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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.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
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.
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?"
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 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?