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Yahoo Patents 'Smart' Drag and Drop
Unequivocal writes "According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Yahoo has filed a patent for 'smart' drag and drop. From the article: 'A computer-implemented method for manipulating objects in a user interface, comprising: providing the user interface including a first interface object operable to be selected and moved within the user interface; and in response to selection and movement of the first interface object in the user interface, presenting at least one additional interface object in the user interface in proximity of the first interface object, each additional interface object representing a drop target with which the first interface object may be associated.' How do these patent claims differ from normal drag and drop? In pretty trivial ways if at all, but it may be hard for a patent examiner to understand that trivial changes in drag and drop user interface are not in fact novel enough to warrant a patent. If Yahoo gets this patent, they'll have a mighty big stick to shake at competitors."
Simply post links to papers which do exactly this, contextual drag and drop and you can blow this patent out of the water!
Wouldn't this describe NWN interface?
Drag, choose option, drag some more..
If anyone can hear me, slap some sense into me But you turn your head, and I end up talking to myself
A large mug is what I'd call whoever granted this patent. Isn't it just a normal drag and drop crossed with some context sensitivity?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If Yahoo gets this patent, they'll have a mighty big stick to shake at competitors."
No they bloody well won't.
I have the patent for shaking a stick at competitors.
liqbase
They've applied for this patent. It has not granted yet. Seems like a small point but it isn't.
How is this different from spring-loaded folders which have been in MacOS since before it was X?
that will stop Yahoo for having to fire 1000s of its employees over the next few weeks. Go Yahoo!
Patent tax revenues are backdated to the day of filing. So patent trolls are claiming that all those inventions that were suddenly extant and infringing on day 0 didn't exist as prior art on day -1. They just appeared fully formed overnight.
How can anyone working in the patent racket sleep at night? It must be where lawyers end up when even child molesters, cannibals and politicians won't employ them any more.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Every windowing system in existence? How could Yahoo! possibly implement a drag-and-drop interface without the support of a window system that has already implemented it (whether they use the window system's native drag-and-drop or not)?
But it's not worth it.
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
EVE:
:-(
-click on some object on screen (typically ship in space) and hold mouse button down
-several "drop targets" appear around selected object
-by "drag and drop" one of these "drop targets" can be selected. Each "drop target" launches a specific activity, like locking weapons on, unlocking target....
"Drag and drop" in parentheses because the selected object is not visibly dragged, only the mouse cursor moves.
Overall, this is not quite the same but might be similar enough to count as prior art. That is, if it was present in EVE before March 29, 2006.
Unfortunately others have to confirm or refute this as I started EVE in December 2006, after the date of the patent application
C - the footgun of programming languages
I'm too busy to sweep my floor, perhaps PtP or the USPTO could send some people over to do it for me? Not that I'm going to pay these suckers or anything but honestly...
How much do patent examiners earn a year and how much are the USPTO going to pay us for doing their fucking jobs for them?
I would think that someone should send a copy of the Microsoft and Apple APIs and corresponding documentation for implementing "Drag and Drop" in Windows and in MacOS 9 / MacOS X. I suppose that this documentation would count as "published" because everyone who wants them can download them from the Internet. Actually, you would have to find versions as they were available at the time the patent was filed, plus any previous versions. Anything that is in either of these APIs would have to be removed from the patent as "prior art"; anything that is obvious (once you know the prior art) would have to be removed as obvious.
Patent Examiners should post ALL technology-related patents onto Slashdot and then just wait to see what WE have to say about it =P
People are asking about traditional drag-n-drop or drag-n-menu, but let's try to be specific to the claims made. After reading them I am convinced Apple's "spring loaded folders" match the description. They were released in the 1990s, I believe in OS8.
"A computer-implemented method for manipulating objects in a user interface, comprising: providing the user interface including a first interface object operable to be selected and moved within the user interface;"
Since this is the "drag", this portion of the patent is prior-arted by just about everyone. Next...
"and in response to selection and movement of the first interface object in the user interface, presenting at least one additional interface object in the user interface in proximity of the first interface object, each additional interface object representing a drop target with which the first interface object may be associated.'
This is the key. Although other UIs might meet the first portion of this part of the claim, the second is more narrow. Specifically it has to open something near the first that is a drop target. Menus are not drop targets, so they don't apply. Launchers are not related to the original drop target, so they don't apply.
