Andrew Warren wrote: > Russell McMahon wrote: > > the patent talks about launching an application with different sub > > attributes depending on how long the button click is held. This is > > not the same as presenting a menu. It may be that Micro$oft'$ > > patent is essentially novel within a very limited range of > > functionality. If so, they deserve protection > > Exactly the point I was about to make. > > The software-patent debates -- and the numerous examples of "bad" > software patents -- notwithstanding, the specific claims in this > particular patent seem valid to me. Using button-click timing to > select between launching an application with no document selected > or with the last-accessed document active (for instance) is, as > far as I'm aware, innovative. Only in the very specific case of "launching an application". Within an application, this is very old news. I used to use a document preparation system called Interleaf on Apollo workstations in the mid-1980s. Its GUI had a rather innovative system of context-sensitive pop-up menus activated by the right mouse button. These menus sometimes had relatively complex hierarchies of submenus under them that you could navigate through to get to the specific action you were after. After that, if you just clicked briefly in the same context on the right button, you'd get that same action again (with no pop-up menus), or if you held the right button down for a second, the hierarchy would reappear as you had last left it, allowing you to navigate from there to a different action. I actually liked this system quite a bit, and have been disappointed that it never caught on anywhere else. I have a feeling it would be tough for Microsoft to argue that the shell from which you "launch an application" is not itself an application, and therefore this patent would be invalidated by the above prior art. -- Dave Tweed -- http://www.piclist.com hint: To leave the PICList mailto:piclist-unsubscribe-request@mitvma.mit.edu