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Adobe Sues Over Tabbed Widgets
angst_ridden_hipster
noted one that you'll find hard to believe.
Adobe is suing Macromedia over the patent they seem to have on
tabbed widgets. Now I'm torn: Is this lamer than one click shopping? Definitely not as lame as hyperlinks, but pretty sad.
A Direct quote by Adobe's CEO from the yahoo piece:
"Adobe will not be the R&D department for its competitors. Our patent and other aspects of our user interface are key to the user experience and functionality of our products; they are essential to differentiate our products and brand from others."
This seems kinda sad... that for adobe, tabs are a big part of what differentiate their product from competitors... shouldn't the differentiating factors be features, price, quality and not a small part of their UI....
$.02,
11oh8
Are these also infringements?
--Humpty Dumpty was pushed!
The thing about Freehand is that it doesn't really work in postscript -- it uses its own intermediary format, and translates to Postscript. (This is how you can get transparency and such in Freehand). Also, because of this, Freehand seems to be generally "snappier" feeling than illustrator.
The down side is that whatever I make in Illustrator, I know will rip correctly. Always has, always will. But, my Freehand files... well, they run about 90-95%. Not bad, but not "production" quality -- at least to me.
The damnable thing is, there are parts of both apps I like, and so tend to do things in both. Damn those two companies... :)
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
If I'm not mistaken, this comes under the heading of "look and feel". Which is fair game ever since that lotus 1-2-3 court case years and years ago.
Besides that...
Tabs are a common feature in current gui's. Adobe should also be suing Microsoft, IBM (OS/2 used tabbed properties palettes), NetObjects, etc., etc. Is Adobe going to argue that the unique invention is the use of tabbed properties palettes in a graphics program, but not in a Operating System?
Macromedia could certainly argue that they were just trying to create an interface that matched the operating system. Then Adobe would have to sue Microsoft / etc. just to show that they are not selectively enforcing the patent (which will invalidate it). That probably wouldn't make much business sense.
For what it's worth, here's macromedia's dull corporate response.
Not true at all, Flash is continuing to grow and though only about 20% of the web-using world is using Flash, Adobe can't come close.
I don't believe I said he couldn't get upset. But cussing out someone for calling something news instead of a press release bordlines psycho.
Who have a claim on Tabs filed 12 months earlier than Adobe. Here's another interesting Patent Borland owns, I wonder if Microsoft is paying their IP fees on tooltips.
I'd been using MetaCreations Painter for image slicing forever and then was so excited that Adobe had finally built one - - until I used it. Ack. But I do have to give props to Photoshop 5.5's compression features (Save for Web). It's really pretty good, and about 50% of the time it's better than say, a Ulead Smartsaver filter.
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
How is this post Insightful?
"Adobe did make a pretty neat discovery with regard to UI design, which Macromedia went on to use in Fireworks to great effect, therefore being innovative"
No, therefore taking someone's established intellectual property and plagiarizing their ideas.
Why are they doing harm to the consumers? They're just saying that Macromedia can't steal their specific GUI functionality. Macromedia has the ability to "discover" their own GUI design and functionality, which is good for the market and consumer because it introduces a conflicting opinion that could pan out to be a better interface. At which point Macromedia would patent their concept.
I don't think this has anything to do with defensive tactics or either company being scared. They both have a large market share in some of their many products. Macromedia has successful products in Flash, Fontographer, Dreamweaver (as well as many others), while Adobe has Acrobat (always forgotten), Photoshop, Imageready, AfterEffects, Pagemaker, etc. And they're both duking it out between Freehand and Illustrator (each problem has both some pluses and some minuses)
Tabs were used that far back.. Was Adobe even around then? Hell, GEOS from 83 might have even had some Tabs somewhere in it .. But don't quote me on that one!
Dungeon Master (My Favorite RPG) used tabs exclusively. I believe that was out in the 80s .. Came out on the Atari ST before that...
When was this tab thing patented?
I eat the flesh off the living, and I vote!
In the first instance, the question is not whether someone could have done something similar in the past but whether they actually did and then proving it.
To have the features of the claim, you would need to open a window, drag several folder icons into the window and perfectly align them one over another along the Z axis. The you need some way of selecting one of the folders to bring it to the front. With a tabbed dialog this is usually the tabs, but one could used page numbers or icons in a margin area for example.
Macromedia's response.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
You'll need more than a simple plugin to replace MacOS's system wide color management.
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So does this mean that Microsoft tabbed widgets that do the same thing are also braking the law? After all, I've seen this thing in GUIs for a long time. In Windows it's refered to as a "Tab". Sue MS!
I am a bad speler. Please ignore speling meestakes in me poast.
At my previous company, I implemented a "tear-off tabs" interface for a graphics application (Windows and IRIX). After meeting several times with our legal department, we decided that Adobe's patent was effectively too broad to be enforced, so we went ahead anyway.
The gist of our arguments were that the patent sounds suspiciously like tear-off menus, which have been around (in OpenLook) since before Adobe filed the patent.
(Aside: implementing tear-off tabs in X/Motif/ViewKit was a seriously fun and annoying excercise!)
Aren't patents supposed to be invalidated if the holder doesn't enforce them for a long time? Stuff like 1-click shopping, this tabbed thing. If everyone's been using it for so long, how come the can still come out with a patent and try to stop everyone?
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...and that's what I get for posting in the pre-coffee state.
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The unsig!
I got that too, that the patent is just on tabbed palettes, however, IMHO Adobe isn't on very strong legal ground, after all, tabs are quite common and as such it would be hard to prove infringement. Personally I can't even see WHY they were allowed to take out a patent on the damned things in the first place, maybe its just cuz the patent office loves to hand the things out...
./'d (or something) at this time... anyone manage to grab the pics before it went down?
Anyways, for more information see the adobefacts website which unfortunately seems to be
-GreenHell
"I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication."
Borland filed a patent for Tabs a year before Adobe.
It sounds suspiciously like "GUI" to me.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
I'm just curious why Adobe is accosting Macromedia specifically. The tabbed window interface was used very extensively (and effectively) in Paint Shop Pro 6, but I can't recall an Adobe/Jasc lawsuit. Anyone shed some light on this? Presumably, if Adobe truly had a leg to stand on and wasn't just picking a fight like the neighborhood pixel bully, they could go after AltaVista... and any number of sites and applications that use a tabbed interface without any idea that the Adobe patent exists.
It is my opinion, based on these years of experience, that although the tabbed pallete behavior is useful, and possibly unique, it is a feature that amounts to little more than look and feel. Apple vs. Microsoft quite clearly showed that suits based on look and feel are, in general, doomed to failure. As they should be.
I think that 99% of everyone else got what I was saying from the original post. Whether they agree or not is another story. In any case, it's an easy thing to call someone a shithead whilst posting as an AC... It's another thing altogether to call someone a fuckwit when not posting that way.
Where the value of X-Mailer: is the true measure of a man...
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See the "..for smart people" banners Wired runs here? Look elsewhere guys.
OS/2 2.0 had tabbed palettes in 1990. The tabs were on the right side though.
Lotus Apps had very Adobe-like tabbed palettes going back to 93 or even earlier. I've seen countless program launchers that operate on that principle (had one running on my Mac back in the early-mid 90's) Even Microsoft is now getting into the game with tabbed palettes (Office 2000 web controls, screen shots of MacOffice 2001 UI.), even if you don't quite consider a Windows Control Panel to be a tabbed pallete.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
This is an obvious PR ploy constructed by Adobe - it is cynical in the sense that it seeks to undermine the USPTO hegemony on the protection of our intellectual rights to valid patentable items (such as, say - a new type of handheld device that runs on solar power) at the expense of a vaudeville approach to get others to comment on their actions. Please be aware that I am recommending we all really begin to ignore this stuff. Its stupid.
he who has the fastest cart always has the best lie.
