Don't Support Information Architects
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You're overthinking it.
It's the most naive implementation you can think of. It's exactly this: you select "verbs" and the verbs are highlighted. You select "nouns" and the nouns are. Same for adjectives, adverbs, prepositions (as, from, in, etc) and conjuctions (and, or, etc).
Nothing earth shattering, nothing you can't do with simply tagging words, nothing marchine-learning or AI about it.
Here's an example of Syntax Control in action: http://imgur.com/NrseuZV
Beside the naiveness of the core functionality, notice also how naive the tagging is. As noted below by bosie, "programming" is marked as a verb in the phrase "in programming terms", syntactic context be damned. Same for "run-on" where run is highlighted as a verb too.
P.S Damn, it's even worse than that. All the hard work -- which was not that hard itself -- was already made by Apple in their CoreText API. According to the Verge:
">the heavy lifting is already baked into Apple’s developer platform. Since iOS 5 and OS X 10.7, Apple has provided a class called NSLinguisticTagger that segments natural-language text and labels the text with various bits of information, including parts of speech".
P.S 2 Now, since Apple itself added the capability to tag parts of speech in the iOS API, and since this is a very obvious example of using this (Apple themselves showed something similar in WWDC 2011 IIRC), isn't iA's patent application essentially like asking to restrict the use of Apple's very specific API? It would be interesting to see iA's lawyers fight Apple's lawyers.
P.S 3 This was part of a comment in a sub-thread, but thought it would be more useful posted at the top level to give everybody an idea of the feature.
"Invisible pink bananas sleep furiously."
If you do it properly and automatically, yes.
The way Writer Pro (and the underlying Apple API) do it, not so much.
The definition of "obviousness" in a patent is whether there exist two works of prior art that can be combined to create the invention. In this case, any prior art that stylizes text based on syntax could be combined with any prior art that determines the syntax of natural language to invalidate a later patent that stylizes natural language text based on syntax.
Whether the output feels different and non-obvious to a user is unimportant. Application to a different domain ("programming" versus "writing") is irrelevant. Patent law is very mechanical, and the rule is that it must not be any combination of prior art unless the means of combination is patentable on its own.
iA appears to be attempting to enforce their idea through pre-emptive public shaming of future competitors, which could be effective in a community of creative writers, but doesn't legally hold water.
If it behaves the way it's described, it sounds remarkably useful. Indeed it's obvious in retrospect, but that's true of many physical inventions worthy of patents.
Is there prior art? The example of Phraseology's "Inspect" doesn't seem similar at all. It's not a visualization tool; it's an analysis tool.
It sounds to me like the author doesn't like software patents regardless, and was offended by a misreading of the word "cheap": I don't think the original blog post implied that copies would be cheap-as-in-crummy but cheap-as-in-easy.
http://www.wordbanter.com/showthread.php?t=110660
This is enough to make the concept of highlighting a syntactical unit a prior art (assuming the date on the said invention is not older), and the invention may now at best claim a method of solving this. The latter would barely be an invention on grounds of obviousness.
Note: IANAL, and haven't read the claims of the said invention.
So then the question should be: Is selecting syntactic units of text unique?
I don't know of any specific applications that do this, but I imagine that there are programs or libraries used in the field of machine learning that do exactly this or make doing it trivial and obvious.
[1] It's basically applying a dimming effect to an inverse selection. Off the top of my head, this is a common technique for highlighting passages from documents in video documentaries.
http://www.mrspeaker.net/2012/03/24/syntax-highlighting-for-... http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/syntaxhighlighting/ https://github.com/adib/ColorizeWords
These are all linked to from other comments here. This is not new or unique. Sure, the design is different, and they are probably the first "big" name writing app to include it, but being more popular doesn't mean you invented anything.
It sounds like the syntax highlighting that every half-decent IDE and programmer's editor has had since forever. Which is odd, since there's no way that should take 4 years to implement.
Note: IANAL, and haven't read the claims of the said invention.
First of, you need a huge dictionary of all words and rules for their conjugations. Then you need a huge rule set for bound morphemes. Which adjectives can you add 'ly' to in order to make them adverbs? There are literally hundreds if not thousands of bound morphemes and they can sometimes only be applied to certain words within certain word-classes.
Then you need a huge rule set for when each word acts as a specific word class (is bank a noun or a verb? Is anime a noun or an adjective? Is like a verb or preposition? You know, "Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana", actually like can behave like several wordclasses)
These are not solved problems yet, but we are getting very good at them now. We weren't 4 years ago.
Failing that, you could also take and annotate word classes in thousands of pages of text, and then use a machine algorithm to apply similar annotations in the the text entered into the program. Unless you are expecting people to write articles for the Wall Street Journal, this might not be such a good route either.