But spring loaded folders absolutely do. They opened in response to a "hesitant drop" over a folder, creating a new window under the cursor showing the contents folder (as if one had double-clicked it). This window is "at least one additional interface object", it is most definitely "near the first that is a drop target", it is definitely an "object representing a drop target", and finally, it is [related to] "the first interface object may be associated".
Flush.
Maury
'on the internet' !
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
After skimming through the patent, it seems the "smart" component of this is in bringing the possible drop targets within close proximity to the object being dragged. I vaguely remember reading about a system of that nature in one of my SIGGRAPH conference proceedings a few years back. I don't have time to look it up right now though, as I have to get to work. Maybe later tonight, unless someone else can find it first.
Sounds like the interface of a LucasArts-adventure to me. If you pick up a banana the pointer changes and the environment reacts differently if you click on something.
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
From 1990 had a drag and drop interface. Windows 3.0, and OS/2 back in the early 90's had a drag and drop interface. IBM PARKS in the early 70's used a drag and drop GUI. I dont see how Yahoo can claim this as theirs.
How about those icons that appear when you start throwing a Mii around by the scruff of its neck?
If every company submitting such silly and obvious pattent applications gets their way then the system is bound to collapse. Business as the USA knows it will come to a halt, because each and every piece of equipment is being threatened by dozens of lawsuits.
Fine. Let it happen. China and India will be more than happy to ignore US patents and create new economies on that. It's already happening and stupid stuff like this will only help to make the process go faster.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
But it looks like this isn't just plain old drag and drop. Can't say if it's patent worthy, or even something with no prior art. Read the article if you didn't get the difference from the description. My summary- It's sort of like they combined a right-click with a drag, popping up drop targets when you start to drag an object (similar to opening a new menu when you right click on something). I wouldn't think it's patent worthy, but that standard seems to have fallen recently...
has had this for years. Dragging/dropping in context of what the content is your manipulating - and then initiating an action (or series of).
Hell, anytime you've burned a CD in OSX by dragging to the trash can and it changes to a burning icon, you've just prior-arted Yahoo.
The way I read this, it's describing something similar to.. well, let's take Flickr as a Yahoo example. If you had an interface which you could pick photos on, but really don't have a great deal of space for myriad menus, and click-click-click operation. Imagine you select and drag a photo image, and the user interface darkens and presents a ring of graphical menu items - perhaps a trashcan, or a couple of previews of certain filter effects which you can drag the photo object onto and apply the effect.
That's my take on it. I'd say if that's what it's getting at (although it may be worded a little too generically, for sure), then this is quite a novel use.. not totally unique in a "oh that's so obvious" kind of jealous way, but novel enough to justify a patent.
Now I think of it, I actually think.. no, I am sure.. I have seen this menu operation as described in the patent claims on Nintendo's Wii Menu or Paint app or something..??
The only reason companies use patents is to create phony investment potential.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
This also sounds a lot like Photoshop's guidelines that they've had for several years. There's got to be more to this patent than this.
This is ridiculous hypocrisy!
Yahoo uses open source http://www.news.com/2100-1023-963937.html
Yahoo publishes open source http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/
Yahoo are now well and truly on my sh*t list.
Damn! I have to go and expunge them from life :(
we are all cosmic nuclear waste
The USPTO is trying to develope a new system wherein the public can take a look at applications and submit prior art for them to use in rejecting the patents. Check it out here:
http://www1.uspto.gov/go/og/2007/week26/patsuba.htm
The only problem I can see with this is the dumping of massive amounts of references onto an already burdened patent examiner. Hopefully, the public will think before posting, and help more than hinder.
Keep in mind - to those bashing the office, we are talking about engineers like you and me, who are given a certain number of hours with which to search all the patents, applications, and documents in the US and around the world for that matter... so take it easy on them.
I've been thinking about this for a while as the basis of all things of "intellectual property" but on the basic level of how patents are a joke, for any reason other than profit why do people try to quantify intellectual property when it has no technical or actual value? Sure, it can be useful, but the price is set by individuals. Just in the same way I have ideas in my head, but how can any value be put on that, in any form?
Just curious as to what the arguments are to the side of "intangible goods being given values"
So it's a context sensitive d&d interface -- obvious and fails novelty criteria.