It's ludicrous that Adobe could be granted a patent for something this trivial. It's a form of 'drag and drop', something made popular by the earliest GUI's. Maybe someone should have patented dropping a file into a folder. This is stupid.
At least Paint Shop Pro doesn't try to look exactly like Adobe's products. It still keeps its own identity.
And I don't know, can you drag those tabs out to become their own palettes?
If you can, then that would mean that Adobe is selectively enforcing their patent, which is not a good thing for their case.
I am a psycho! :-) You hit the nail on the head, man. Thankfully, I can also be heard around here (sometimes)
I don't know where the name "tabbed widgets" came from. In the article and in Adobe's press release they talk about "tabbed palettes", which sounds very different. Clearly, they are not talking about those popular multi-page dialog boxes with tabs at the top. Still, I haven't been able to figure out what exactly this is as the web site which Adobe put up to discuss the issue is not responding at the moment... /.ed, perhaps? Anyway, if anyone knows what "tabbed palettes" are, please do tell.
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All elements of look and feel effect functionality. An icon on a desktop is part of look and feel, but also provides a functionaly of starting a program (on both macs and pcs...)
This 'patent' was filed in 1994, and issued in 1996. In 1994 I remember using IBM OS/2 v2.1 (released in may 1993), and beta's (the so-called "performance edition") of 3.x (later to be known as "Warp", formally launched in october 1994). OS/2 2.1 already had tabbed widgets (notebooks). This alone should void the patent I'd say. Up yours, Adobe!
--frank[at]unternet.org
Without doing a reasonable amount of research into this, like reading the patent or seeing the Macromedia product, I would guess that what we're talking about here is more than just tabbed windows. Heck, if it were just that they'd be suing a lot more folks than just Macromedia.
Yeah, you're right, they are talking about the floating dialog boxes with the separatable tables. But other programs have similar functionality as well, such as Corel Draw, although their rollups don't use quite the same interface, but they are customizable (you can group different palettes together, but its not as cool as it is in Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator)
Don't forget that this is really a bitter feud that has gone on with these companies forever: Macromedia was started by a bunch of ex-Aldus employees when Adobe bought Aldus to get PageMaker. They dumped Freehand (because it competed with Illustrator), so the Freehand guys went and started Macromedia. Both camps have been bitter since.
My journal has hot
Has anyone used Visual Studio by Microsoft? You can do the exact same thing--drag boxes into others to add a tab to the existing box. For some reason, however, I doubt Adobe wants to sue Microsoft.
If it's just palettes Adobe's claiming, Macromedia simply needs to give their "palettes" a thicker titlebar, which would turn them into "dialog boxes".
This is funny.
Microsoft Visual Studio acts in almost the exact same way... Floating dialogs with tabs that can be dragged out to create new windows or in to consolidate them.
Except the microsoft implementation also supports docking and latching those dialogs and is infact, just a little more flexable.
Additionally, ms has been using these types of windows since vb3... yet there hasn't been any noise at all between ms and adobe on the issue.
-T
Old truckers never die, they just get a new peterbilt
In my mind, it is a good patent. It is something that is unique, they advanced the state of the art and they probably did it before someone else did, they deserved the patent they got. The problem is that by the time that patent expires it will be an irrelevent technology, all TVs will support 1080i. I'm all for letting corporations patent themselves into a cold war with other corporations but they need to last a shorter period of time, especially as related to software. Software is expensive enough to develop without paying an army of lawyers to make sure your product doesn't infringe on a UI patent.
I also think that there should be a reasonable response time. If you're a multinational corporation with billions of dollars at your disposal, there is no excuse for letting a competitor deploy a product, upgrade it througha couple of revs and then, years later, start rattling your saber. If you're a private inventor and you don't have the resources you should have a longer period of time but like trademarks there should be a period of time where non-defense of your patent turns it public domain. What Macromedia should do is accuse Adobe of sitting on the patent until macromedia had enough marketshare or money to make the defense worth their while.
This is my signature. There are many signatures like it but this one is mine..
I agree that this will probably fail like Apple's look and feel lawsuits. But I am thinking that the NeXT OS's use of dockable icons is really prior art to dockable tabs. I thought that Norton Desktop for Windows (circa 1993) had dockable tabs. Then maybe someone could pitch in, but there was a set of tools for Windows 3.1, all I rember is hDC, and I thought you could dock tabbed menus. I don't particulary like a lot of what Warnock has been saying lately, but this takes the cake for stupidity.
Stop talking about who's to blame when all that counts is how to change --"Born of Frustration" - James
adobe snubbed windows as well up until about 4 years ago. They never did simultaneous upgrades. it was always the mac version first, and the windows version whenever they got around to it. Those bastards left me stuck with their POS illustrator 4 for two years, and made me buy a patch so it would even work with windows 95. (super unstable) During this timeframe they upgraded the mac version twice. (yeah thanks)
They did similar stuff after they absorbed aldus pagemaker (which they DESTROYED)
Yet despite all their suckness, Adobe is a very successful company with 2 excellent products i use every day. (photoshop +pdf empire) Unfortunately just about everything else in their product line is second or third rate crap. (In-Design anyone? quark killer my foot!)
What it really boils down to is taht they're pissed cause macromedia came in and ate their lunch on web applications.
xoxo
"Tension is the great integrity" -- R. Buckminster Fuller
this lawsuit greatly angers me, so much so that i'd love to write to adobe and tell them that i plan to boycott their products...
unfortunately, i can't -- going without photoshop is the graphics equivalent of a hunger strike
i thought, therefore i was...
Obviously you read it too moron. If it bothers you that much go read Deja or something.
Stats? Anyone?
Also, how much doctering of the actual default screens did they need to do to make their case?
--Humpty Dumpty was pushed!
Let's see, how great a leap is a tabbed widget? Wait a minute, all my life I've seen tabbed widgets! Prime example? Your personal phone book is probably a tabbed widget with little tabs indicating the beginning letter of the names on the associated page. Come on, how great a leap is it to apply that to a computer interface? How great a leap is one click shopping? It's as simple as someone saying, "Hey, it takes two clicks to do this. Wouldn't it be good to do it with one?" These *ARE* obvious.
Transistors are both elegant and simple, but by no means obvious. The internal combustion engine, conceptually, is both elegant and simple, but not obvious. A user interface design that mirrors a real world object can be elegant and simple, but is likely to be reinvented if you put a class of undergraduate computer science students on the task, let alone a talented and well versed professional. A user interface design that mirrors a real world object will NEVER be innovative. A patent that basically says "I do $COMMON_THING_IN_THE_REAL_WORLD, but I did it on a computer!" should never be granted. That's imitation, not innovation.
Doesn't this go back to the failed look and feel court cases such as Apple's, though? It does seem to be pretty lame and doesn't seem to have precedent supporting it there.
If you'd care the actually read the patent ( here for example) you would have seen that the patent is about A method for displaying on a computer screen multiple sets of information needed on a recurring basis. There is no mention of tabs or other selection methods. The generic term "selection indicator" is used instead.
I think it is foolish of Adobe to pursue two operating system features being combined together as a patent. Anybody with Codewarrior or RealBasic on a Mac can make the exact same thing in under a minute.
I think its sad when large software companies fight over software techniques that are neither unique or difficult to create. I think it lowers the quality of all other software that would take advantage of those features.
The clash of honour calls, to stand when others fall.
