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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.
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.
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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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
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
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.
"Should I buy Macromedia if we run the risk of having to learn a new interface in six months?" is the question that might be asked.
As for Flash being dead because Adobe made a new tool, well, Freehand, Dreamweaver, Flash, Director and QuarkXPress are all products that survive (and indeed are better, IMHO) competition with Adobe.
Adobe came late to the game with ImageReady, was forced to bundle it with Photoshop 5.5 so it would actually ship. Meanwhile, Fireworks integrates nicely with Dreamweaver and Flash. OTOH, Photoshop's web obtimization capability is quite clearly tacked on, not designed from the ground up. Web designers know this. The guys in my office work w/ Macromedia products for precisely this reason.
Consider this, why did Adobe feel compelled to be able to import Flash graphics?
--Humpty Dumpty was pushed!