New Patent from Apple Introduces Platform Independent Word Processor

patentlyapple.com

12 points·ssclafani··11 comments

Wait, am I missing something here? How is this anything but a patent on the not-exactly-cutting-edge concept of a web application?

Even if you think that performing some rendering computations server-side is somehow a patentable innovation, there's plenty of prior art out there already doing so. Score another one for the broken patent system.

"Apple states that although the present invention is primarily described in the context of a browser-based word processing system, the present invention could in fact be more generally applied to any system that renders textual information in a platform-independent manner and is not meant to be limited to word-processing systems or browser-based systems."

So... they patented PDF? Don't Adobe have patents that clash with this?

Also, TeX's DVI format, Metafont, and their common structure of platform-independent font metrics and layout computations, and the notion of testing for consistency across platforms.

Apple sneakily patents Google Docs on the sly - I bet Google didn't see that coming.

Yeah, but the prior art would make the lawsuit a bitch.

Unfortunately, prior art doesn't mean as much as we think it should sometimes.

I dont know if that means anything anymore: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

scribd surely has prior art on this, in relation to their platform independent rendering of an intermediate representation of textural and graphical documents.

This sounds like iWork.com that was introduced a few years back. Create your documents in Pages on desktop and you can share it online with an almost similar rendering.

... is this serious? No. Really. What?

They should definitely sue Google now.

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