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Microsoft Patents Grouped Taskbar Buttons
I_am_Rambi writes "According to the US Patent office, patent #6,756,999 belongs to Microsoft. The patent this time is grouping taskbar icons processes. This is included in Windows XP, and some prior art in X. Looks like it was accepted two days ago."
THERE IS prior art.
BeOS' Tracker had that in 1999 before anyone else. All windows/instances from the same application are showing grouped in the BeOS Deskbar, under the same sub-menu.
It seems the big difference is in the 'time threshold' part:
"The system organizes like application files and clusters the corresponding taskbar buttons and, upon reaching a threshold limit, creates and displays a group button that contains the like application files and removes the like taskbar buttons from the taskbar. Further, upon reaching a second threshold limit, the system ungroups the application taskbar buttons, displays them on the taskbar and removes the group button from the taskbar."
Big difference? Probably not, but enough for it to be 'new'...
While there is probably prior art for this, you have to realize that the issue date in not what determines if the prior art is relevant. It is the invention date or original filing date, which in this case was back in April 2000.
Grouping in the taskbar has to be one of the most annoying "Features" ever seen in a taskbar.
I disagree. The annoying part about it is that it's not predictable. Depending on how many instances I have open of any given application, they may or may not be grouped.
The XP PowerToys allow you to set the minumum number of items before they're grouped to 2. That way, any given app always takes the same amount of space on the toolbar, as long as at least one instance is running. I think that's a great UI improvement.
Patentable? Not sure.
I recall it being in a very early GNOME panel. I wouldn't be suprised if KDE had it as well.
I've seen it in Win98SE and W2K, in both cases with Symantec Enterprise (for grouping various Norton utilities, like AV, Ghost, etc.). First I saw it was last fall, however.
I'm typically a Linux user, though I use neither GNOME nor KDE, and didn't start using a system tray until this past fall with xfwm4 and the xfce taskbar -- and none of the apps I've used need any grouping.
The patent application dates to 2001; it may possible be valid.
This is a continuation of a provisional application filed in April 2000. Not sure what the invention date is, but is certainly earlier.
Prior art has to beat the invention date which is probably no later than 1999 in this case, possibly earlier.
they did pantent it
BeOS. Since 1998, and probably much earlier.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I don't know about you guys, but that's one thing I always disable when I sit down at a fresh terminal... it's just too troublesome to have to click through it that way to get to the window I'm looking for - I think the OSX task bar makes so much more sense.... make it real tiny, but make it magnifiy a lot and a lot when my mouse moves over - no idea why the default settings don't present it that way...
anyway, what i do when i have too many things on my task bar is to move it to the right instead of leaving it at the bottom - in that way i can squeeze more buttons in and still read some of the text.
"What is the average time to get a patent approved,"
... they often take 2 years to examine your invention on the merits.
It mostly depends on the field of art. Because there has been a huge boom in computer patents, there is a backlog in that department
Once the patent is examined on the merits, the examiner often makes rejections, to which the applicant answers with arguments/ammendments, and that may repreat several times, until the examiner agrees on a version of the application that is patentable. That part may take several years as well.
Three years is not really a long time to get a patent. I have seen some patents that have been languishing for 5 years. And sometimes the delay is not due to the PTO, rather it is the applicant's fault.
This actually has been in KDE before XP as far as I can remember. Nothing new here
Well, M$ recieved a patent for double-clicking, as was discussed in a previous ./ article. The GUI was, I believe, developed at PARC, under Xerox, along with the mouse, etc. Apple basically stole the whole idea from them. If you want to learn more, read _Insanely Great_ by Steven Levy. It's an excellent book (I just finished reading it today), and very educational.
XP's release date has nothing to do with it. You need to find a system than had it in use no later than April 1999, one year before the filing date, to be sure of prior art.
The regulations are that prior art disqualifies a patent if and only if it was in use or on sale or had a description published before the latter of the invention date (which might be hard to prove) or one year before the filing for the patent. (35 USC 102.) Because we are not sure of the invention date, we need to go off of the one year previous rule.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Sure can! Right-click the taskbar, choose Properties. In the Taskbar tab (should be the first one), uncheck "Group Similar Taskbar Buttons".
:)
If you really want it to be nice like 2k, under Start, Settings, Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Services, disable the Themes service.
I recognize people by their sigs. Is that a bad thing?
If by stealing it you mean copied it...
Well then you're still partially wrong. They bought it off Xerox and drastically improved it.
And the mouse was invented by someone else I believe prior to Xerox.
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
Not obvious? You cannot be serious; not only is it obvious but I've seen it at least once before (KDE???). Yet the worst thing about it is not it's obviousness or whether there's any prior art but that it's the kind of thing I can imagine a highly configurable desktop or window manager might allow a user to figure out how to do by him/herself.
It's the kind of thing that I can imagine the developers of said configurable desktop might not actually have explicitly programmed into it in the first place. I can imagine one or more smart power users figuring something like this out for themselves and telling their friends how to do it. Who is infringing on such a patent now?