Do Patents Still Work?
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How to Download YouTube Videos
Which is a pretty non-obvious thing to do. (I've been using Photoshop for years and had no idea it could do this) And therefore it's patentable.
Its tough to be a large company and not be aggressive.
Adobe(and all the other companies doing the same thing) are hurting us, the users by usurping our property here. Bastards....
If it's true that Adobe has managed to get a patent on the 'tabbed widget', then the real culprit in this story is the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. They've been making some absolutely insane calls in the software area, and it's about time Congress looked into it. Either the P&TO needs to start recruiting examiners who know what they're doing, or the law itself needs to be rewritten to clarify what is and is not patentable.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
Why funny you should mention that... why just last week I was posting on /. when I noticed that the button underneath that said 'Submit' and I thought to myself, you know what, they should be giving me money... You see, back when computers with GUI's were just being thought of I patented the "Ok" & "Cancel" buttons, then when the internet began going graphical I saw the potential and I patented the 'Send' button (already having a patent on Cancel I didn't need a new one).
/. owes me money. So you know what, I think I'm gonna sue em... I'll be rich! I'll be financially secure! I'll be... awww hell, it didn't work for Apple, it (hopefully) won't work for Adobe, and it sure as hell wouldn't work for me...
Now, as you can see Submit is quite similar to Send both in the meaning of the word and what the button does, so as such
-GreenHell (who doesn't really own the patent on Ok and Cancel but wishes he did)
"I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication."
I think it's amazing how big companies seem to believe that they can sue over any little thing. I mean they'll sue a 5-year-old for a domain name. Will the madness never end?
I think that these companies need to relax and stop getting so lawyer happy. Actually maybe we could limit the number of lawsuits you could have in a year. I mean some people or companies end up making a million lawsuits a year. If you limited it to starting a certain amount of lawsuits depending on the size of their company. Some flaws, but whatever, maybe that's just my opinion.
Actually I do wonder if maybe companies start these pointless suits just to get into the news and get their name over there. It probably makes them seem like they have something important that's only for them. Maybe they just have a lawyer on retainer and don't want to waste money. Getting sort of tiring.
Hey! Soon we could start a "lawsuits.slashdot.org" with all of the new suits coming out.
It seems to me, after briefly reading the patent , Adobe are not trying to protect just any old use of tabs.
Their first claim describes a standard tabbed dialog box UI component, with the additional function:
"and
combining the additional set of information, displayed in a different area of the display from the established area, into the group of multiple sets of information so that the additional sets of information may be selected in the same manner as the other sets of information in the group. "
I have not seen this software in use, but this sounds like a control in which other controls can be dragged into it, and appear on a new tab.
Why is the universe here? -Well, where else would it be?
Without doing a reasonable amount of research into this, like reading the patent or seeing the Macromedia product, I would guess that what we're talking about here is more than just tabbed windows. Heck, if it were just that they'd be suing a lot more folks than just Macromedia.
Photoshop utilizes a number of floating dialog boxes with tabs that switch between the various tools. Where Adobe's stuff is unique is that you can drag those tabs out to create new dialog boxes. You can also drag between different boxes to form new combinations of tools within a dialog box.
Okay, so customizing floating dialog boxes isn't exactly earth shattering stuff. Lot's of other folks have similar kinds of interfaces, but Adobe apparently owns this concept when utilizing tabs to customize them. You can have floating dialog boxes, and you can have tabs on them, but you can't use those tabs to customize them.
Personally, I think Adobe is going to lose big time on this one. Those tabs emulate file folders moving between drawers, and with a heavy precedent for the folder analogy througout GUI's I think they're going to have a hard time maintaining this one. On the other hand, it is a very cool feature for customizing the look and feel of Adobe products which nobody else has done a good job of emulating without duplicating. It'll be interesting to see how this one plays out.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Read enough of these patent stories, and you start to get numb. Groooovy.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Never knock on Death's door:
The Anti-Blog
A lot of this is the patent office's fault in the first place by setting precedent for idiotic patents. I'm sure a lot of companies patent things that are just ridiculous just because if they don't do it first their competitor will. Hey, how about taking just a little bit of my tax money that goes to corporate subsidies and actual employ some sentient people in the patent office?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Zero Click Ordering is the ultimate in convenience - no more wasted time selecting a product to buy. You won't even be aware that you've purchased anything until you get our invoice. It's worked for the long distance industry for years and now WE own the patent- Suffer, Bezos, suffer! www.ridiculopathy.com
After going over the patent info, I think I'll just go ahead and stand by my original post. I am still of the opinion this has far more to do with user customization methodology than simply tabs.
Seems like Adobe must be getting prettied scared about Macromedia products if they're willing to unleash the lawyers on this.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Here is the link to info about Zero Click Ordering. Enjoy.
Any user of photoshop/illustrator/etc will know how the tabbed palettes in these programs are different from other tab widgets. You can drag them from palette to palette, drag them out to give them their own palette. You can customize it based on which stuff you need handy and your idea of logical organization.
A suit over tabs in general would be silly, but looking at the screenshots at adobe's site, I think Macromedia's new program looks a lot like an adobe program.
Just my $0.02
I am a very picky software user and before I download any software that reader adobe acrobat reader .pdf files, the software has to pass a rigerous check list of my design.
----Check list----
[ ] Does the software have lots of tabby moving
boxes that I can use to customize for an optimal
Anyone see Interdev 6.0? It also has dockable tabbed widgets. Is MS too big of an opponent.
- Make the most of all failures. Fall forward.
MACROMEDIA DENIES ADOBE PATENT INFRINGEMENT CLAIMS
San Francisco, California--August 10, 2000--Macromedia, Inc. (NASDAQ: MACR) announced today that it categorically denies the claims made in a lawsuit filed earlier this afternoon by Adobe Systems Inc. The claim alleges patent infringement relating to user interface features of Macromedia products.
Macromedia believes the claims made in the Adobe lawsuit are without merit. The company believes that U.S. Patent No. 5,546,528 is invalid and unenforceable and that Macromedia does not violate the patent. Macromedia advised Adobe of this belief when first contacted by them in 1996, and readvised them when they last contacted Macromedia in May, 1999.
Talking about patents... EU is about to pass laws making software patents possible in Europe. Check out eurolinux.org's petition to warn European authorities against software patents.
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Your link is broken too.
I guess your idiocy is at the same level as BorlandInsider's.
They're not suing for the use of tabbed windows. They're suing for the use of tabbed *palettes*. The palettes allow you to tear off the controls in the tab and put them into a separate window, or combine the available tabs into any number of palettes in any combination the user prefers. On the one hand - yeah, sure, I can see why they're suing for this. Adobe spent a lot of money developing this look and feel for stuff (first time I noticed it was changing from Photoslop 3 to 4, but I hadn't been in the industry long at that point), and everyone's imitated and copied it. But, on the other hand: everyone's imitated and copied it. Leave it be, Adobe - you should have gone after the first person to imitate and copy it, instead of waiting for Macromedia to do it. Amusing aside to the dichotomy of those two statements: the demonstration on adobefacts.com actually shows us that Macromedia did it better - they display the name of the tab while you're dragging it. Adobe does not. *shrug* :)
(Bias disclaimer: I use Photoshop, and I don't like Fireworks. I use Homesite, and I don't like Dreamweaver. I don't do any Flash.)
You can't be that naive. Where do you think most 'news' stories come from? Reporting? LOL.
"Anyone that has ever gotten an idea based on any of my work and done something better with it-good for you."--J.Carmack
Ha Ha Ha. Ok, the patent on the pixel would be wonderful retribution. As would the patent on air and every other god damn idiotic pience of nonsense at least 50 people will post.
