“The US Patent and Trademark Office officially published a series of twenty-nine newly granted patents for Apple Inc. today,” Jack Purcher reports for Patently Apple. “In this particular report we focus entirely on Apple’s first granted patent for Radial Menus.”
“The first two patent filings were discovered by Patently Apple, not in the US, but rather in filings found in Europe and Korea,” Purcher reports. “Even the granted patent published today in the US was a surprise, as it too came out of nowhere.”
Purcher reports, “In this granted patent, Apple notes that radial menus will be both for the desktop and portable devices. Radial menus will work with a mouse and/or touch commands on multi-touch displays using a finger, stylus and/or iPen. The timing of this granted patent comes on the heels of Google’s radial patent filing coming to light in this current quarter. Obviously there’s a race to get radial menus on portables and beyond – and Apple’s in-depth trio of patents now give them a definite edge.”
Read more in the full article here.
There’s prior art on this stuff. You could use radial menus in X11 back in the 90’s. It never really caught on though.
Autodesk has several apps, both for MacOS and iOS, that feature radial menus.
Blah Blah prior art. Go fart off. They said that about the iPad vs Microsofts tablet. Did the iPad go on to crush the MS tablet. Yup and so this whining about prior art is going nowhere, again.
Of course there is prior art. Nearly every granted patent has prior art, which the USPTO considers. Still, the patent was granted, indicating that it is in some way different than the prior art.
How about that stylus?
Looks kinda like the menus Autodesk has been using for a long time in Sketchbook Pro, etc. I hate ’em – at least Autodesk’s implementation of them.
Is this where the Mac OS and iOS merge?
TheSims had/has radial menus.
This cant possibly hold up. I used (commercial) software with radial menus in the 90’s. The Qt framework had them as part of their toolkit around year 2000.
They said that about the tablet, that it would never hold up. I guess it did and so will this as well.
It is all about how it is implemented, If you Read the Patent’s that had been granted you would see that this is completely different in implementation and design then Autodesk.
So as far as it not holding up, I wouldn’t bet on it, Apple has a strong Patent here and it will be hard pressed to have it invalidated due to prior art.
Again…. They are not the same in design and implementation. And if your not convinced just pull the Patented works and compare them.
There was a tool called Denim which used “pie menus” http://dub.washington.edu:2007/denim/
I went to a restaurant this morning that had a “breakfast menu.”
Prior art must be acknowledged when filing a patent. The patent office takes it into consideration when issuing the patent. Of course prior art may be discovered at any time and used at trial. I am wondering, however, how the change in the recent patent law affects all this? I believe it is no longer first use, but first to file (for a patent), that matters. If that is the case, then prior art will not matter unless there is a prior patent.
Prior art just means that prior to the current patent, there was something sorta like what is being done now. But:
Your car and mine look alike. OK
But yours is a diesel and mine is a hybrid… Different cars.
And to all the “its all been invented before” people out there. 😛
I don’t know why Ballmer doesn’t patent his monkey boy dance. He definitely invented it.
for a tv remote control people… think different…
but you can already enjoy Radial Menus in these iPhone apps:
360 Browser + Portal
but these are flat or pseudo menus.
for real 3D radial movable menu! use this free iPad app!
QuoteGuru
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/quote-guru/id454246541?mt=8