“An Apple invention published on Thursday illustrates a simple yet effective way to remind a user of who is on the other end of a text message or group chat, a problem that is the bane of people who juggle multiple conversations at once,” Mikey Campbell reports for AppleInsider.
“As published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Apple’s patent application for ‘Generation of a user interface based on contacts’ enables users of apps like iMessage to be more aware of who they are talking to at any given time, thereby preventing potentially embarrassing misdirected messages,” Campbell reports. “The invention basically inserts a contact’s picture, or photo corresponding to a contact, as the background image for a messaging session. For group chats, text is overlaid atop one or more images relating to the contacts involved in the conversation.”
Campbell reports, “When a contact does not have an assigned photo, a generic male or female avatar may be used as the system intelligently selects gender based on stored contact information.”
Read more, and see Apple’s patent application illustrations, in the full article here.
I hope (and assume) this patent is merely to keep someone else from patenting it. I’m an Apple fan, but if they sue somebody for showing the contact’s picture it won’t help their image.
Wouldn’t it also work if you could set the color of background of the text session to a color defined in your contacts for that person. Just seeing the different color background would let you know you were in a different conversation. For group conversations maybe have some combination of the colors (rainbow ??) as the background.
The “inventions” that Apple are patenting lately are kind of stretching the boundaries, aren’t they? Does this really need to be patented? Can this really be said to be an invention?
If they don’t, someone else will and would then sell the patent to a “non-practicing entity” who would then sue Apple.
Is this just Apple’s way of announcing that they are working on a patch for the iMessage bug that causes it to lose and misdirect messages?
Is this really necessary Babe?