theregister.co.uk — Apple has patented the OS X Dock, nearly a decade after the operating system made its public debut with a new slant on the taskbar.The late arrival isn't due to a lack of initiative, however. Apple applied for the patent December 20, 1999, and it was approved by the US Patent Office only yesterday.
Oct 8, 2008 View in Crawl 4
m1ss1ontomarsOct 9, 2008
No, that's not stupid. Apple essentially gets protection during that patent pending period, so there's no point to give them (or anyone) an additional 20 years on top of that.
mattbdOct 9, 2008
@enterneo WTF are you talking about? AWN pwns OSX's dock. The plugins for it go far beyond what the OS X dock is capable of. For instance, there are ones to display the album art for what you're playing in various players. It's also far more flexible.
elranzerOct 9, 2008
They even patent things they didn't invent. For example... the DOCK.Yes, it was invented by Sun first, for their Project Looking-Glass. Not docks in general, but the 3D style that OSX uses, yes.<a class="user" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Looking_Glass">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Looking_Glass</a>
enriOct 9, 2008
Prior art! Apple should be fined for wasting the patent office's time. That might deter them and others from abusing patents.
azzxOct 10, 2008
You should proof read "I don't give a toss" by Carefacter 0 :)
kibbledbitsOct 10, 2008
This is a not so terrible patent. It should protect Microsoft from cloning it, but I doubt Apple would go after any open source projects that mimicked it.
kreatre2007Oct 12, 2008
I'm surprised that they didn't get this done sooner. Apple inherited the dock when it bought NeXT. I'm surprised that NeXT didn't have the patent already.
johnnysoftwareDec 8, 2009
Wrong, the Windows taskbar is not a launcher. The only part of the entire Windows task bar that can launch applications is the task *tray*. The task tray is a one inch wide strip at the right edge of the task bar.Task icons of running applications in the task tray do not exist until the application launches, which is a huge difference between the task bar and the dock.For another thing, the task tray did not used to have the ability to reorder the running tasks on it by drag and drop.So they are two pretty different technologies, used in different ways, that work in different ways.
johnnysoftwareDec 8, 2009
You can't patent a name, as everyone knows. He is just a troll.