Microsoft Applies For Page-Turn Animation Patent

eldavojohn writes "Ever seeking to out innovate their competition, Microsoft has applied for a patent on animating page flips in devices like the Nook or Kindle. The application summary reads, 'One or more pages are displayed on a touch display. A page-turning gesture directed to a displayed page is recognized. Responsive to such recognition, a virtual page turn is displayed on the touch display. The virtual page turn actively follows the page-turning gesture. The virtual page turn curls a lifted portion of the page to progressively reveal a back side of the page while progressively revealing a front side of a subsequent page. A lifted portion of the page is given an increased transparency that allows the back side of the page to be viewed through the front side of the page. A page-flipping gesture quickly flips two or more pages.' Maybe you've seen this before?"

Comments

You mean like this!!

[future assassin]

http://www.pixelwit.com/blog/page-flip/ I can flip the page back and forth on my works MultiTocuh monitor. Exactly like MS describes it. I've seen this about 5+ years ago on sites.

Re:Spot the prior art

[WindBourne]

Hypercard on Apple by Winkle. late 80's.

Re:Have all the knowledgeable people left Microsof

[nmb3000]

I'm guessing that most of the intelligent, technically knowledgeable people have left Microsoft. So now non-technical employees are pretending to run a technological company.

Filing for patents like this has absolutely nothing to do with technical people. What probably happened is something like:

1. Engineer designs cool interface with gestures and page animations
2. He shows his project manager neat interface
3. Project manager like it, sends it up the chain to see what higher ups think
4. VP over section likes the idea, sends it to legal (like everything else) to make sure it won't be a problem
5. Legal drone sees no prior patent filings for the interface idea. Sends idea to his boss.
6. Legal over-drone notes no existing patents and thus automatically files a patent for the interface idea.
7. ???
8. Profit!

The software patents filed by a company have little or no bearing on the quality of the engineers working there.

One indication that the smart people have left is when a company brings out a new version of software, and the big change is in the menus. Menu changes are something people who don't care about technology can do.

You don't say?.

(The Microsoft Vista operating system was, it is said, not a failure, but an intentional method of getting people to pay for two operating systems, by deliberately releasing an unfinished one.)

Said by somebody who almost certainly never even ran Vista. Vista's real problems were:

• Hardware companies didn't want to adopt the new driver model (which they had years to plan for). Instead they released half-assed drivers, in part to make Microsoft look bad (for creating work for them).
• The huge amount of third-party software available for Windows was filled with poorly-designed programs that required users to be administrators. Microsoft pushed UAC and limited-user rights to try and get this to start changing. There was absolutely no way to make this any easier on people than they did.
• Vista did have higher hardware requirements than XP, and people were installing it expecting it to run well on their 256MB of RAM and Pentium 3. The "designed for Vista" logo/sticker just made things worse (and honestly, I think this is the biggest place Microsoft screwed up Vista. They should have been much clearer with regards to hardware requirements).

The way software patents work right now is every company is trying to get as many as possible. It's basically the Cold War all over again, except instead of nuclear weapons it's software patents. Microsoft is doing it for the same reasons Google, Apple, Palm, etc are: Mutual Assured Destruction.

Re:Spot the prior art

[Sethumme]

Prior Art? Here's the flash file from May 11, 2005: iparigrafika.hu at archive.org