/. moderates this up. If it were the first time a comment like this was made, sure it's funny, but not now.
I think, however, it is more telling about the "community" of
Who designed this moderation system anyhow. If he/she bipedal?
When was the patent issued? OS/2's had tabbed widgets since the late '80's.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
One more thing. _Stop the madness!_
:(
~Religion is O.K., as long as it gets you laid.
Obviously, Adobe doesn't give a shit about the opinion of the hacker community; in this regard, they are like most corporations. Is there any evidence (anecdotal will do) regarding how corporations treat the opinion of their stockholders (outside of annual meeting type stuff)?
See, I own a bit of Adobe stock, and it's been doing pretty well for me. If I write them a letter saying "You're being jerks and abusing IP, cut it out", that letter goes in the circular file. OTOH, if I write "You're doing things to lower the value of my investment, cut it out", I hear a vaguely implied threat that "I think that I might be able to sue you for being jerks and costing me money." Hacker opinion might not count, but the thought of a class-action suit can generally get a few mental wheels turning.
Any thoughts? I dropped an email to Investor Relations already (can't hurt), but I'm wondering if others think this might work (and would be willing to do likewise). If it might work in this case, might it work in the general case? Might it be possible to influence the companies we hate by buying stock in them and grumbling about our investment?
I suspect that the answer I'll get is "It won't work, go do something useful", but I'm curious.
Yahoo News isn't much diffrent from Slashdot.
Yahoo being a link angentcy is just copying Slashdots "news". Occasionally this means linking to press releases.
Yahoo dosn't copy it compleately ofcourse. No comments section. No commintary from Yahoo. Just a link.
While taken from Slashdot Yahoo is doing this in Yahoos own style. Just link it. This can result in Yahoo posting press releases.
In the end Yahoo is "News for Investors" It's about the stocks man....
So like Suns little "Microsoft copyed our vision" rant wouldn't get the laughs it got from Slashdot. Becouse stock investers use those statments to understand the thinking of the companys and Microsoft copying Sun means basicly this isn't a true reflection of Microsofts ideals or goals but just something that was good and so Microsoft copyed it.
The news on Yahoo is gona be a bit.. umm strange... But it matters. Like when the news media gives the presedent of the United States the mike and just let's him rant. It's news becouse he runs things and what he's saying could become a facter in our daily lifes even if he's totall off his rocker. So the more factless his comments are the more newsworthy they become.
In the stock market the same rule applys. The more factless Adobes press release is the more newsworthy it is. This is stock moving data.
A factless tech specs sheat is very newsworthy on Slashdot. Oh wow a new technology. Yeah prepetual motion machine marke 5. Oh great... Bad technology to reduce a $2,000 computer into a $2,000 pile of junk.
Thats why it's news... not becouse it's factual but becouse Adobe is nuts
I don't actually exist.
Ill probably find one right after i write this, but, can someone post links to good examples?
'Tabbed palettes' which you can rip off and create new palettes with sounds awfully like the menus in WindowMaker You can tear them off and stick them anywhere on the screen - did NextSTEP have these, because, if so, thats clear prior art for such a system.
When did the tabbed palettes arrive in Photoshop - i don't remember, The earliest version of Photoshop i used was 3.something in the mid 90s i think. I don't recall it having tabbed palettes, so presumably they were introduced with 4.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Molog
So Linus, what are we doing tonight?
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
Sure, the photoshop brand of tabbed palettes were kinda, uhm, well, innovative when they first came out, but so was all that nifty stuff done by Xerox PARC way back when. Too bad for Adobe good ideas tend to become more or less public domain after a while, because everyone starts ripping them off after a while (3D Studio Max uses them as well, now). It's very difficult to uphold a patent that's as vague and general as this. Just change some of the little details and the party sueing hasn't got a leg to stand on in court. I'd really like to see them try, though. It's always amusing to see the death spasms of an obsolete moloch.
.sig
Which is precisely what's going on here, I think. Adobe is losing the lucrative webmarket very fast to those nice, slick and Internet-savvy boys and girls from Macromedia. I'm not very much inclined to worship huge companies that sell their stuff at outrageous prices, but if you're doing webgraphics, the stuff Macromedia puts out is just way, way better. The fancy-ass photo manipulation you can do with Photoshop is something that I at least don't use for day to day web work. If I have to do a site, I just stick with Fireworks. Then there's the Adobe joke that's called Illustrator: sure, you can do nice stuff with that, but they can't even get their own (both AI and EPS) file format right, making your artwork completely useless except, maybe (I wouldn't know) for print. Basically what is happening is that there's a very lucrative and very big new market emerging in the graphic sector and Adobe isn't getting as much of it as they would like. Sure, the people doing print work will probably stick with Adobe for a while yet, but what happens when every designer makes most of his/her income from webgraphics? You think they'll pay the extra money just to get pantone calibrated stuff from Adobe when the Macromedia software they already own performs more or less equally good?
And we all know what happens when big companies start running into trouble:
Sue the bastards.
Am I the only one to see striking parallels with the way the RIAA is behaving right now?
This is not a
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
Tear-off menus, anyone? Isn't a tear-off menu a vertical tabbed pane? Sure, it's not attached necessarily to the thing it's modifying, but the patent doesn't require that.
I would think that any normal, sane person would see an arguement isn't neccesary. Obviously we do not live in a normal, sane world.
The patent system is not intended to protect obvious inventions. It is meant to allow inventors to show the public how their inventions work, while still protecting their rights. Patenting widgets, file managers, or new ways to tie your shoe-lace is hardly benefiting the public, and it's the public that by and large pays for enforcement of these patents with taxes going to a legal system that now has to worry about folks like Adobe who are miffed that someone else is using a tabbed dialog. Imagine if they could focus on the crimes and issues that concern the public, and not those that concern companies like Adobe.
Don't just pretend that things that nobody in fact did come up with, were things that anybody could have come up with.
Are you seriously suggestion no-one would come up with a tabbed dialog? A window manager? A file manager? I'll grant you Post-it notes are ingenious, but protecting them with a patent is an abuse of the original intent of the system.
--
Maybe someone should come up with a patent violation press release generator, that would be fun!
has filed a lawsuit with
over a patent they hold, that
A said today
"". More on this later.
Molog
So Linus, what are we doing tonight?
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
I blame Taco for screwing this up in his headline. But you are equally culpable for believing what you want to be true, rather than looking for what actually is true.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Forshame on Adobe for trying to punish someone elses success.
I created a tabbed widget in 1986, and have documentation to prove it. Furthermore, I was divinely inspired -- the idea came to me in a Quaker Meeting, when I should have been thinking about something else entirely.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Funnily enough, the Apple way of "selecting one of the folders to bring it to the front. With a tabbed dialog this is usually the tabs" is to type Apple-tab
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
--- Never hold a dustbuster and a cat at the same time ---
Setting his threshold to 5, Sparky eliminated most of the trolls on /.
I later used Emacs with tab windows to implement an authoring tool for HyperTIES, a hypermedia browsing/authoring research project developed in Ben Shneiderman's Human Computer Interaction Lab, at the University of Maryland College Park.
Later on I wrote and freely published several different implementations of "tab windows", using The NeWS Toolkit version 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. They allowed you to drag the tab around to any edge of the window, lay the windows out sequentially so they overlapped and each of their tabs was visible, and you could bring any window to the top by clicking on the tab, move the windows by dragging the tab, etc.
Sound familiar? It's called prior art. I believe it makes Adobe's patent invalid.