And you obviously know next to nothing about how this is implemented in Writer Pro.
We're not talking about AI-level intelligent understanding of english here (which not even MS Word has in its syntax check). We're talking about a ho-hum, "this word is a noun, this is verb" etc kind of tagging, which just needs some metadata (you can even scrap off of an online dictionary).
"Drive to the store." vs. "I'm going for a drive."
"Don't punch Judy!" vs. "I gave Judy some punch."
Absolutely. And Writer Pro breaks down completely at such distinctions. Some words are always marked as verbs and others as nouns, context be damned.
Phraseology 2 has a similar feature but with highlights instead of dims. Also more than one word class can be selected at once. https://twitter.com/phraseologyapp/status/413825814145556480...
It's one for the lawyers I suppose. As far as I see it the only reason that I would buy writer pro is for the syntax control (and I want it). If an app came out with the feature for less money I would probably buy the cheaper version.
I think it's fair enough that they have attempted to file a patent here. Their business model relies on having no one compete with them on this feature.
That said, I think they could have handled the announcements with a little more grace. Maybe it's just the adrenaline of launching a 4 year long project?
I prefer Writer Pro's execution. I can see it as something that will actually speed my workflow up. Phraseology doesn't look like it will make things any faster for me.
It's not just about the nature of the feature, it's about how it affects my end-product as well.
Edit: double checked Phraseology and mixed it up with a Spanish-English app made by same dev team. Edited accordingly.
Then you missed the fact (which he also mentions in TFA), the feature is a classic example of an obvious bullshit patent, like Amazon's "one click".
If you aren't against software patents, you don't realize that any patent can more or less creep into any semi-related field ultimately producing something like a totalitarian regime where anyone producing any application will need multiple licenses.
And so, if you have already sworn allegiance to our future insect overlords, then indeed, no patent will receive scorn though they all will still deserve it.
If it's obvious then it's not worthy of a patent, period.
Most things are obvious in retrospect - you can look at a traffic light and say "yeah, I'd obviously think of that - you need a bright and clear signal positioned where all can see it, and you need to have a warning light in addition to stop/go since cars have a braking distance" but it took years for someone to come up with it.
(note: "obvious", "straightforward" and "easy to understand" have various degrees of subjectivity attached so it's never easy to argument in these terms)
In this case though, I'm not sure "we took a first-party API and applied it like other products, but we used dimming instead of highlighting" qualifies.
Because it was demoed at WWDC by Apple before the patent application.
http://www.macg.co/logiciels/2013/12/writer-pro-le-grand-enf...
Now does the scorn make sense?
Writer Pro is just BS. A half-assed product to make money off of people who already bought Writer.
The "workflow" involves just showing you the same text with a different font, depending on which step you selected (Notes, Write, Edit, Read). When you step into "write" mode, you're editing what you wrote in "notes" mode. If you step back to "notes" mode, you just see what you were editing in "write" mode -- that is, you cannot keep notes that are not part of the final output, something every writer does. Only the font chances, you're working with one document all the time.
As for the show syntax "innovation", it's just highlighting different parts of speech (verbs, nouns, etc). Nothing extremely worth your while.
Those 2 half-baked features (with several MIA from iA Writer) are not worthy of the "Pro" moniker.
Opinionated software I'm fine with (I like iA Writer). This is more: "software that has the opinion that it should scam you out of your money" (especially with the only way to check it out being buying it from the App Store).
//dim non-anchor tags
$('*').not('a').addClass('dim');
//hightlight anchor tags
$('a').addClass('highlight');
If the browser provided the syntax metadata, then I don't see how this example with anchor tags is logically different. This appears to be obvious and trivial, where a patent requires non-obviousness and non-trivialness given the state of the art.
The linked demo at https://github.com/macguru/SyntaxCheck also seems to show the trivialness of this.
It does seem a bit much to be making so much out of a feature that's 90% Apple framework.
Here's how to implement the feature iA's saying is such an innovation in < 20 lines.
Let some patent holders hit with other text editing patterns that they violated in iA Writer and Writer Pro.
The "font adjusting size to the size of the window" would be a good start. Or how about "word count based on text selection". Or "auto formatting markup syntax". Or "modal writing workflow".
... yet
And before you say, "but they were stealing and so weren't going to be part of the audience." I'm well aware of that, but the reality is that you're drawing out the ire of folks from amongst your hoped for audience. Just not a good plan.
Of course, it would seem iA is in the later category. Hopefully they've done some market analysis that they still have a critical audience mass who are either ignorant/apathetic to such tactics and buy it anyway.
http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/syntaxhighlighting/
Likewise this project on GitHub from a year ago shows NSLinguisticTagger being used in a similar way:
2. The use of Apple's existing APIs to do the "heavy lifting" has no bearing on the "quality" of the patent or the novelty (if any) of the work. All inventions are built on prior work.
