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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."
So is the patent more like the windows "start" menu, which collects icons for frequently used programs, the "tray" which collects icons for frequently used programs which are loaded into memory, or the "quicklaunch" bar (which I know nothing about since I use the start menu for such things)?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I've had a 'dock' in XP for years now... On my desktop my Start menu is at the top of the screen and I have a toolbar at the bottom (and I can just as easily move it to the side), it's set to auto-hide. I have shortcuts to my most frequently used applications there. If I want to run a program I just move my mouse to the bottom of the screen, the toolbar pops up just like Apple's dock and I click an icon. Hey presto, my app opens. AFAIK that capability has been available since Windows 98.
I'm guessing you're too young to remember when a computer with a GUI wasn't a particularly obvious idea, never mind how to pull it off properly. When the mouse was kind of revolutionary.
Xerox's decision not to patent those ideas may have led to quicker development, or it may not have. It's hard to say. By the time GUIs were getting to be mainstream any patent would have been getting long in the tooth anyway.
Most people who were around at the time think PARC SHOULD have gotten more credit than they did though.