Steve Jobs Patents "The Dock"

theodp writes "If you're a PC, you may be unfamiliar with The Dock, the bar of icons that sits at the bottom or side of a Mac and provides easy access to Apple applications. But don't count on it becoming a standard on the PC. On Tuesday, the USPTO awarded Apple — and inventor Steve Jobs — a patent for their User Interface for Providing Consolidation and Access, aka 'The Dock,' after a rather lengthy nine-year wait."

Comments

CDE?

[goaliemn]

you have to be kidding.. CDE has had this for years, if not decades..

Re:CDE?

[furball]

You mean NextStep has had this for years, if not decades.

Re:CDE?

[AvitarX]

It means the patent ran out.

Re:CDE?

[kidde_valind]

Mod parent up! As much as software patents apall me, I can't se why this would be any less valid than any other.

Re:CDE?

[electrictroy]

Don't PCs already have a dock? "The bar of icons that sits at the bottom or side of a Mac and provides easy access to Apple applications."

The sounds like a description of the start menu, and its corresponding bar.
Hmmm.
I wonder why Jobs did not patent the Trashcan/recycle bin utility?

Re:CDE?

[speedtux]

Thus, Nextstep does seem to preceed CDE by quite a few years and with NeXT Apple purchased these IP rights.

"These" IP rights? What IP rights would that be? Even if NeXT had been the first company to do this in the 80's, they would have had to apply for patents then, not more than a decade later.

Second, there were equivalent constructions for X and Smalltalk. Oh, and in case you were wondering, both of those predated NeXT and NeXT liberally copied from both of them.

Re:CDE?

[mollymoo]

Don't PCs already have a dock? "The bar of icons that sits at the bottom or side of a Mac and provides easy access to Apple applications."

The sounds like a description of the start menu, and its corresponding bar.

Yes it does. There are bazillions of patents with similar names because they cover similar subjects. With only a brief description of a patent it's impossible to know whether it is indeed novel. Fortunately, patents are more than a brief description. The Dock patent does into great detail covering the magnification feature. It's easy to trash a patent by looking at the title and saying "it's been done before". But when you actually read it, it becomes a bit less obvious the novel things the patent claims have actually been done before. Does Claim 120 ring any bells?:

120. The method of claim 117 wherein each icon is displayed within a corresponding tile area having two opposite edges that are respectively located at distances d.sub.1 and d.sub.2 from said cursor, and said other icons are magnified by the factor 1+(d.sub.2'-d.sub.1')/(d.sub.2-d.sub.1), where: d.sub.1=S.times.sine(.pi./2.times.d.sub.1/W) and d.sub.2'=S.times.sine(.pi./2.times.d.sub.2/W), where W is equal to said defined distance, and (S=((H-h)/2)/sine(.pi..times.(h/2)/(W.times.2)), where H is a magnified size for one dimension of said one icon, and h is a default display size for said one dimension.

That's some details of how that nice "hump" is generated when you use the magnification feature. Had you seen specifically that before 1999?

Re:CDE?

[villindesign]

It does not matter what limitations a dependent claim (like claim 120) contains. The independent claims are the claims that have the "allowable" subject matter. Claim 120 depends from claim 114 which contains the limitations: "A method for displaying representations of objects in a graphical user interface for a computer system, comprising the steps of: displaying a plurality of icons in a row, where each icon represents an object in the computer system; displaying a movable cursor via which the user can select individual ones of said icons; magnifying the size of at least one of said icons as said cursor is moved into the vicinity of said one icon; and repositioning others of the icons along said row to accommodate the magnified size of said one icon." All the limitations in claim 114 were considered allowable over the prior art; claim 120 has nothing to do with the allowability of the application.

Re:CDE?

[lisaparratt]

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that OS X isn't just the rebranded latest version of NextStep.

Oh.. you mean the Quick Start Bar?

[AnswerIs42]

You know, that area on the windows tool bar that gives you quick access to applications? Been there since Windows95 I think..

Re:Oh.. you mean the Quick Start Bar?

[clone53421]

That's an awfully trivial difference.

Re:Oh.. you mean the Quick Start Bar?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

That's an awfully trivial difference.

Not in patent-land.

Re:Oh.. you mean the Quick Start Bar?

[CountBrass]

Not in usability land either. It's those kind of small difference that are found throughout OSX make the difference between an average UI and a great one.

Yes I know OSX isn't perfect (I can rant for days about the awfulness of Safari) but to paraphrase Winston Churchill: OSX is the worst operating system, except for all of the others.

Re:Oh.. you mean the Quick Start Bar?

[thepotoo]

What? That's ridiculous logic. I've used the dock on OS X (a little bit, anyway) and it's wonderful, except that you can't tell if something is running or not.