3. As a corollary, the triviality of implementation is orthogonal to obviousness of an idea. As an extreme example, RSA is pretty easy to implement, but it was a breakthrough nonetheless. (Of course, patents very rarely cover anything as groundbreaking -- the bar is and always has been much lower.)
4. If you are concerned that this leads to an unnecessarily broad patent, submit it to askpatents.com, along with any relevant prior art. This will increase the chances an examiner will find it, especially since it's highly unlikely that they're going to look at WWDC videos.
Unfortunately, as it's not even a non-provisional application at this point, you would need to wait for one to be filed and published. This could be as much as two and a half years from now, and I doubt anyone will even remember by then.
Imaging writing a 100+ page document and doing Menu > Syntax Control > Adjectives and seeing all the places where you use unnecessary adjectives. Or really long, run-on sentences. Or extra semicolons. These may be correct grammatically but they might lower readability so you want to minimize their use.
I could be wrong but I think this is what they meant by Syntax Control - ability to detect syntax use in English and not highlight/fading text color. If it is the former, I can absolutely see why it took four years to create.
It's exactly this: you select "verbs" and the verbs are highlighted. You select "nouns" and the nouns are. Same for adjectives, adverbs, prepositions (as, from, in) and conjuctions (and, or).
Nothing earth shattering, nothing you can't do with simply tagging words, nothing marchine-learning or AI about it.
Here's an example:
P.S Damn, it's even worse than that. All the hard work -- which was not that hard itself -- was already made by Apple in their CoreText API. According to the Verge:
"the heavy lifting is already baked into Apple’s developer platform. Since iOS 5 and OS X 10.7, Apple has provided a class called NSLinguisticTagger that segments natural-language text and labels the text with various bits of information, including parts of speech".
Programming can be a verb and a noun, and it just happens they have it tagged as a verb -- context and syntax be damned.
(Or actually, it's Apple's API that does the tagging. They just take advantage of it, and do the oh-so-difficult work of highligting the tagged words)
Unlike, say, Word's "syntax correct" feature, "Syntax Control" has very little to do with recognising syntax.
His example ("prior art") wasn't remotely relevant.
So many upset about something you have no information on. But go ahead, grab your pitchforks and go hurt another small developer.
Hindsight is always 20/20, especially when it involves obvious things that somehow nobody managed to combine in a certain very useful way before. You can slap a piece of fried squid on a bowl of risotto, but that doesn't make sushi an obvious derived work.
Patents and copyright provide small businesses or inventors the means to monetize their innovation for a time. I don't see what's wrong with that. It could stand being reformed, like almost everything in American civil life...institutions are broken all over...but holding this small group of ira glass look-a-likes responsible for the larger system being broken is kind of lame.
They made something wonderful, they should be able to be rewarded under the terms of the law. Don't like the law? Take that up in the political process.
At this point usually everyone says that the political process is irreparably broken and the Republic is lost. If you think that's the case...I don't know...just kill yourself. There's nothing you can do and everything, everywhere, is bad. Woe is me. Oh. Oh, woe is me.
What can be done, however, if you disapprove of their actions is to do exactly what the OP is doing. Calling them out, shaming them to a group that might feel similarly. Likewise, if one of my friends is being a jerk, I can choose not to be friends with him and also tell my other friends what he did that irritated me. Hitting on my girlfriend is not illegal, but it's not acceptable in my social circle either.
Not everything needs to be illegal, sometimes it can just be immoral to a certain audience.
A small business attempting to make use of the patent system can expect to spend many tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of waiting 5-7 years for the issuance of a document that entitles them to wait 2-5 years for the privilege of a hearing in court which only has a chance of being remunerative if the counterparty is a gigantic tech company that can afford to bury you in legal costs.
Aside from all this, flip a coin: heads you're in the "right" and have a "case", tails your patent claims are insufficient to keep anyone from realizing value from the idea underlying your patent: you lose, and we all breathe a sigh of relief.
Patents make sense for some industries, where inventions are clear (or at least justiciable) and product lifecycles are measured in half-decades. But they are decidedly unuseful for software entrepreneurs.
Patents are a pox on the software industry.
(I have a few, from earlier in my career; I've never been the one paying for them).
No they don't. Quite the opposite: they prevent small businesses from innovating, as they're hampered by the legal minefields of patent and copyright infringement. They only benefit large corporations that already have a legal team and their own patent portfolio to bargain with.
Two lies that can be ignored; a rich man telling you what's best for the poor and a large corporation telling you what's best for small business :-)
Don't support information architects... hire multi-skilled developers who can do the information architecture themselves.