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Adobe Beats Macromedia In Tabs Patent Case

Posted by timothy on from the dueling-press-releases dept.

An Anonymous Coward points to this Adobe press release, writing "Adobe has won in its rather-silly patent lawsuit vs Macromedia, which covers the "tabbed palettes" UI used in so many applications these days. Hard to believe this one stood up in court, but hey..." Slightly less happy is Macromedia's release.

2 of 13 comments (clear)

  1. Lots of prior art on this one.... by amacbride · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is ridiculous -- there's loads of prior art on this one. Specifically, I designed a tabbed pane/notebook metaphor for a development environment project when I was at Sun in 1991. It was demo'ed to a bunch of customers and potential customers, including the NSA. I'm not sure where I saw the idea in the first place, it might have been something from Lotus 1-2-3.

    Hmmm....I wonder if I still have the source code stashed somewhere....

    -a

  2. What about Mozilla? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    The new tabbed browsing feature is one of the greatest parts of Mozilla. Is this at risk underneath that patent?

    Oh, hey, and what about Lotus Notes? Or Excel?

    I'm not trolling, being ironic or funny here -- how broad can you stretch the definition of a tabbed palette?