Good thing too, because I hold the patent on posting worthless comments.
You other posters will be hearing from my lawyers soon.
-mcgrew
(link is to latest journal. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can imagine.)
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Apple's Final Cut Studio. When you drag an item from the Browser over to the Canvas, a number of drop targets pop up, offering the editor a bunch of options for how to integrate that particular item (video clip, still picture, etc) into the timeline. Pretty straightforward stuff. Not sure if Apple has patented it, but it's definitely prior.
"Apparatus dignosco occultus, satis non supernus."
>>> How do these patent claims differ from normal drag and drop? In pretty trivial ways if at all, but it may be hard for a patent examiner to understand that trivial changes in drag and drop user interface are not in fact novel enough to warrant a patent.
Firstly I think you're confusing novelty and "inventive step". Something is either novel or not, there are no degrees of novelty. . It's very easy to create something novel, by collocation for example, but there must be a synergy between the elements as any application can only cover one "invention". The inventive step is the difference between the "state of the art" and the patent being considered, whether that step is obvious is often the crucial point.
Looking at the claims (eg http://peertopatent.org/patent/20070234226/overview; assuming they are copied correctly) then they seem to follow a pretty standard formula. Often (and in certain jurisdictions there's a benefit in this) the first claim is intended to be too broad. This means that the applicant gets an extra period of time for amending the patent before it can be granted and hence before fees have to be paid. Other reasons for broad claims are to get an overview of a field from the examiners perspective - they site a spread of patents that knock out your claim 1. The claim 1 in this case is to broad for this however.
The claims then branch off, methods, devices, systems each incorporating or excluding details of what might be the envisaged product. This way the broadest possible scope of monopoly is sort - it's an adversarial system really. So the article is bunk when it claims to be fighting overly broad patents - the applicant wouldn't want claim 1 to stand as such a patent wouldn't be enforceable as it's clearly invalid wrt the prior art.
Now back to that quote "trivial changes in drag and drop user interface are not in fact novel enough to warrant a patent". Well the issue if indeed the steps are minor is that drag and drop interfaces are used by a plurality of users in a plurality of places (!). So the field is extremely well worked. A very minor change therefore is critical, it could easily corner the market. Say the change from a static to a dynamic "wait" cursor (egg-timer) - a minor alteration but a very significant one. Now we say such a change is obvious, but we have to assess this question from the time of filing (or more properly the priority date) and from the perspective of the man skilled in the GUI art and in possession of the common knowledge of the GUI field or research. Do citations in the field mean you could produce that inventive step without being inventive. Is it plainly obvious.
In any well worked field it appears to me that it's perfectly reasonable to argue that any small feature that can't be hit for lack of novelty must be inventive as otherwise it would appear in the prior art. That argument can't easily be refuted; though I think it lacks rigour, personally.
FWIW.
[I was a UK Patent Examiner a few years ago.]
The most recent game I played, The Witcher, has this interface. Take a weapon from your inventory bag, and the slots you can drag and drop it into in your character (hands, for example, but not the feet) light up. I think that's exactly what the patent means. Yahoo doesn't specify (at least in the /. write-up) that it's web-only, so I predict this being nixed by prior art.
And my guess is, the 4 month old Witcher is hardly the first application to do this.
Except for "dragging" the initial item, this is the same actions as a pop up menu. Your Eve example is a pop up menu. And there are circular pop up menus, and menus drawn as lots of floating icons, and menus that don;t appear until you start to drag or you hesitate. Some of these are already patented, so not only is their prior art, there may be patent violations here!
This is basically the same thing as context menus. When using a context menu, you actual "drag and drop" a little invisible ball from the client area -- a context menu pops up and then you drop the invisible ball on the menu item you want to select. They've just made the ball real.
The way I would interprert the description of the patent is this: as soon as you start to drag an image, icons for GiMP and a trash can would appear next to the icon you're dragging. As soon as you start to drag a text file, icons for vi and a trash can would appear. And so on. In other words, it doesn't cover any of the things you think it does.
That's not saying there isn't prior art, but it isn't about having drop targets. It's about having source-specific drop targets appear dynamically. It is more closely related to context-sensitive pop-up menus except that it has larger targets for choosing what to do and it is done with the normal click and drag gesture instead of requiring a second mouse button or control-click or whatever.