Here's the reference to and a quote from a paper we published in 1991, although we performed the research a few years before that (which explains the words "Look Back" in the title).
-Don
Designing to Facilitate Browsing: a Look Back at the HyperTIES Workstation Browser.
By Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant, Rodrigo Botafogo, Don Hopkins, and William Weiland.
Hypermedia, V3 #2, 1991
Page 115.
The more recent NeWS version of Hyperties on the SUN workstation uses two large windows that partition the screen vertically. Each window can have links and users can decide whether to put the destination article on top of the current window or on thee other window. The pie menus make it rapid and easy to permit such a selection. When users click on a selectable target a pie menu appears (Fig. 1) and allows users to specify in which window the destination article should be displayed (practically users merely click then move the mouse in direction of the desired window). This strategy is easy to explain to visitors and satisfying to use. An early pilot study with four subjects was run, but the appeal of this strategy is very strong and we have not conducted more rigorous usability tests.
In the author tool, we employ a more elaborate window strategy to manage the 15-25 articles that an author may want to keep close at hand. We assume that authors on the SUN/Hyperties will be quite knowledgeable in UNIX and Emacs and therefore would be eager to have a richer set of window management features, even if the perceptual, cognitive, and motor load were greater. Tab windows have their title bars extending to the right of the window, instead of at the top. When even 15 or 20 windows are open, the tabs may still all be visible for reference or selection, even though the contents of the windows are obscured. This is a convenient strategy for many auithoring tasks, and it may be effective in other applications as well.
CONCLUSIONS
The documents written with Hyperties have been used by hundreds of users at demonstrations, and some components have been studied in controlled experiments. A full usability study with a realistic application to compare Hyperties/SUN documents with other electronic forms or paper is a desirable goal. We believe that the components are important contributions and encourage other developers to try them and refine them further.
We see further opportunities for improving the hypertext browsing environment with ideas such as multiple indexes to permit partitioning of lar5ge databases, graphic browsing capabilities (not a node-link diagram, but a higher level representation), various bookmarks, and still larger, sharper, and faster displays. Improved search facilities would include flexible string searching, search for graphic images, search within a restricted distance from the current node, weighted search results, intersections/unions of searches, and search by node-link structures. Our recent efforts have been to develop structural analysis software tools and metrics to provide authors with suitable feedback to better guide the document creation process. The future of hypertext will be brighter if the user interface for browsing can be made more attractive and effective.
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
How come some fucking idiot always posts this comment whenever slashdot links to a newswire story using some site (usually yahoo or excite) as the gateway? How come a bunch of fucking morons always mod it up?
Yahoo does not run the story. Yahoo does not claim that it is news. That's why it's served from biz.yahoo.com (the Newswire gateway), marked "Press Release, Source: Adobe Systems Incorporated" and tagged with the Canada Newswire graphic. This is so painfully obvious when you actually take the time to open your eyes and READ.
Yahoo didn't write the story. Adobe did. You want the news story? Wait till you get the WSJ blurb in *tomorrows* paper. Want to start talking about it now? Read the newswire Adobe propaganda - the only thing available at the present time. Obviously you have no clue how the media works. Slashdot feeds you something a little bit uncut and all you can do is complain? I thought most of you people were supposed to be a cut above the rest?
~GoRK
I'm asking, will they win? Apperently, according to Yahoo!, they own a patent on using a tab-based system to show information for things like options. I haven't heard that MS has been sued for their implementation of it (I'm thinking "System settings" and "Network" in the control pannel). Doesn't that mean that the patent is void when infringment is made because they aren't sueing everyone that infringes?
However patent lawsuits based on look and feel are a separate issue. A UI can be considered a process for communicating with the user (processes are patentable) or as a design (possibly a design patent could be used).
And there is a third option. If the UI is distinctive in form instead of in function, it could get protection as "trade dress". This is related to trademark law - if something is distinctive as belonging to a company - like the colored cases of iMacs or the specially shaped Coke bottles (*) it can be protected as trade dress. This concept could be extended to UIs that look like those of the company claiming infringement.
There is an informative article about trade dress protection for UIs at http://www.fenwick.com/pub/trade_dress_for_user_in terface.htm
The article says that idea is dying, but it possibly could still be used by a litigious company to harass a competitor.
I'm not a lawyer, but it seemed patently (no pun intended) obvious that at least theoretically the concept of trade dress could be applied to a UI, even before I heard of any such attempt.
(*) The Coke bottle is a great example of trade dress. It is still so familiar even to this day that they decided to put a huge Coke bottle replica on the Las Vegas strip as part of the Coca-Cola store. Everyone recognizes the shape instantly as belonging to Coca-Cola - that is what trade dress is all about.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Oh, and I just saw boxes and boxes of infringing hardcopies of tabbed widgets at OfficeMax -- and if it's color selection that's an issue, there were multiple colors, colored flag attachments, colored containers, and not far away a pallette of ink of assorted colors in convenient plastic containers with built-in cloth brushes.
Why can't these companies call 'em as the market sees 'em, not as their mission statement reads??
First - IANAL. I'm just a grad student who has had to read patents for my work. I've developed a bit of the patience needed to read these works of obfuscation, so I thought I'd take a gander at Adobe's at the IBM database. Here are a few thoughts. From the synopsis, they are patenting a method to (1)section off a small region of the screen to display often-needed information and (2) using multiple selectors within that section to allow the user to choose which info to see, at which time, the information is displayed, displacing the previously shown info. First thought: This patent was filed in 1994 and granted 1996. In 1993 I was developing software on NeXT computers for multi-view interface menus & manipulators, using drop-down selectors. This work was based on prior demos from the NeXT community. It seems that prior art makes trivial the Adobe patent. Looking at the patent itself: p1 - Ahh.. tabs... I've seen these in Illustrator (which I use for technical figures). Handy little things, those. p2 - image of Apple menu p3 - image of Apple dialog box p4 - images of icon interface bars; iamges of tabbed palettes p5 - images of palettes p6 - flowchart of tabbed interface logic p7 - intro: Hmm... they contrast their method (persistent info) to menus (drop down, then disappear) & dialog boxes (disappear after use). Menus get longer, dialogues more cluttered with greater info. Palettes will solve this problem in user interface design. p8 - preferred embodiment: Seems to be saying that this patent covers all uses of tabbed interfaces for compact information flow, with any combination of previous developed menus, dialog boxes, icon palettes, etc. p9 - p8 cont.: Here's a juicy quote: "The technique of the invention provides a way of combining palette controls to allow multiple sets of controls to occupy the same screen space. The invention allows any number of palettes to be combined or separated at the user's discretion." The claims given don't seem to require tabs. Thought on p6 - this chart is pretty similar to the logic used in getting multi-menu windows to work on the NeXT, as mentioned above. Thought on p9 - claims not requiring tabs. Common practice in patents is to make your claim as broad as possible, so I'd expect Adobe to do the same. Other thoughts - if you've been in the science/engineering business then you probably know that it's common practice to file patents on anything you can afford to file on, making the claims as broad as possible to maximize potential profits. It's also known that larger companies sometimes file facetious patent-infringement suits against smaller ones to bleed of cash (and possibley market cachet) and thus hinder their product development & sales. Following the claims, it seems this work was laregly accomplished well before 1994. (Given a NeXT computer, I could probably resurrect examples of such code.) It would seem that Adobe is following time-honored business practices of siccing lawyers armed with dubious patents against competitors.
ShoutingMan.com
Sorry, I beat you to that. Check the IBM Patent Server.
