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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."
PC. On Tuesday, the USPTO awarded Apple â" and inventor Steve Jobs â" a patent for their User Interface for Providing Consolidation and Access, aka 'The Dock', after a rather lengthy nine-year wait."
Didn't everyone already have a dock 9 years ago ?
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
I can recall using CDE on an AIX box just over ten years ago. It was a well established part of the interface at that time. Anyone actually know the inception date of CDE's dock?
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
No, he means the 'system tray', which is the closest equivalent to 'the dock' that exists on Windows. 'The dock' has been part of the Macintosh OS and user interface since its introduction in 1984. There have been plenty of imitators, such as the GNOME System Notification Area and The Windows 9x System Tray and the 'dock area' in so many other environments -- KDE, NeXTStep, OpenStep/GNUStep, XFCE, CDE, etc., but I don't think any of them predate the Mac's 'dock'.
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This is probably actually a move to advance that agenda--Apple's paranoia about its software running on generic hardware actually extends to any representation of its interface running on generic hardware. There have been about a dozen Windows dock applications under various names, many of which have gotten cease-and-desist orders. Aqua-Soft has been something of a hub for this kind of stuff in the past, and their various policies and histories are very prominent indirect evidence of exactly what the landscape looks like. (They used to host things more directly, if I recall.)
I wonder if StarDock will come under fire for ObjectDock.
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Well, the dock can auto magnify icons when you put the cursor over them, and provides some useful shortcuts like being able to specify whether an item should be loaded on startup if you right click on its icon in the Dock. It's more analagous to the quick launch plus the task bar though because it keeps track of currently open applications and hidden windows too.
No, I don't think it's worthy of a patent, it's just a menu bar and probably a lot of the ideas in it have prior art. I don't really think software should be able to be patented anyway.. copyright is enough for me to protect distribution of complete applications. If someone else can copy my design and improve on it, then good for them..
I used to think the Dock was quite tacky when I first saw it, but now that I've set it up with only the applications I use regularly, I'm used to using it as a tool and have grown to like it. I just realised right now that I've disabled the auto-magnification of icons (I forgot I even did that) - that's probably the reason I stopped thinking of it as a gimmicky/tacky..
which is totally what she said
So basically, CSS Dock is now illegal despite the fact that it is just JavaScript (written using jQuery) and CSS? Great. Now when I'm doing web development, I need to make sure I'm not stepping on the patents of people in completely different arenas.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Since 1996. Apple was using it in 1985 right? This looks like it may have some harsh repercussions.
There is a war going on for your mind.
I don't know about Apple fans, but Mac users certainly don't "extol" the Dock. Most people disable magnification, move it away from the bottom of the screen, set it to autohide, and/or replace it with something else (and then complain because you're still forced to use the dock for some things, since a full API for replacing it is not available). Only absolute newbies use the horrible default configuration.
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.
Ah, yes, there we go. The patent is for rollover magnification of the items in the dock.
This concept is also old as the world. You can find a myriad of, for example, Flash UI-s and experiments on the web as early as 1996-8 that offer all kinds of navigation via "lens zoom" when you hover.
But I guess the irony comes from the fact that kind of zoom is a usability disaster, and Apple themselves have disabled it by default on Leopard.
Oh shit! This means we can't have icons both showing a task that can be opened and one that already is in one icon!
Oh well! I'm not sure how we'll survive, but those crazy developers are pretty resourceful, I'm sure we'll find some other way to launch applications and check if they're still open later.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
In 3.1 you had open "windows" that held within them a set of links to applicaitons. You could drag this around. It would not 'dock' to any adjacent objects though.
I'm not going to read all 129 claims, but a quick glance seems to indicate they all include resizing an icon and moving the others to accomodate the resized icon.
I'm usually the one standing up to defend the patent system, but I've got to say, claim 1 is astoundingly broad. I'm stunned that the examiner couldn't find any prior art on this.
Of course, the real value of this patent is it has 129 claims, meaning it would cost a fortune to get a non-infringement opinion from an attorney. And that, of course, is the whole idea. Maybe you can invalidate some of the claims. Maybe you can be pretty sure you don't infringe some of the claims. But if they throw enough spaghetti at you, chances are they can get some of it to stick.
In case you have .sigs disabled: This post is not legal advice.
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I'm a Mac user and I do use magnification because it lets me shrink the Dock but the magnification means I can mouse-over and quickly find what I need. I also have auto-hiding on. Minimises the space it takes up on the desktop whilst maximising readability.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
I have just had a look at the patent and it seems to be *how* the "dock" is *presented*.
E.g. the patent constantly mentions things like *fading-in* the program name over a "tile" (icon?), *magnification* of a tile and it uses the term "bar" instead of "dock". The patent even specifies formulas!
Does this mean that a "dock" can be implemented by using different "effects" and formulas?
Also, the "magnification" seems to be specifically defined in the patent. I'm sure there are other ways this can be done without "violating" the patent.
Certain parts of the patent seem very narrow. It seems to cover direct clones of the Mac "dock".
If this is the case then this seems to be an expensive patent for a trivial issue.
The Dock is more than just a Windows taskbar. It's both an app launcher and a running app list. The patent in the article specifically describes other Dock-specific things like the magnification of icons when the cursor is near them as well as the Dock's physical appearance.
I believe Apple does have a patent for the Trash can, as well as several other MacOS attributes. One reason Microsoft provided Office for the Mac in the late 90s was due to a settlement deal in which all previous interface disputes between the two companies were forever resolved (in truth, Microsoft had been caught stealing QuickTime code, and Apple was threatening a lawsuit).
I do wonder how this will affect the AWN project https://launchpad.net/awn personally I stopped using AWN because they could never get full screen windowing to work to my satisfaction, but I would hate to see a productive and lively OSS project shut down because of Job's intellectual greed.
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?
You mean the Apple menu and it's associated bar? As it was pretty much taken directly from the MacOS. There were plenty of other similarities like how holding the shift key down during boot would turn off extensions/go into safe mode. IIRC, they copied Win95 from the MacOS so closely they managed to get some of the bugs in there also.
Jobs should have patented it so that MS wouldn't have copied it when they made Win95. Perhaps he's learned his lesson?
If i thought of a gui first would i deserve billions of dollars? NO fuck that. If an idea takes under 10minutes to come up with and the implementation is nothing then it SHOULD NOT be patentable. If you make every idea patentable then we would have nothing. Talk about stifling competition. One company could have the rights to mp3s another to volume control another to the audio port another to........ Aside from the RIAA i don't think anyone would be happy if it cost a million dollars for a music player.
does patenting the magnifications etc on the osx dock give them the right to file lawsuits against other docks like say, cairo-dock? wouldn't that be like ms office trying to sue open office for using spell check?
the only viable reason why they'd try to patent it is so they can sell it to other os companies.. oh wait, it's a mac... so it'll be like 'you can only have this dock if you pay us an obscene amount of money' --please.
It's too obvious,
This is really all that needs to be said. While the icon zooming "feature" is admittedly a good function, I don't really think that Apple should be able to claim inventorship of something that could occur to, oh, any UI designer.
My mother is a patent lawyer and recently she's angry at the USPTO because they (presumably understaffed bureaucratic as usual) have rejected several of her clients' applications on the basis of originality, or obviousness, or specificity. Keep in mind that these are patents for like, chemical synthesis pathways and things. Things that required R&D at some point. I guess everyone, even the patent examiners, know who Apple, Inc. are though. And that's the difference I guess.
-- arstchnca
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