If I glance at the KDE bar under the browser window right now, I can see a couple of PDFs, my Thunderbird Inbox, and Firefox open to Slashdot. In a separate area, I can see commonly used stuff that could be open but isn't right now (Konsole, Ktorrent, KVpnc, and Amarok).

Tell me, why is it better to have these bunched together into a single menu where you can't differentiate what's open and what isn't?

P.S. I bet I hit -1, Flamebait in less than 2 minutes for this, but I'm asking an honest question and would appreciate an well-thought-out answer from someone.

Re:Oh.. you mean the Quick Start Bar?

[niklask]

What? That's ridiculous logic. I've used the dock on OS X (a little bit, anyway) and it's wonderful, except that you can't tell if something is running or not.

And here I thought the little shiny "blob" under the icon indicated a running app in MacOS X.

Re:Oh.. you mean the Quick Start Bar?

[caluml]

I've started using AWN at work. And although I'm not a Mac-ite - you know what? It makes sense.
Why (in Windows, KDE, etc) is there a place to start a program (Menu, QuickLaunch), and a different place to maximise it from, see where it's running? Answer me that?
When I click the Firefox icon on the AWN dock, I'm saying "I want Firefox". I don't care if it's not running, and has to start a new one, or if there's one already running it can bring up. I just want Firefox to appear in front of me. Same for Thunderbird, PSI, Last.FM, Amarok, whatever.

So yes, actually, docks make a lot of sense for apps that you only ever have 1 instance of. Like most of them. Terminals, etc - sure - that's different. And FWIW, I just have a Terminal quicklaunch set up to spawn as many as I need.

Re:Oh.. you mean the Quick Start Bar?

[RulerOf]

why is it better to have these bunched together into a single menu where you can't differentiate what's open and what isn't?

OS X Dock Layout:

Left side: Applications. Running applications are identified by a big silver dot under the icon.

Right side: Open, minimized application windows. These windows are identified by a preview of their content, and a scaled down application icon is superimposed over the window preview in its bottom corner. Folders, files, and the trash can also are or can be affixed to the right side of the dock. These items contain no application icons superimposed over their pictures. Should folders be affixed to the dock, applications will minimize to the dock in an animated fashion appearing between those folders and the trash can. Separators can be added by the user for convenience.
____

It scales a little better than Windows/Linux bars IMHO, clutters a little more easily (with multiple minimized windows from the same app, it gets hard to tell what's what) than Windows, but starts with much less clutter than KDE.

FWIW though, I prefer the Windows taskbar to both, because even when my open applications/windows start to reach the classification of beowulf-grade clusterfuck, it maintains a little more composure than KDE or OS X while still keeping me well informed of what's going on.

That is, rather, on very high resolutions with taskbar grouping turned off :P

Re:Oh.. you mean the Quick Start Bar?

[carou]

Tell me, why is it better to have these bunched together into a single menu where you can't differentiate what's open and what isn't?

In many ways, it doesn't matter whether an application is currently running or not.

You want to use it? You click on it.

The advantage is that it's in the same place every time, whether running or not. Sure, if it needs to launch the application then you might have a delay for a few seconds first, but otherwise the resulting behaviour should be pretty similar in both cases. (i.e. if a text editing application is running but has no windows open, then clicking on it in the dock will open a new window - just as opening the application would. The HIG documents mandate this.)

If background applications are intelligent about not using CPU time, and the OS is clever about paging out unused code - then there's little reason you should ever need to quit an application. It therefore makes little sense of Apple to optimize their UI for two different cases, when a simplified version will handle both adequately.

I havent seen Apple's version

[night_flyer]

but what's the difference between this and the quick launch bar in Windows?

Re:I havent seen Apple's version

[linuxpng]

Which is odd, considering magnification is not enabled by default on new installs.

Re:The worst part is

[camperdave]

The fact that such vile abuse of punctuation is standard as the USPTO is irrefutable proof that the entire institution is corrupt.

Never attribute to malice that which can just as easily be attributed to stupidity. The punctuation abuse is irrefutable proof that the USPTO is not entirely sane.

Re:The Death of Y'z Dock

[Joe U]

I don't know why that went out of style

It completely went out of style when:

Hi, I'm a Mac.
And I'm a PC.

Re:The Death of Y'z Dock

[Just Some Guy]

I don't think anyone in the community ever thought they could get away with mimicking the dock...

Ummm, why? Everyone mimics everything else, so why wouldn't you think you could "get away" with mimicking this?

Re:NeXT in 1988

[Anonymous Coward]

Feh! There was a dock in Arthur (precursor to RISC OS) in 1986. It just shows; that even now, the Mac is still 20 years out of date...

What about RISC OS's 'icon bar'?

