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

Software patents suck ass

[turing_m]

A page-flipping gesture quickly flips two or more pages.

I'd flip Microsoft a gesture but they've probably patented that too.

Re:Maybe you should ask the right question:

[tofubeer]

All the physical books on my bookshelf. Making a computer mimic the real world is 100% obvious.

Re:Spot the prior art

[WindBourne]

Hypercard on Apple by Winkle. late 80's.

Re:Prior art?

[Nadaka]

I've seen that on a tactile touch display that even varies in thickness as a number of pages are turned and it is powered by the kinetic energy of the gesture.

Its called a god damn book.

OK, so what's the penalty for IP fraud?

[kale77in]

If IP theft is possible, then surely IP fraud must be? If I claimed to own any random houses I happened to see, and put them down as security on financial documents, this would be viewed dimly by the courts. This is that.

If patents secure intellectual 'property' then where's the aggressive penalty enforcement for intentional (or unintentional but negligent) misrepresentation of property rights? Given the money at issue, and their strain of their enforcement on the court system, these penalties ought to be severe, esp. for corporations. If anybody knows a government looking to increase revenue, then here's some.

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.