Apple claims to own widgets

Why not just add an update bar, or something equivalent, to the "widget" when it "replaces itself" so that it's not a transparent process?

I hate to say this, but RedHat Linux 5.2 Deluxe had widgets.

They were interactive things on the background. It came with Xfreex86 (xwindows)

One has a oversized clock with seonc hand, the other one was two eyes that looked in the direction of the mouse. they eyes followed the mouse pretty good. There was others too.

Other then that, i still had my x windows, menu bar, icons on desktop, virtual desktop with 4 areas/terminals etc.

So I am pretty sure they were widgets.

the patent fiasco that you have in the US is crazy. as a company you need a good writer to sit all day long at his desk and write cute lite stories about how soming might work in the future and voila: you'll be a major player in the patent industry.

it's just wrong wrong wrong

That's an automatic update patent.

@BB: why do you 'hate to say it'?

@bitter: agreed. But, The australians let a man patent the wheel in 2001. :P

http://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/auspac/07/02/australia.wheel/

Hey! This is a negative patent guessing form title. They patent not the behaviour but lack of it.

The next what they patent will be browser that does not need separate search field (ops, it is chrome).

I hardly think that this patent has merit.

Doesn't this entire behaviour the same as computer viruses/trojans? Auto-update without telling user while continuing to mess up your machine.

And isn't this just a way of handling updates? Not even anything specific, just a certain methodology that have been applied countless times already.

This patent bullshit is becoming too generic.

I blame Apple but I blame the system the most since Apple's probably just protecting it's ass, thinking along the line of "if it's not us then some other asshole's gonna do it so if the system's corrupt then let us be the ones that benefits"

The first thing that came to my mind when I read that patent description was WGA. I can also think off things like Xbox Live, Steam and the ATMs of my bank.

Online services usually update themselves transparently, so Apple owns them all too.

For now on the industry must avoid inventing overpriced things made of white shiny plastic with curved corners, because they will all belong to Jobs. Yeah, even these...

If you want to look at a consumer or mainsteam OS with auto updating 'widgets', go look at Win95 with IE4 addon or Win98.
(And there were a few others before Windows but not as widespread.)

So in terms of the patent, they fail with the update, and with 'widget' they also fail.

Win95/Win98 had a thing called Active Desktop, which allowed any HTML content to be displayed as an auto updating 'widget' on the desktop.

People use to have calendars, weather maps, online media players, calculators and virtually everything you can find in the 'provided' Apple widgets.

The Active Desktop could also show web page slices (something else Apple thinks it invented).

And I'm not even giving MS credit for creating widgets, as they were used in XWindows interfaces going back to the 80s.

However, the MS Active Desktop was the first desktop to web/HTML interface 'widget' concepts that were live 'updated' content.

I hope Apple pisses on MS shoes over this one, they might find out how many patents MS can destroy in one broad sweep that could literally cripple Apple.

Side Note:
Active Desktop was done away with in Windows Vista where the HTML rendering engine was removed from Explorer and the Active Desktop features were replaced with Windows Sidebar Gadgets.

So good luck Apple, and if you are smart you will wake up and realize you didn't invent hydrogen too, even if you got it through the insane US patent system.

whoa, whoa folks. I'm pretty sure transparent to the user means that it is visible, not hidden and the user is aware of what is being done. Too many of you are talking as if transparent means invisible, in the background without the user being aware of it.

The confusion is understandable. The meaning of transparent might be invisible. In fact the meaning of transparent, in this instance, is open for all to see, unhidden, not obfuscated.

Think of seeing what goes on in a house with transparent walls. Everything that happens is transparent to those outside looking in.

Windows (the real ones not the MS ones)are transparent but we can still see them and we know they are blocking wind and rain and allowing light through. They are not hiding functions or obscuring themselves so we don't know they are there.

Windows (the MS ones, not the real ones) do not feature transparency, they can feature invisible updates and descriptions about what an update does that confuse and mislead the user.

example:
"This WGA update is in response to customer demand and meant to help you determine if you are running genuine windows software."

Widgets to me looks like interactive icons on the desktop, who can secure a patten on that?

My word on the patten is, it is long dead since China flooded the markets with cheap copies [of anything] that in most cases circumvented the pattens.

The good that can come out of this [Tip] is, use the occasion of a patten litigation threat to modify the code by improving code execution, don't bloat the code.

If the code cannot be shortened and work beyond the protected patten, then in preliminary court argue that it monopolizes competition to the point of forcing users wasting power and resources to run bloated code, therefore a threat to human survival.

Millions of computers produce more heat released in the atmosphere in running bloated code.