So all of you ``First Post Lamerz" better knock it off. This is fair warning. Next time one of you lusers do this, I will sell the patent to a true scumbag of a company (No, I don't mean Microsoft -- Computer Associates would do nicely. Or maybe even Network ``Reviewing our software violates our NDA" Associates) that will track you down like a common criminal, & not only sue you but take your computer away & do even more evil stuff to you.
Now if I could only get the patent to pouring hot grits on my pants (pat. pend.) & turning women to stone (pat. pend.)
Geoff (pat. pend.)
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
If anyone really thinks Macromedia would have thought up tabbed widgets without noticing Adobe doing them, then maybe you have an argument, but it is quite obvious that they wouldn't have, they have spent years not doing anything innovative. If Adobe was the first one to do this and got a patent, good. If it was obvious and Adobe should never have gotten a patent, then I guess there will be tons of prior art to win the case for Macromedia, right? Oh no, there won't be. Cause this is a genuine innovation.
Slashdot readers: Stop confusing "obvious" with "elegant" or "simple". Just because something isn't crazy intricate does NOT mean it is not innovative and original.
sig:
sig:
See the "..for smart people" banners Wired runs here? Look elsewhere guys.
News just in; Xerox Inc are to file a lawsuit with Apple Computer over the shape of the mouse pointer. Xerox PARC claim that the mouse pointer violates U.S. Patent 3,223,596 which defines the shape and function of the on-screen pointer. The design of said pointer was used in their early Alto systems and took many years of research to perfect. Based on the success of this, Xerox plan to follow up with lawsuits against other companies and individuals involved in the design of windowing systems.
P.S. This is a joke....
I think it's painfully obvious to everyone here: we're just pseudo-intellectuals in clown suits and/or Bob Saget suits. As for myself, I'm nothing but a fucking idiot. And there's nothing i pride myself in being then a /. fucking idiot, r3pr3sent!
Help me through college please!
Will this stand up? Who knows. But patent applicants have no interest in narrowing down their claims--if they claim too much, the courts will simply narrow it down for them to as much as they can get away with.
What a bunch of loosers ...
Never buying Adoobie products again...
(wait i never did ;)
Since everyone is in the mood to sue of stupid, lame, idiotic stuff then why isn't amazon suing musicians friend? if you go to the sites you will see what i mean.
The whole point of all of this is to prove that none of these lawsuites that are going around over patent infringement have anything to do with the design of products or copyrights.
The only reason Macromedia is being sued is because they make graphical design programs, as does Adobe. Adobe is only trying to hurt one of their biggest competitors, and if they keep them from using their precious widgets then that is just a bonus.
Musicians Friend has remained untouched because they sell musical instruments and do not represent a significant threat to amazon's book sales, in fact amazon sells far more music books than musicians friend.
One more example of this practice of hurting your competitors with stupid lawsuites is that between Barnes and Noble and amazon a while back. (Read the Slashdot story here.) The only reason amazon started that lawsuite is because B&N is their biggest competitor and once again, if they could keep B&N from using their precious 1-click crap then they were all the more happy.
When will the Courts handling these cases wake up and smell the mud?
Opportunities multiply as they are seized. --Sun-Tzu
I don't think FUD is at all part of it -- just protecting what differentiates Adobe's products with others.
Funny, though, how one of the biggest complaints against Adobe products (even from loyal Adobe users) was when they introduced this kind of paletting -- too many palettes people constantly screamed Now competitors are copying them.
Adobe was very late to the Web game, and they paid with Dreamweaver getting huge market share over that pathetic excuse for a program, PageMill. Instead of copying Macromedia, however, they did the right thing when you're in a hurry and behind -- buy a kick-ass program and put it into your lineup.
With Flash graphics, Adobe was also late to the de facto standard that Macromedia created, but I guess they thought they had enough time. So they created LiveMotion. They didn't decide to copy Flash, but built their own product with Adobe looks and way of doing things, and lots of Flash users like it better (hence, Flash 5's surprisingly similar UI).
Macromedia came up with some great innovations and cutting-edge products with a UI that many liked. But many Macromedia users I know are there because they don't like the Adobe UI, and now they really have no more choice in UI.
You could have made your point in a much more friendly tone.
Oh, you're Håkan Lans? -- Data processing system and apparatus for color graphics display (1981)
Well, if they're using suing as a tactic to stall their competitors, they have lost whatever respect I had for them. In this age of suing, we can just wonder who will be next.
They have a good argument: protecting their intellectual property enhances shareholder value in the only way that matters, the bottom line.
Now, if you can show that there's a grass-roots campaign to boycott Adobe products (and Acrobat is too widespread for that to be effective) and that it will be fuelled by this action, then you might have a point. There's long-term harm to profits being risked.
The trick with investor action is to get the institutional investors - pension funds and investment trusts and the like - on side. They are the ones holding blocks of six per cent and up, which in a publicly-traded company is big enough to attract proxies and swing a vote. They also act in concert (here in the UK, at any rate) to force good corporate practice on their investments by - basically - threatening the directors.
If you can show them that Adobe is likely to hurt its own bottom line in the long term by acting like this, then those institutional investors, singly or as a group, will have a word with the board and suggest that if they want their stock price to stay where it is, they ought to reconsider.
Frankly, though, I don't hold out much hope.
-- AndrewD
A Maze of Twisty Little Laws, All Different.
According to News.com: Adobe, based in San Jose, Calif., says it owns a patent awarded in 1996 for "tabbed palette" technology Microsoft etc. does not (as far as I know) use tabs in a program using palettes, and therefore cannot be sued under Adobe's palette.
I have alerted the estate of Gilda Radner of your patent infringement on her SNL news routine.
Thank you and have a nice day.
bravo.. wish I had some moderator points.
How we know is more important than what we know.
All the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) lacks that Adobe Photo$hop has is robust color management. Plugin anyone?
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Ever notice Amazon's tabbed top-level navigation?
But did they ever try to get a patent on it?
Why is there only one Monopolies commission?
Tabbed widgets have been around nearly forever, Adobe certainly didn't invent them. And tabbed dialog boxes have been integrated into Microsft Windows since Windows 98 (or thereabouts), though they were (obviously) used before then.
All this patent crap and legal wrangling is really pissing me off, if you want to defeat your competitors, build a better product.
Wow, you thought that? You haven't been here long, have you? ;)
Randall.
Property law should use #'EQ, not #'EQUAL.
It's like Ford patenting headlight, seat and bumper bar technology. http://www4.tpgi.com.au/users/e1aurian/
Beyond that, their pronouncements on intellectual property seem particularly hypocritical given that their core technology, PostScript, was developed by the Adobe founders while at Xerox PARC, and I doubt that Xerox got a lot of money out of Adobe for that.
Anyone who has actually used LiveMotion would know better. While it simplifies some animation tasks, it is pretty much useless when it comes to interactivity, and the gap on that front will become much broader with Flash 5.
can we sue them for allowing us to save in .gif format? can we? please?
Chaos, Mayhem, and Destruction: Not
with OS X and NeXT, the PS portions of Quartz and Display PostScript were licensed from Adobe for font smoothing and what not.
--Humpty Dumpty was pushed!
What's even funnier is that the people mentioned often don't even make those statements. A lot of PR people are licensed to make up whatever sounds good, and stick the appropriate person's name on it.
So in response to your wondering about where Colleen was when she made the statement-- there's a good chance she never made that statement at all.
Well, in that case, why don't you think of something new and become a billionaire? Of had you had the monstrous misfortune to be born just after all the obivious things had been patented?
All the things you mention were designed, by designers. They're obvious once you see them (they're designed to be obvious -- that's the whole purpose). They're not obvious when you're sitting down, looking at a list of requirements and trying to make something usable.
