Re: window rotation
Re: window rotation
- Subject: Re: window rotation
- From: Jim Witte <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 29 May 2004 03:37:58 -0500
An idea very similar to this was proposed around 1981 by Vaughan
Pratt at Stanford, and then at Sun. His idea envisaged a
three-dimensional 'universe' as your desktop. Instead of
Hey! That's MY idea! ;-) Except I envision it for a PDA type
device. Think about the visual-spatial interfaces used on the Taelon
ships in "Earth: Final Conflict"..
Now, if this idea was around in *1981*, why hasn't someone
implemented it yet? For God's sakes, the Apple ATG-HIG paper on Piling
was written in *1992*. It's now 12 years later, and do we have a
piling interface as described in the paper? NO!! And neither does
Windows! Or anything else that I'm aware of (certainly nothing in
mainstream usage).
hiding windows or moving windows around to get them out of the
way, you would push the windows 'away' from you and they would
become smaller. You would grab the shrunk windows and 'pull'
them back towards you to enlarge them again . . .
Yep, all there in my idea. I'd also add a full-body harness and
full-motion-sensors/tactile-response-actuators that would allow you to
"fly" through the interface.
He also envisaged tat you would have a loupe with which you could
magnify
the shrunken windows if you need to see what they were . . .
I didn't think of this though. This Pratt guy didn't happen to
patent it at the time, or create a demo that would show prior art?
(Which brings to mind, what would happen if the entire cocoa-dev list
came up with about 50-100 (more?) examples of apps that use
transparency in the way the Apple patented before they got the patent,
thus proving prior art? (Of course, that patent was basically a
defensive move against MS - if Apple doesn't patent it, you know MS
will)
One example of a rather silly patent by MS is that they apparently
have a patent on doing handwriting-recognition by combining
stroke-timing information and character-image information (or some such
"obvious to anyone in the field" combination) So Apple got a
"counter-patent" (I suppose you'd call it) on methods of combining
stoke-point information and character-image information (or some such
other combination - I'd have to look it up) Absolute madness!
Jim
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