That said, I have not read the actual patent, so I could be wrong.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
A project called Open Rico has had an open-source javascript api that does that for a long time, and it works quite well. There is an online demo at: http://demos.openrico.org/demos/drag_and_drop_custom_dropzone No login required.
use the word interface a few more times though?
My other sig is a knife wound.
I'm not sure how they can do this, since as far as I can tell they "released" these design patterns a while ago.
Patents like this are outright ridiculous and a symptom of much greater problems (with law and society).
Stop searching for prior art, doesn't matter who came up with the idea first when its so obvious and simple as this.
Just say no.
Also sounds like dragging and dropping in Windows when you have taskbar grouping enabled and multiple Explorer windows open.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Drag and drop: Hit the joint, and pass out
_Smart_ drag and drop: Hit the joint, and drop a stamp
Has no one else here even heard of LSD?
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
We had a product that did this back on the Amiga (read late 80s, early 90s). It would allow you to drag objects to a generic object on the screen, the generic object would scan the 'dragged' object and present the user with the viable options. For instance dragging a text document would present you with a reader object, printer object, a copy object, and a zip/email object, it would not bring up paint, connect, or play (media). dragging a media file would give you the obvious options, etc. It was written in a combination of C and then extended with Arexx so you could easily extend the file types and associate it with new scripts to create new actions.
The idea of having all of the drop targets appear when you start a drag operation is actually pretty cool. In standard Windows and Linux, they don't. It doesn't make any sense for that to happen because, well, everything would pop up because you can drag just about anywhere. Still, it's not really discoverable for end users and it would be kinda neat if Windows (or Linux), for that matter, lit things up a bit.
However, this patent wouldn't actually cover such an application, because, under Windows, there's no way for a drag source to actually tell all of the drag targets to light up. You would need a new interface on COM (which Windows shell is all written around), that a drop target could get a message to light up with. I highly doubt Yahoo could do -that-, and that's really only something Microsoft can do. At best, Yahoo's patent only really covers drag and drop within the same application, and, here, we have to ask ourself if it is so novel to have an application that lights up all the options that go with something when you select a certain item.
This is my sig.
Sorry, I could not find anything like this in my SIGGRAPH Conference Proceedings for the past seven years. I must have been thinking about something else. It may not have been a drag-and-drop system, either; it might have been a browsing/navigation system where related objects where arranged in close proximity to your current object, and moving to a related object would re-arrange the other objects to show the objects related to the new object.
The way I would interprert the description of the patent is this: as soon as you start to drag an image, icons for GiMP and a trash can would appear next to the icon you're dragging. As soon as you start to drag a text file, icons for vi and a trash can would appear. And so on. In other words, it doesn't cover any of the things you think it does.
But changing targets based on what you are dragging isn't terribly uncommon either. Right in front of me I can pick up a text file from the OS X Finder and drag it to the trash can to delete it. If I pick up a disk image, the trash can becomes an eject symbol (fixing the old and hideous mixed metaphor of dragging your external hard disk to the "trash"). I know I have seen similar behavior in IRIX and NeXT, but I don't have either handy.
Something else interesting is "spring-loaded" folders and variants, where dragging an object causes a folder to open, recursively if necessary, so you can copy or move a file where you want it. This definitely creates drop targets which did not previously exist and is sensitive to the type of what you are dragging. If I try to drag an application off the dock to a folder, for instance, it will not pop open.
What is important there is not that the exact same thing is being done, but that the idea that changing the interface as a result of a dragging action and in connection to what is being dragged is not new. That makes even a subtly different approach by Yahoo just an obvious application of an existing concept. If I know how to drive nails with a hammer, merely hitting something different with hammer is not innovative. It is also not necessarily a great idea. I think one of the reasons people have been restrained with those kinds of tricks is because changing the interface out from under a user confuses them. Best to use it only in limited and obvious ways.
You don't want it to be always in the vicinity of the item you are attempting to drag. That would be annoying (it would distract from what you really want to do assuming you have your dock set up according to how you normally work) and changing the interface out from under a user tends to be confusing, but this is an HCI and asthetic choice, not in any way a technical one.