Paper is obvious. Glue is obvious. Post-it Notes are not obvious. People had been gluing pieces of paper to things for centuries before the post-it was invented.
If you don't like patents, come up with some arguments against them. Don't just pretend that things that nobody in fact did come up with, were things that anybody could have come up with.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Most people don't realize that midget obesity is a serious problem and that Adobe is just stepping up here in the best interests of those little people affected. Macromedia has flaunted its use of Flabbed Midgets for a long time now and it's not fair to us or them that they can benefit from Adobe's considerable R&D expense regarding these short, fat people -
oh wait, what did you say? Trapped gidget? Oh, tabbed widgets. Right.
Forget it.
Hotnutz.com - Funny
This is a little off topic, but how can Yahoo call this "news" It's a press-release from Adobe!
the leading developer of award-winning software solutions for Web and print publishing
Talk about one sided. This is pathetic. (Yes, for the record Yahoo does state "Source: Adobe Systems Incorporated" but really...this is hardly journalism.)
[/rant]
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
A (admittedly hurried) reading of the patent (and its claims) indicates that it is rather broad; it seems to cover paged widgets in which you can select things that are consequently propogated to another area of the display. However, the legalese is so abstracted from reality that I can't make heads or tails of it. It seems to apply to more than palette selection, though...
(BTW, Extrans and Plain Old Text are reversed for me; anyone else see this problem?)
My Blog. Sela Ward can sell me long distanc
IAAFL, and this patent looks pretty kosher. The palette idea was new and non-obvious, the prior art was disclosed and other industry players have respected it. Go Adobe. And my opinion is in no way tainted by my oft-stated desire to find the man who invented Flash and Shockwave and break his arms and legs with breezeblocks.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Give them your phone number.
They'll make short work of the patent and Adobe will come out with egg on their faces - as will the patent office for yet again granting a patent that is not only obvious but which had already been done.
It's not likely that the right people at Macromedia will see this unless someone makes the effort to put it under their noses. C'mon, be a hero.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
This sounds awfully familiar. It's an interface issue, not a functionality issue. I don't have a problem with trademarking an interface (trademark infringement has to be nearly exact to mean anything in court) but an interface paradigm is another matter entirely. They should sue MS and AOL while they're at it. Plenty of other folks using tabs, too many to name. Of course, Amazon took the one-click patent against their biggest competitor, ignoring all else. It would seem to me like this is very selective targeting for Adobe.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Let me see if I understand the situation here...
The "tabbed widgets" in question are the little separated 'toolboxes' with multiple menus in them, that the software user 'tabs' through to get to different sets of options, right?
While, admittedly, I can't think of any specific examples being used, this does strike me as a pretty obvious (potentially) "nifty feature" that can be implemented on a web page with frames and forms. Not to mention Java applets, and who knows what else.
Perhaps adobe would like to file a preemptive lawsuit against W3C for participating in generating a standard that allows patent infringement.
"Obviously" current versions of HTML and Java, while they have some, isolated, legitimate use, are just tools designed to promote illegal patent infringement. (Hey, that same basic argument was enough to get Napster AND 2600 Magazine into court on two separate trials...)
Or, better still, perhaps a class-action lawsuit against software companies who hold software patents. While some of these patents have some isolated legitimate uses, they are OBVIOUSLY primarily tools to facilitate illegal harassment of others with lawsuits.
Of course, this assumes that it's still illegal anywhere to harass with lawsuits. People who have the money to do this sort of thing also have a lot of money to buy politicians and lobbyists with.
(Me? Cynical? Whatever gave you that idea?)
Joe Sixpack is dead!
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
But the press release doesn't mention that Macromedia is a trademark. Adobe are clearly infringing on Macromedia's rights by using their name and should be sued for everything they own.
Well, it makes as much sense as the Adobe case...
Avery has been making manila folders with those litte tabs for years. I think they should sue.
I always have to laugh at the wording of press releases of any kind. Just a bunch of marketing dweebs trying desperately to make their company sound important.
"We are taking this action now, after notifying Macromedia on several occasions that its products are infringing our patent. The remedy sought is straightforward -- we ask them to stop infringing our patents," said Bruce Chizen, Adobe's president.
Those bastards at Macromedia! How could they steal your widget tabs? After the months and months of blood, sweat, and tears your company poured into it! Obviously, ole Bruce is not happy with this turn of events, but those evil Macromedia people left him no choice!
"Adobe will not be the R&D department for its competitors"
Damn, Bruce, you sure are one shoot-from-the-hip, no-nonsense kind of guy. I bet right after saying that, Bruce went right back to the grindstone, to go crack some heads and burn the candle at both ends. He is obviously doing this for the good of the stock-holders, and not for the cheap publicity and chance to make millions of dollars in court.
"Adobe will aggressively enforce its patent portfolio and protect the interests of its stockholders," said Colleen Pouliot, Adobe's senior vice president and general counsel.
I wonder if Colleen was in the 10th floor executive-only meeting room (with drink bar, stocked mini-fridge and recliner chairs) when she made this statement, or on the private company jet on her way to Aspen? Nice to see Adobe stockholders have a pitbull like Colleen on their side. Wow!
OK, enough cut-and-past fun. I just had some leftover sarcasm I had to get rid of.
...have little if any legal force. The legal force of a patent is concentrated in its "claims." IANAL but I have studied patent law if only to figure out how to create a game that infringes Nintendo's U.S. Patent 5,265,888 on the game of Dr. Mario.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Now I'm torn[.]
Nope, sorry. That's not allowed. It violates Adobe's other patent, on tear-off menus. You'll be hearing from their lawyers in the morning.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
If you actually did sue them (or even had your lawyer file suit against them), then I could see some change in the wind. But empty threats are always faced with laughter.
How we know is more important than what we know.
...that Macromedia's continued success, particularly in the burgeoning web graphics market, is having a big impact on Adobe's bottom line. Anyone else agree?
"NOTE: Adobe and the Adobe logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries."
Did anyone else find it sort of amusing that they made a big show out of putting "Adobe stuff belongs to Adobe" down there, but didn't make a peep about Macromedia?
This is a Chao. A Chao says "Mu."
Consider the following example of what happens when the three are mixed together.
1) Macromedia comes out with a cool tool with a crappy user interface called Flash.
2) Macromedia does something pseudo-open source like and generously releases the SWF file format (and some sample code) to the world at large.
3) Although the specification isn't crystal clear, there's certainly enough information within it for Adobe to come out with an internally labelled "Flash killer" called Live Motion. Live Motion is essentially a Parasitic App. It exists on the good graces of Flash. The only reason it has for living is that it has a better user interface than Flash (which, as already noted, has a stinky interface).
4) The Parasite (Adobe) after laying its eggs in the brain of its host, then attempts to eat said brains via this very lawsuit, accusing Macromedia of the same Parasitic behavior which it itself has already commited.
The only difference, as I see it, is that Macromedia gave Adobe an open invitation to eat its brains and Adobe didn't.
Flash is certainly signficant, but I don't think Adobe's too scared of it because John Warnock (head of Adobe), keynoted at FlashFoward2000 (or something like that). I don't even consider FireWorks to be on the radar. Photoshop is the standard there. Dreamweaver is making great sides on the Windows side of things, but Adobe hasn't really put out a real web production product yet. They bought GoLive, basically took the existing code and shipped it as Adobe GoLive 4.0. This has done well in the Mac world (mostly because Dreamweaver is a bad Windows port).
GoLive 5.0, due out any day now, will be the company's first real foray into this space, and may give Macromedia some real static. Check out some key features from the feature list:
And this is in addition to the native WebObjects support, QuickTime editing, and JavaScript editor/debugger that GoLive has always had.
