnails [uspto.gov]
Between others.
Re:Prior Art (Score:3, Informative)
Alt-Tab switching is not an invention. That's simply a key binding they used for task switching which was around in mainframes prior to the PC even being invented. Even at that, the Mac had this feature for GUI windows back in 1987.
As for the scroll wheel, a company named Genius had the EasyScroll mouse out long before MS's Intellimouse. MS may have popularized it, but they certainly didn't invent it.
Finally, Samba's networking protocol, SMB, has a twisted history. First came IBM's original PCLAN, on which Microsoft based the Microsoft PC LAN Server Message Block (SMB) which, itself, was a hybrid of the existing X/Open spec 2.07. So again, Microsoft didn't invent it although they certainly evolved it.
So, I'm still unconvinced there's any real innovation to have come out of Redmond -but- I do think that they are very good at taking existing technology and making it mainstream.