[Isvara]

I guess they're patenting the dynamically-sized bar. Acorn's RISC OS came out in 1989, and it had an icon bar for applications and devices. Arthur before it (1987) had one too. The only difference is that they were always full-screen-width.

Re:What about RISC OS's 'icon bar'?

[gavinkendall]

Thank you! I was just going to mention RISC OS. Nice to know someone else out there knew about it.

Re:What about RISC OS's 'icon bar'?

[sgt scrub]

Oh man! You beat everyone to it. Well, here is a link anyway.

http://www.iconbar.com/desktop/screenshots.html

Avant

[jadedoto]

I'm not uninstalling AWN or giving Apple any money to use it.

Re:Avant

[jrothwell97]

Apple have proven quite lenient with FLOSS clones of their patented concepts - so it looks like Avant, Looking Glass etc will be safe.

Re:SIZE

[Sulihin]

My dock wastes exactly as much screen real estate as my quick launch bar did in windows... 0. Auto-hide is a wonderful thing.

Apple is vicious

[ProzacPatient]

I fear what this could mean for other operating systems because Apple has a reputation for being rather zealous about their software patents; as Microsoft might remember.
I don't know if anybody else remembers Apple's patent frenzy on people who used a 'Recycle Bin', let alone an entire GUI.

On a side note; in KDE you can simulate a dock by sizing your taskbar to 50% and putting nothing but icons in it and then enabling the KDE menu on the top, it'll look just like a Mac desktop.

magnification

[sgt scrub]

The patent is specific enough to not be abusive. IMHO including specifics like User Bar and Magnification separate the patent enough to avoid interfering with other products.

To permit a greater number of items to reside in the userbar, a magnification function can be provided which magnifies items within the userbar when they are proximate the cursor associated with the graphical user interface.

I still don't see why a decorative aspect of an interface is patentable but...

Re:More like windows 3.1

[Sandbags]

Docking a bar on the sceeen is not what this patent is for. It;s for an organized location to contol multiple aspects of the machine across multiple software programs, for providing user feedback, and for the use of dynamic features.

Want to challenge that? how about we simply look at who owns the patent on the Icon itself...

Re:More like windows 3.1

[hairyfeet]

I personally think that this is just a good example of how patents and copyrights passed the offramp to sanity a few miles back. You have MSFT patenting the double click(or as my home users call it "Clicky Clicky") you have Amazon patenting the single click,and now Apple has jumped on the crazy train. It has already gotten to be a minefield when it comes to patents and copyrights and I don't think anyone in their right mind would say that either promotes the arts and encourages innovation. What we need is serious reform or the USA is going to be left out of the 21st century as all the innovation goes to countries that don't have the minefields of patents and copyrights to navigate.

And for those on Windows who wouldn't mind a quick,easy,low resource dock of their own I'd suggest they snatch a copy of Rocketdock before Apple ends up killing it over this patent. They have plenty of addons and icons and skins to customize it your way and it runs really nice.

Re:What does this mean

[Poltras]

Calm yourself. The shuttle can still dock as long as it doesn't use the magnification feature of the dock. sheesh people.

Re:It's just a ripoff of OS/2 Warp...

[clone53421]

Yeah, they met one-too-many fanbois... -.-

Re:More like windows 3.1

[hairyfeet]

FYI I did RTFA,and where exactly did I say ANYTHING about putting icons on the desktop? Hell you made me reread my own post three times because I thought sure I must have missed something or been unclear,but nope,nowhere is there anything about icons on the desktop.

The simple facts are these: patents and copyrights have gotten insane and any large corporation needs to build up a "defensive" portfolio just to protect themselves from troll corporations and submarine patents. It is also stifling innovation because the little inventors out there simply don't have the $$$ to navigate the minefield. As for other countries see India and China which both are a lot more lax when it comes to copyrights and patents of those outside their borders. We have destroyed our manufacturing base thanks to outsourcing and it know looks like we are going to bet the entire country on "IP" which can easily be copied and cloned for next to nothing. This is a BAD idea. And I doubt seriously that you can find anyone that isn't a patent or copyright lawyer that thinks the insanity of patents along with the eternal copyrights are anything but a BAD idea.

But go ahead,insult me all you want. That doesn't make the onslaught of patents we have been seeing coming out of USPTO anything but nuts. Oh and let us not forget the recent waves of "ON THE INTERNET!" patents. Like doing commerce ON THE INTERNET! or watching a video ON THE INTERNET! It seems like you can patent any previous idea by simply adding ON THE INTERNET to it. But I'm sure that most of us agree that patents and copyrights are both LONG overdue for serious reforms. Sadly until we can find a way to reform our congress critters so they'll stop going "How much money? Really?" and selling us out like a bunch of cheap whores I seriously doubt we'll be seeing any real reforms from either side of the isle.