It's not so much a technology patent as it is a patent on a particular *use* of a technology. Do you really want people to be able to patent the way you use things? Or use patents to prevent others from making flexible and configurable things for users who like that kind of power?
This is just the kind of patent that ought to be waking people up to the idea that software patents are perverse and egregious thieves of diversity,creativity and individual liberty.
No, that was invented by an IBM employee.
Not more than you need, just more than you want
Actually Microsoft was a very infrequent user of the patent office a few years back, and actually seemed like a pretty upstanding intellectual property citizen (they were making boatloads of money anyways at a steadily increasing pace, so perhaps it seemed just too greedy to try to use patents to bully money out of new entrants in the market). This aggressive patent position is the sort of thing that people warned about a few years back - as the Windows dominance came under threat (not as much by Linux as by the ubiquitous web), and Microsoft finds it harder to compete with older versions of their own software (the biggest competitor to Office 2003 isn't OpenOffice, but rather is Office XP, 2000, 97, etc.), the easy money is harder to come by. The scenario the paranoid painted was that now would be the time that the screws start to get turned, and patents are one of the screwdrivers.
BeOS did not implement it using thresholds to automatiacally group and ungroup. BeOS simply grouped them all.
It's not the concept that is patented, it is the implementation, and this implementation is different than BeOS.
You don't "file a case" to defeat a patent. You release a product that uses the patented work, and wait for them to come to you.
They didn't patent double clicking. Go read the patent.... they patented application buttons on PDA's (and similar devices) that performs different functions depending on how long the buttons are pressed, and how many times it's clicked within a specific amount of time. Whether or not they should've been granted that patent debatable, but simply saying that they've been granted a patent on double clicking is just wrong, and just plain silly.
The mouse was invented by Douglas Engelbart of Stanford Research Center in 1963. The patent on it was granted to the Stanford Research Institute in 1970 and (unfortunately from Mr. Engelbart) expired in 1987, just prior to the PC revolution. Cheers.
Carl P. Corliss
I don't remember exactly but a while earlier there was a patent described on slashdot which was simply a mix of a couple basic techniques. My analogy (although incorrect and over-simplifed) was the notion of patenting the mix of peanut butter, jelly, and bread, even if you have no obvious ownership over the rest.
Actually I am remembering now. It was the concept of having a window fade when not in use, and fade more as it is not being used, patented by Apple. This combines time and variable transparency. Other examples already existed where putting the window in the background made the window more transparent but the Apple folks apparently were awarded a patent simply for fading it with respect to time. To reiterate: they took a preexisting idea, took the next logical step, and now own a patent on it. There was no advancement made by this in any way with the (very slight) possible exception that the UI itself can be said to be improved, and I think that'd be a hard case to prove.
Watch someone patent rotating desktop backgrounds based on the weather. To my knowledge it hasn't been done, so by the logic of the patent office it deserves a patent to protect it's.. uhh.. umm. money?
Stephen Levy often plays fast and loose with the facts in order to make a more entertaining book (hence all the "hey cool" but impossible anecdotes in "Hackers").
The GUI was invented aways back in the 1960s. At first, it was just a cursor, but it was definitely driven by a puck with a button on it. There's you're mouse, years before PARC. PARC, which was a research center, by the way, not a product development center, created a graphical interface for performing actions featuring windows and icons. This was brought to the attention of Steve Jobs, who thought it was neat and traded several million dollars worth of Apple stock to Xerox in exchange for a "field trip" with his developers to PARC. Apple didn't license the technology per se -- there was nothing to license at that point, there was no product yet -- but they also didn't use Xerox's idea. They took the interface for performing actions and used the basic premise to create an interface for managing objects. They turned icons as verbs into icons as nouns, inventing in the process such things as the first Desktop, the first file management system (Finder) and the first graphical forms, controls and alerts (Xerox's interface was basically a CLI in a window with buttons).
Microsoft's "patent for double clicking" pertains only to hardware buttons on palm sized devices, and only to the specific use of timed accesses. Sounds like double clicking, but it isn't -- the patent is on using one hardware button on a handheld to perform three distinct actions using three distinct input methods, not on any of the three methods. Want to avoid the patent? Make sure YOUR handheld device only uses two of the three methods. Of course, this doesn't make for quite so sensational an article as "OMG M$ Patentz dbl click," which is probably why you don't know about it. Or, like Mr. Levy, do you prefer spreading colorful and entertaining fictions so long as the outline is correct?
Hey freaks: now you're ju
But Microsoft licensed the Apple trash can back in the 1980's.
That was the whole Apple/Microsoft lawsuit thingy.
To my certain knowledge, BeOS had 'task grouping' in version 4 which I beleive predates April 1999. Since I did not use BeOS before version 4, I do not know when it was introduced as a BeOS feature.
Then again, I could be wrong.
-Rusty
You never know...
BeOS's taskbar wasn't the same thing. They always grouped windows of a single application together. This patent is on dynamically detecting the need to group and acting on it.
