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Comment by robert-wallis | Hacker News Reader

Apple has a patent on the Dock. https://www.google.com/patents/US7434177

And clickable pull-down menus in the menu bar. https://www.google.com/patents/USD629412

The legal system strikes again.

The Dock patent is specifically on the dynamic resizing and repositioning of icons when moused over. A plain collection of icons won't infringe this patent.

The second patent is a design patent, which means you'd have to have a menu exactly like that to infringe.

Funnily enough, one of the icons in the figures in the first patent is for Internet Explorer. I think I also spied one for Word.

It's from 1999; at that time, Apple shipped IE.

Yep, just seems funny today.

I actually never understood the usability behind growing/shrinking the Dock icons. Good icons have enough of a profile to be distinguishable when they're small.

So that affects how the project is hosted, big whoop. Another "amazing" property of platforms without a gatekeeper!

(PS- pretending the lawlers' games are important just serves to propagate their influence)

Oh shit. Ubuntu better change their menus...

...that they've been using from 2005. Oh, they also really have to change their dock!...

...that they've been using from 2011.

The menu patent is a design patent, so you'd have to have a translucent menubar and menus to infringe. The Dock patent is, I believe, strictly for magnification and behavior, so icons arranged in a row do not infringe.

I am not a patent lawyer, but the second patent appears to be for an interface where windows can situationally be rendered translucent, not for the general idea of pull-down menus.

Wow, I was surprised to see that Apple has patents on those, especially the one on pull-down menus. Wasn't pull-down menus there in some old Xerox computer?

Pull-downs are entirely Apple's:

http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_P...

and

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Busy_Being_Born.t...

That's interesting, IIRC pull-downs were used in GEM and Amiga Workbench too...

They both did, but came after Apples implement implementation in Lisa.

The Apple Lisa was released in January 1983, GEM was first demoed in November 1984 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_Environment_Manager, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMDEX), and Amiga Workbench was released in july 1985 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workbench_(AmigaOS), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_1000)

I don't think anybody ever claimed parallel inventions here.

The menu patent is for translucent menus "large, lower rectangle that conveys the impression of a translucent/transparent surface"

Ubuntu has a dock-like-launcher and pull-downs in the menu bar. Interesting.

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