This lawsuit doesn't make sense. Adobe is in a good position, they don't need to do this.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Tabbed widgets? Adobe should ask Apple how far they're gonna get suing over look and feel. Patented or no.
Where the value of X-Mailer: is the true measure of a man...
"Adobe will not be the R&D department for its competitors." Okay, so they have the patent, ridiculous as it is. Were they really the first to come up with the tabbed dialog?
The patent is here. Very interesting that crap like this is even possible! IBM's patent server also lists patents that reference this one, including:
- Computer user interface with window title bar icons (IBM)
- Computer windows management system and method for simulating off-screen document storage and retrieval (HP)
- User interface system having programmable user interface elements (Apple)
- System and methods for improved spreadsheet interface with user-familiar objects (Borland)
- System and method for viewing icon contents on a video display (Wang)
<sarcasm>Great to see the patent system at work. Now we the public can understand how all these amazing things would work, since we'd never possibly think of them ourselves.</sarcasm>Title bar icons? Window management? Document storage and retrival? This is almost funny.
--
Interesting how Adobe was one of the senior sponsors at FlashForward 2000 in NYC this past July (conference for developers using Macromedia Flash). One of the new features of Flash 5 (coming out in September) is having tabbed, draggable widgets, in which Macromedia spoke on how they are trying to make it more familiar to those that use other industry standard software (such as Adobe products). Adobe was also there promoting how their software can be used to help developers of Flash. Strange how Adobe would be there in such a major way when they intended on accusing Macromedia of violating their patent ...
- jiggity
- jiggity
...or is this a contest to see who can sue over the silliest things?...I would love to see a judge laugh stuff like this out of the courtroom...and then demand that the silly people making these lawsuits repay ME the taxpayer for all of the money taken from my pocket....Or can us the taxpayers sue these companies (One click shopping, hyperlinks, tabbed widgets) for wasting our money after the judge laughs them out of court...
I am just waiting for someone to lay ownership to the SUBMIT and CANCEL buttons...
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
...back when it was a Virtuoso product and ran on NeXT boxen.
It will be interesting, and probably very important, to see how this turns out. So many legal battles are fought out by Big Guy vs. Little Guy, and that's just not a fair fight. Now we can see when happens when this sort of (imho) silliness gets aimed at someone with the money and reputation to defend themselves.
My mom is not a Karma whore!
I assume what they mean by tabbed widgets are the tabs that everyone uses in any GUI toolkit. So why only Macromedia? They could sue Microsoft, the developers of GTK+, Trolltech, Sun, etc, etc, etc... Everyone uses tabs.
I'm sure they are just scared of Flash and Dreamweaver (which is an AWESOME HTML editor BTW).
Welp, good luck to Macromedia, hope they can find something to countersue with
Wasn't the patent system created to HELP innovate* technologies, not sue-everyone-who-uses-my-patent?
* Innovation is a registered trademark/patent of Microsoft Inc.
-Brandon
Um...
What about Adobe sues Gimp for patent infringement? Does this mean that Gimp can never have tabbed midgets either?
Can you make my eyes hurt any more??
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
You posted the exact same link, but I still won't call you an idiot. Try this one.
That's being generous. With just 200 million computers used for 100 million seconds, over a septillion pixels have been used. So that's only 0.00005 cents per pixel, not bad.
I'd say this is as lame as one-click shopping as they're patenting obvious technology. Hyperlink copyright is even lamer. Just my two cents.
In all seriousness, does anyone believe Adobe would be suing a non-media/graphics company over the interface? I somehow don't think so. This sounds like another case of flexing muscles to scare competitors.
And product differentiation? What the heck is the splash screen for?
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Re: Patented! (Score:0 Flamebait)
by Adobe on Thursday August 10, @11:35PM EDT (#1001)
(User #10546 Info)
Furst Pat3nt!
Sux it Macromedia!
- The guys who do the TV Guide channel have a patent on using irregular cells to display information about TV shows.
- The guys who we're licensing our web browser from have a patent on doing screen magnification by magnifying part of the screen in a separate Window. This patent goes back to the early '90's (92 or 93) but I'm pretty sure both xdvi and gs/gv did it earlier.
- Someone apparently has a patent on getting time off a computer and displaying it on a TV. I hate to tell you this, but my TI 99/4A did this in 1983.
- I ran across a story in the Moscow times that some Russian company had patented the bottle and was trying to get breweries to pay royalties. The Russian patent officials were actually indignant that someone should get such a silly patent and were planning on launching an investigation(!)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The reason is simple. Flash 5. I was at the Flash Forward 2000 conference a few weeks back, where Macromedia annouced Flash 5. And it is a DAMN incredible product. Directly after MMs speech was Adobes... and it was... well, sad. They were *really* embarrassed... their Livemotion product, which they touted as a Flash "Killer" ended up being a horrible piece of junk that barely kept up with the features of Flash 3. It is all sour grapes.
A|Q|U|A
A method for displaying on a computer screen multiple sets of information needed on a recurring basis, comprising the steps of: (1) Establishing an area on the computer screen in which the multiple sets of information are to be displayed, the established area having a maximum size which is substantially less than the entire area of the screen. (2) Providing within the established area a plurality of selection indicators, one for each of the multiple sets of information. (3) Selecting one of the multiple sets of information for display within the established area by pointing to one of the selection indicators within the established area, whereby the selected set of information will be substituted within the established area for the set of information previously being displayed therein. A selected set of information may also be moved out of the selected area by pointing to its selection indicator and dragging it away.
But the real KICKER is
Issued/Filed dates:Aug. 13, 1996 / June 23, 1994
Intel Corporation(Nasdaq:INTC) the leading developer of PC processors, today announced it has filed suit in a U.S. District Court against Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE:AMD) for infringement of U.S. Patent No. 150,000,000 which is Intel's method for creating a processor with a 256k full speed L2 cache.
"We are taking this action now, after notifying AMD on several occasions that its products are infringing our patent. The remedy sought is straightforward -- we ask them to stop infringing our patents," said an Intel spokeswoman, "Intel will not be the R&D department for its competitors. Our patent and other aspects of our processors are key to the performance and functionality of our products; they are essential to differentiate our products and brand from others."
Zetetic
Seeking; proceeding by inquiry.
Elench
A specious but fallacious argument; a sophism.
Amen to that, brother. If you find him, I'll be glad to hold the little bastard steady while you work on him.
Force Adobe to GPL Photoshop 5.5 once Photoshop 6 comes out!
Does this mean that Gimp can never have tabbed midgets either?
:(
looks that way....
I am in the process of finishing up coding a TTabControl and TPageControl for project Kylix. Does this mean I can stop working and go home now?
-- I'm not a Linux guy but I play one at work. --
Would that be a pre-Colombian state?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
How can you patent a 'look'? That's all a GUI really is, different ways of visually presenting information, along with some widgets the user can click on to do stuff. It might be possible to protect a really novel UI element under "trade dress" (same thing Apple used to go after iMac rip-off makers), but I doubt it for tabbed palettes.
And what about the prior art? Other people have been using tabs in UI for a long time. Is the idea of putting them in a palette novel? Hardly.
What happens if everyone starts patenting UI elements? Every company will have to develop its own, unique UI, and the result will be a total usability mess, with absolutely no UI consistency.
I'm working on a project for my company which involves tabbed dialogs. Is that covered by the Adobe patent? Or just tabbed palettes?
This is just making me depressed... Stupid software patents are the perfect example of what happens when both governments and corporations are corrupt (which happens when the populace becomes stupid and apathetic).