Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 8th Sep 2008 23:23 UTC
The US patent might be a bit daft, especially when it comes to software, but it does offer some interesting insights into what crazy things the big companies might be working on for future products. One such patent emerged today: Microsoft applied in 2005 (and was granted in 2008) a patent which describes how different windows may be coloured differently, or that they may have different transparency settings. This sounds a bit weird, but it may actually prove to be quite useful.
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Member since:
2006-12-05
I've used Xfce for a couple years. While it's a distant third compared to KDE and Gnome judging by how well it's supported by major distros, it's had a compositing window manager for a while now. This compositing manager allows you to change the transparency of active windows, inactive windows, title bars, menus, etc. I always found this distracting, so I didn't use it much, but it's there.
I now use a Gnome-based distro with full support for Compiz-Fusion. While I'm sure it supports the above scenario (if I really wanted it), it also has a tendency to (by default) make any programs that are extremely busy or locked up fade to a dark gray. Let me just say, I'll take the good old hourglass or similar mouse pointer and keep the window as is. Windows fading in and out just begs for attention and is the perfect way to distract... even worse than the above scenario.
On the other hand... why the hell can something as obvious as changing the shades of windows be declared a patent to begin with? This one appears to me to have prior art against it and seems to be destined to fail the "obvious" test miserably. Just another patent for the Ballmer crew to add on to their list... 235+1. Now if this is not a potential hindrance to the further advancement of GUI design, then I don't know what is.
Edited 2008-09-09 01:15 UTC