Having annoying icons chase your mouse around is easy. I did that to some guy at college (many years ago) when I made the "OK" button in the Logout screen run from his mouse cursor. This was after I set up a little program called "DogCow" to be his Windows Task Manager. My Linux box was a bit harder for him to hack...
Now back to that quote "trivial changes in drag and drop user interface are not in fact novel enough to warrant a patent". Well the issue if indeed the steps are minor is that drag and drop interfaces are used by a plurality of users in a plurality of places (!). So the field is extremely well worked. A very minor change therefore is critical, it could easily corner the market. Say the change from a static to a dynamic "wait" cursor (egg-timer) - a minor alteration but a very significant one. Now we say such a change is obvious, but we have to assess this question from the time of filing (or more properly the priority date) and from the perspective of the man skilled in the GUI art and in possession of the common knowledge of the GUI field or research. Do citations in the field mean you could produce that inventive step without being inventive. Is it plainly obvious.
In any well worked field it appears to me that it's perfectly reasonable to argue that any small feature that can't be hit for lack of novelty must be inventive as otherwise it would appear in the prior art. That argument can't easily be refuted; though I think it lacks rigour, personally.
The problem is that there is a serious difference between most industry/scientific disciplines and software (and I have worked in both). People don't go through all of the citations in the industry when trying to invent "new" things in software. They look at a few things, sure, but mostly they play around and pull things out of their butts. The thing is that in software it is ridiculously easy to try "new" things and "invent" things because it is so malleable. It would be like making shapes out of polymer clay and trying to patent each thing you could make out of it: look, I invented a polymer clay dog! That's not "innovation". As for a spinning cursor, for instance, movable sprites go back to the earliest of computer games. Applying that concept to a cursor is not a technical feat, it is an aesthetic one. That is why it is so common for a number of people to "invent" the same "technology": once the tools exist, the applications are obvious.
The argument that anything which has not been done must be novel, at least for software, is easily refuted in two ways: One, in that there are so many different possible ways of doing things with software and it is so easy to do that people simply cannot apply all of the obvious concepts at any given time. That does not mean it is any way difficult to do so. The second counter point is related: due to stylistic and HCI guidelines, it may not be a good idea to do so. The options have to be limited and rate of change slowed somewhat in order to keep users sane and allow them to have some clue of how things work. That means changing interface metaphors in (mostly) controlled doses and clear ways. As style changes, different options appear, not always because they are now possible, but because they are now allowable under current fashion. If a fashion designer is not producing bloomers, it is probably because they are not in fashion at the moment, not because they are innovative and technically challenging. The same thing would go for selling hats that look like upended bowls of pasta and shout at random passers-by. There just is not a demand for them at the moment.
Disclaimer: IANAL...
But as far as I know, only the inventor has one year to file after the invention being made public. Anybody else who just reads the publication and tries to grab a patent in the innovation is not entitled to the patent.
So you might need to prove you were the original inventor. Easy enough if you wrote the first article in a science journal, but it might become messy end expensive if you did not make your invention public in such an obvious way.
C - the footgun of programming languages
The devil is in the details.
So far no Slashdot poster in this thread gave a decent prior art.. it seems Yahoo stumbled on a user interface *idea* and patented it, and let me make a further point; are not attempting to do anything BUT that. Every time IBM or Microsoft or Google or one of the other billionaire software companies patents something, the world goes apeshit because they think somehow this will be used to smash into the ground the world of free software. However it has been proven that it would be just as much a motivation to patent it to protect the world from dickheads like Eolas, Forgent, and the many rampant disputes going on in the East Texas District Courts in the past and even as we speak. Yahoo could patent PNG now and as long as they don't start expecting licensing for it, it doesn't really matter.
There is no defense on software patents that includes complaining about how you could code the same thing in five minutes with a copy of GTK+ - patents are to protect invention, and the only way to invalidate an invention is to show that it is shit or impossible to achieve economically (which does not require patent review) or to show that someone invented it before you. So, I suggest we first investigate Yahoo's intentions for this patent, then we can scramble around being paranoid..
... can be seen if you try to drag this tab to another position in the tabbar (assuming you're using firefox).
Show a man some news, distract him for an hour. Show a man some mod points, distract him for the rest of his life.
it's what happens in windows when you start to drag an icon and the whole system zones out like an autistic child for about seven seconds
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