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Comment by twoodfin | Hacker News Reader

Unless you're against all software patents on principle, I don't see an argument here for why patenting this feature deserves scorn.

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.

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My understanding of the feature is that you can focus on a specific syntactical category and dim everything else out while you edit. This will let you focus solely on adverb use (for example) and make changes accordingly.

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?

Why not buy phraseology 2 instead, if the features are so similar?

That's what I am doing for sure now.

Phraseology highlights selected words and is cumulative. Writer Pro dims the 'unselected' words and (I'm assuming) doesn't let you stack word classes.

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.

I started to write this a few years ago: http://www.mrspeaker.net/2012/03/24/syntax-highlighting-for-... - "syntax highlighting for writers", I called it. I was using an MIT library to get the semantic meaning for each word. Didn't get much interest from writers I asked, so dropped it... Though that blog post did get a bit of traction. I wonder if Information Architects ever read it ;)

Can you check your web logs to see if you've ever served anything to their domain?

Unless you're against all software patents on principle, I don't see an argument here for why patenting this feature deserves scorn.

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.

"Unless you're against all software patents on principle, I don't see an argument here for why patenting this feature deserves scorn."

Because it was demoed at WWDC by Apple before the patent application.

http://www.macg.co/logiciels/2013/12/writer-pro-le-grand-enf...

If it behaves the way it's described, it sounds remarkably useful.

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.

Except this isn't a programming editor, and I've never seen one of those that uses dimming aggressively on all but a single syntactic unit. Maybe one exists. Screenshots welcome. And this is assuming I understand the feature correctly.

Unless the said invention carefully distinguishes a programming editor and a human language editor, the invention may still overlap on grounds of novelty. If the said invention does carefully distinguishes the two, the invention would still be questionable on grounds of obviousness unless it explains the key difficulties involved in migrating from programming languages to human languages and the invention claims a solution to that problem. I think the latter is unlikely.

Note: IANAL, and haven't read the claims of the said invention.

You obvious know next to nothing about English syntax. Have you never wondered why you can learn python in a day or two, but not English or Chinese?

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.

>You obvious know next to nothing about English syntax. Have you never wondered why you can learn python in a day or two, but not English or Chinese?

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).

There is some context-awareness required, though. Verbs can almost always function as nouns, too. To determine which requires some reasoning about the sentence a word appears in.

  "Drive to the store." vs. "I'm going for a drive."
  "Don't punch Judy!" vs. "I gave Judy some punch."

You're right, though. It's not AI-level intelligence required for this.

>There is some context-awareness required, though. Verbs can almost always function as nouns, too.

Absolutely. And Writer Pro breaks down completely at such distinctions. Some words are always marked as verbs and others as nouns, context be damned.

They're just using NSLinguisticTagger. Correctly lexing English is harder than lexing a programming language, but that's hardly relevant when there's a pre-existing library to do it for you.

You can't ignore the practicalities of what iA are dealing with, but it does suck to try to control what other people do by artificial means. If writing the "Syntax Control" feature once meant it was done forever, usable anywhere, untied to their product, I might sympathize more with the idea that nobody else should build & sell it because it wouldn't preclude using it. They'd be selling a software product in that case: the "syntax controller". But here they're basically requesting payment for the privilege of re-implementing their idea. Well, sorry, screw you. Information Architects doesn't really provide any service when they collect that patent money.

That sounds exactly like disagreeing with the patent system in principle.

Just in practice, I think. I like the principle; I just think it's working incorrectly at the moment.

Well, I'm against all software patents (at least all that I can think of), so I suppose that describes me. If their editor, with its syntax control, is so sweet, they should sell a whole bunch of software and be happy.

Would you mind explaining how the feature described is novel and hasn't been done before? Because I wasn't able to discern anything I haven't seen before in one form or another.

You can point to a text authoring tool with a mode that will dim all but a selected syntactic unit of text for focused editing? I am not versed in the hundreds of text editors out there, but if one were commonly known surely a link to a screenshot would have made the candler argument much more convincing?

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.

Not exactly what you are requesting, but related:

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.

That's not anywhere close to prior art. Syntax control highlights words based on their syntactical unit, not just doing a *ly grep.

But going from a *ly grep to a syntactic unit is merely a matter of using a context-free grammar instead of regular expressions. The latter extension is obvious.

I would distinguish the dimming aspect from the selecting syntactic units of text aspect. The former clearly isn't new[1], and adding an obvious technique to the equation doesn't make the entire method non-obvious.

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.

Prior art:

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.

>Unless you're against all software patents on principle, I don't see an argument here for why patenting this feature deserves scorn.

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".

Imagine a patent on something that's basically UNIX shell pipes. Filed after the UNIX shell had been invented. And it turns out that the program written by the patent filer just calls out to /bin/sh to do its pipe stuff.

Now does the scorn make sense?

That analogy doesn't make sense, as I understand the feature. They're not patenting "basically" NSLinguisticTagger. They're patenting the use of linguistic analysis to provide visual focus in a text editor. Again, yes, this is obvious in retrospect, but AFAIK, no one else was using linguistic analysis in this way before.

Except Apple demos of their API in which they did exactly this thing.

> Indeed it's obvious in retrospect, but that's true of many physical inventions worthy of patents.

If it's obvious then it's not worthy of a patent, period.

Cotton gins are obvious in retrospect - you basically strain the cotton through a mesh that's smaller than the cotton seeds and have an automatic brush that cleans the mesh to prevent jams. Put the straining process on a wheel instead of a straight belt and mess with some gears to make everything work off of turning one crank, and you're basically done. In retrospect it's straightforward, but we went centuries or millennia harvesting cotton without figuring that out.

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.

I agree that just because it's obvious doesn't mean it's not valuable, but my position is that it does not deserve the various government-granted legal protections of a patent. If it is obvious then it is something that you run into, not something that you create. By all means exploit your first-mover advantage as much as you can (be it a genre, a market, or a technique), but don't ask the government to grant you a time-limited monopoly. Just because it didn't exist for centuries doesn't mean it took centuries to create.

(note: "obvious", "straightforward" and "easy to understand" have various degrees of subjectivity attached so it's never easy to argument in these terms)

"Obvious in retrospect" =/= "obvious".

If I can program the feature from scratch in less than a day with only a simple explanation of the feature, I don't really think it should be patentable...

Time-to-reimplement is not and should not be a measure of patent validity, because a patent isn't about difficulty of writing the implementation, it's about the cleverness of the solution. What needs to be measured is "given the same problem and existing tools but no knowledge of this solution, how long does it take to come up with this idea". A clever solution that takes 20 minutes to implement but that nobody would think of in a dozen years should be patentable while a solution that takes months to implement but seconds to imagine shouldn't be patentable (but is copyrightable).

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.

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