DCMonkey
Sorry.
DCMonkey
I looked as his taskbar the other day, and it was full of 25-30 little Firefox icons (with a few others mixed in) followed by one, maybe two letters of the page name.
Poor guy. Some hints for him:
1. Use Firefox's tabbed browsing, preferably with the Tabbrowser extension. You can still keep a couple of browser windows open, but you can open related pages in tabs within the same browser window.
2. If you use Windows, you should consider installing a tray minimizer to get rid of those programs that you recognize by the icon anyway but that take you hours to find in the task bar if they're stuck between 30 browser windows. At work I use a tray minimizer for Outlook (for work mail), the Novell Application Launcher, Mozilla Mail (for private mail) and PuTTY (the SSH client). The added advantage of putting them there is that they are gone from my Alt+Tab list, which means I can tab between the windows I'm actually *working* with. This is the one crucial feature that I still haven't found a replacement for in Linux -- applications still have to support minimizing to the tray themselves, so it's not always possible to minimize the applications to the tray that *I* want to put there.
3. If that doesn't help enough, extend the size of your task bar by a row, so that you can better see what's there.
4. Put the taskbar on the left/right of your desktop. This takes a bit more screen real estate, but at least you can control precisely how many characters of each window's name you can read.
The problem everyone is hav ing here is that "obvious" doesn't mean "obivous". Sure, maybe it seems obvious to a user, but obvious in the context of patentability has a very specific definition:
From the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure, section 706.02(j):
"To establish a prima facie case of obviousness, three basic criteria must be met. First, there must be some suggestion or motivation, either in the references themselves or in the knowledge generally available to one of ordinary skill in the art, to modify the reference or to combine reference teachings. Second, there must be a reasonable expectation of success. Finally, the prior art reference (or references when combined) must teach or suggest all the claim limitations. The teaching or suggestion to make the claimed combination and the reasonable expectation of success must both be found in the prior art and not based on applicant's disclosure. In re Vaeck, 947 F.2d 488, 20 USPQ2d 1438 (Fed. Cir. 1991). See MPEP 2143 - 2143.03 for decisions pertinent to each of these criteria."
The basic notion is that there must be some prior art, or combination of prior art, that "teaches" EACH AND EVERY claim element in the later patent -- PLUS there has to be a "motivation" to combine them. Just because there is prior art, or because something seems "obvious" to a user, doesn't mean that it meets the LEGAL definition of "obvious" relevant to the USPTO.
Just thought I would mention that...
"That's not even wrong..." -- Wolfgang Pauli
What? No it didn't. You must be thinking of something else...
This is the feature that when you open 20 different IE windows it will show only one taskbar icon for the group, and pop up a submenu once you click it.
There are several SuperKaramba themes you can use to do this under Linux. Some are even virtually identical to what you have in OSX.
once you go slack, you never go back
Of course I noticed the thread -- especially as the reference featured MY NAME in the first place!
:-) ;-)
Of course I was surprised to see that Microsoft seems to patent something that is closely built after my thoughts mentioned on the kde-look mailing list in 1999 already.
One of the problems with considering my thread as prior art is that unfortunately it was implemented by Matthias Elter some months later. It only turned out during implementation that task grouping only becomes interesting if
- the user doesn't use virtual desktops already (because he already organizes his tasks himself already)
- the tasks are only grouped after a certain thresholded is reached.
It doesn't take to be a genius to get that threshold idea because it's just the logical next step once you implement it but it seems that Microsoft actually implemented my idea before we did and therefore realized this tiny step before us.
Anyways it's interesting to see how Microsoft seems to monitor the KDE mailinglists since 1997.
E.g. I had the idea to create kpersonalizer which featured a dialog with a slider which you could easily use to configure the amount of eyecandy versus performance in KDE.
It was funny to see a very similar dialog in XP Betas two months later which contained almost the same wording in some places
So much for cross-polluting ideas between KDE and MS developers
> It seems that at this time, it was already implemented.
/* we can probably unroll the length test */
p lets/tasklist/tasklist_applet.c?rev=1.83&view=mark up
/. code display sucks so much.
Confirmation of this can be found in gnome-core/applets/tasklist/tasklist_applet.c, version 1.83 (Jan 24 2001):
static gboolean
is_task_really_visible (TasklistTask *task)
{
g_return_val_if_fail (task != NULL, FALSE);
if (!task->tasklist->config.enable_grouping)
&nbs p; return is_task_visible (task);
if (task->group && g_slist_length (task->group->vtasks) > task->tasklist->config.grouping_min)
return FALSE;
else if (task->task_group)
return g_slist_length (task->vtasks) > task->tasklist->config.grouping_min;
return is_task_visible (task);
}
Here's the link:
http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gnome-core/ap
(remove the spaces between "app" and "lets" + "mark" and "up")
Not only does the task list perform grouping, but it also uses a threshold to determine whether windows of the same application shall be grouped or not.
PS: Sorry that
I love C++
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