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Apple Tries to Patent iPod User Interface
harlows_monkeys writes "Apple's
trying to patent several aspects of the iPod user interface. This one is particularly interesting because the claims are written in fairly clear and simple language, easy to understand by anyone. If this one is granted, it won't be because an overworked examineer was confused by deliberate obfuscation by the application (which is what I think happens for a lot of the ridiculous patents). About half the claims are for things that were implemented in prior players (e.g., Archos), and the other half are for things that are in many other common device interfaces (DVD players, PVRs) and the only novelty is that Apple put them on a portable music player."
It probably won't help them at all. It's look and feel all over again.
The extent of the patent is coverd by the claims. Apple is trying to take a huge bite with paragraph 34:
While this invention has been described in terms of a preferred embodiment, there are alterations, permutations, and equivalents that fall within the scope of this invention. It should also be noted that there are many alternative ways of implementing both the process and apparatus of the present invention. It is therefore intended that the invention be interpreted as including all such alterations, permutations, and equivalents as fall within the true spirit and scope of the present invention.
Apple had already threatened to sue iRiver for attempting to use the scroll-wheel and a similar user interface in the iHP-120. iRiver went with the 'clit' manuevering device instead. If the iRiver iHP-120 had the same easy to use iPod interface while retaining all those features it could've been an iPod killer.
I think any Apple engineer will tell you that Steve plays a direct role in many of Apple's high-profile products. There's no doubt that some sort of element like the scroll wheel came out of his head, even if he had no direct role in it's implementaiton.
Now, whether he plays a positive or negative role is another matter. It's my understanding that much of the ever-changing UI in OS X+iApps is due to his input.
Perhaps...but click the link in the article, which takes you right to the patent application, and read the claims. They aren't trying to patent the scroll wheel (at least, with this patent). With this patent application, they are trying to patent things that were done before on other players, or that were done on other kinds of devices and all Apple did was copy them for use on the iPod.
Their broadest claims cover any media player that has a menu that brings up another menu (or even a dialog, for that matter), for example.
Although he read the summary rather than the claims, he did get the right idea as to what they are trying to claim. Here's the first claim:
Parent has read the claims. Most posters haven't, before they started bashing.
Parent has done a great job in pointing out the main weakness: Apple doesn't ask for technicalities, but design. Essentially.
Claim 26 is the most precise one: They ask for protection for an Interface Design Aspect that automagically changes the underlying interfaces along with the user interaction.
This is a clear sign of a patent system flawed over time, since the idea is not basically a technical one. Imagine your mail-client (or just look at it) and imagine you click on the sender of a mail and the interfaces changes to display all mails of that sender. You click on a subject and all mails of this subject come up. Not a bad one, no. I'd even agree that it may be discussed if the author should get royalties. But a patent ? Only over my dead body. (I quit the Patent Office to have a life !)
This is the typical kind of software patentry where you describe a rather vague idea, ask for a patent and sue the implementer.
I can only call on everyone - in US and EU - to put all efforts into stopping this madness.
Quite a few times the inventors / designers at Apple will point at Jobs ideas as the one that got them to the current design.
:-).
Case in point, the Lamp Style iMac came from him. Ives had come up with several LCD prototypes -- and they were probably all cool as hell in their own right -- but Jobs wasn't satisfied. While some upper management were touring his wine fields, he took the designers to a plantings of sunflowers and pointed out that the head of the plant was HUGE but didn't seem unwieldy and was natural. He asked the guys to think about that and how the flower's head was supported when redesigning the new iMac (for the 30th time).
The new iMac is directly a result of this and Jobs' idea on how it should work. you can see it in the machine when you look at it and think about it.
There are dozens of these stories out of the net from the designers of the hardware and the software where something that might have been a throw away comment from someone else became the core of what Jobs got out of his engineers (sometimes for good / sometimes for the bad).
So, from past experience, it is only prudent to accept he might have had a good deal of input even if others with the practical experience are listed (that was for the grandparent post as I agree with the parents post
OK. I have a library of close to 250 gigabytes on three machines (four counting the ipod). And iTunes has been the best organizational system I've found. Once you get the music in there, you have so much power at your fingertips for doing mass associations, creating autogenerated playlists, altering EQs, archiving music, searching for a particular song, etc.
Is it perfect? Hell no. For one thing, it plays fast and loose with ID3 tags, so even songs that are tagged correctly in iTunes sometimes lose their tags when they come out of it. Some of the really useful apple extensions like the star rating disappear when you move the files (which sucks when you're auditioning several thousand songs for possible deletion). For another, the "let's appease the RIAA" decision of not allowing copying FROM an iPod means I need to maintain other applications to get stuff that I placed on the iPod.
Finally, using iTunes sort of requires you to adopt the iPod Way of doing things -- e.g. you have to let it control your library, or else it goes a bit whacko. This makes sense. You should ALWAYS control the lowest level of abstraction using the highest level whenever possible, or risk having to maintain the abstraction on each level. iTunes' ability to treat metadata as a pseudo filesystem makes it a very useful high level abstraction. It takes very little extra effort to do all your file maintenance in iTunes, but if you're such a control freak that you're constantly moving files around, you shouldn't be using a music library application in the first place.
Incidentally, the library handling is much saner on OSX, where you can move files to your heart's content and not worry about the app not being able to find them.
Hey freaks: now you're ju