Apple patent is for resolution independent user interface design
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Dec 21, 2006 at 6:55pm
In what appears to offer some insight into a feature of the upcoming Mac OS X 10.5 (“Leopard”), an Apple patent (20060284878) for a “resolution independent user interface design” has appeared at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. It relates to graphical user interface material map objects that are specified by a collection of attribute-value pairs, the collection of which comprises a complete description of the material map and may be used by a rendering engine to create a visual representation of the material map at any resolution.
That is, material map representations in accordance with the invention are resolution independent. Another benefit of representing material maps in accordance with the invention is that they may be encrypted to prevent unauthorized inspection or use. The invention relates generally to graphical user interface design and more particularly to a means for specifying a graphical user interface object in a procedural and largely display resolution independent manner.
Leopard will make use of resolution independence. Here’s what Apple says in an overview of Leopard on its developer web site: “the old assumption that displays are 72dpi has been rendered obsolete by advances in display technology. Macs now ship with displays that sport displays with native resolutions of 100dpi or better. Furthermore, the number of pixels per inch will continue to increase dramatically over the next few years. This will make displays crisper and smoother, but it also means that interfaces that are pixel-based will shrink to the point of being unusable. The solution is to remove the 72dpi assumption that has been the norm. In Leopard, the system, including the Carbon and Cocoa frameworks, will be able to draw user interface elements using a scale factor. This will let the user interface maintain the same physical size while gaining resolution and crispness from high dpi displays.
Here’s Apple background of the invention: “Designing an efficient, ergonomic and aesthetically pleasing user interface is an integral stage of most application development projects. The graphical user interface (“GUI”) is what the user sees and interacts with. Accordingly, the GUI must present information and choices to a user in a way that is not only pleasing and natural to the eye but conducive to efficient use of the underlying application. One major concern in the development of modern GUIs is the resolution of the various objects that comprise the GUI. Typically, a designer designs a graphical user interface object (e.g., a pushbutton, scrollbar, or slider) for a specified resolution. As the resolution of the user’s display changes, however, display of the originally designed object may become distorted. This is particularly a problem when a graphical object is designed at a first resolution (e.g., 75 or 100 pixels per inch) and the user’s display is at a second, higher resolution (e.g., 120 or 150 pixels per inch).
“In the past, two general techniques have been used to address the problem associated with displaying objects designed for a first resolution but which are displayed at a second resolution. In the first, an original (low resolution) object is up-sampled to generate a larger image (e.g., through linear or bicubic interpolation). This technique results in blurry edges such that the user interface no longer looks crisp. In the second, an original object is designed for display at a high resolution and is then down-sampled to an unknown target resolution. While useful in some circumstances, it is not possible a priori to know what width to give a line (e.g., an object’s edge) at the higher resolution such that when down-sampled it remains crisp. This is particularly true when there are multiple target resolutions. Thus, both up-sampling and down-sampling techniques tend to disturb the designer’s specified line width. One of ordinary skill in the art will recognize that line width is a critical factor in GUI design as the width of lines define the edge of graphical objects. If edges appear blurry or ill-defined, the entire GUI design may be compromised.
“Thus, it would be beneficial to provide a means to specify the design of a graphical user interface object independent of its display resolution. Such a description may advantageously be used by a rendering module to display the designed object at substantially any resolution.
According to Apple, in one embodiment, the invention provides a method to represent a graphical user interface object’s material map in a procedural and, therefore, resolution independent manner. The method includes receiving values for each of a plurality of attributes associated with a material map object, associating a value for each of the plurality of attributes, and storing the plurality of attributes and their associated values in a file. The file may be a “flat” file or a hierarchically-ordered file. The collection of attribute-value pairs comprise a complete description of the graphical user interface object’s material map and may be used by a rendering module to create a visual representation of the material map at any number of resolutions. In addition, because material maps in accordance with the invention are represented procedurally, they may be encrypted to prevent unauthorized inspection or use.
The inventor of the patent is Mark Zimmer. FIG. 1 shows, in block-diagram format, generation of recipe files in accordance with one embodiment of the invention.
IP guy Says:
It’s not the idea of a resolution-independent display that the patent claims. You’re right, that idea would probably be obvious… but presumably it’s quite hard to implement or it would have been done some time ago. The patent seems to cover the mechanism by which being resolution independent is accomplished, and by which those technical difficulties have been resolved.
Posted on December 21, 2006
Reddy Says:
Take a look at the name of the applicant: Mark Zimmer. Ring any bells? The long-ago creator of Fractal Design Painter, and who later bought a vector-based but bitmap-apparent package called Expressions. I used Expressions for a bit and it was pretty impressive in the way you could create a vector image, similar to how Illustrator would do it, but it made soft shadows and transparent shapes and painterly strokes and textures that scaled nicely no matter how large they became. Long before Illustrator had transparency or soft edges or even a brush tool.
The deal is, that package was bought back by the original developers when MetaCreations was bought by Corel. Then, a few years ago, I read that Micro$oft bought that company, supposedly to fold the Expressions engine into the Longhorn/Vista GUI.
Now, Apple has Mark Z working for them, digging into his archived codebase for new Mac OS tricks.... Personally, I think Mark Zimmer is a brilliant guy for creating Painter and I’m glad he’s on Apple’s payrole, but this seems to me to be murky intellectual property area.
Posted on December 22, 2006
Sambeau Says:
> Eric said:
> Wouldn’t something like FrontMotion be prior art?
Nah.
Posted on January 08, 2007
Stephen Rider Says:
The program was “Expression” (singular), and was put out by a company called Creature House. Microsoft did indeed buy it a couple years ago, and in fact for a short time you could download the full application for free from the MS website.
The program had some interesting (if non-standard) interface elements, and was pretty flexible and powerful.
I admit I never fully learned the app, but one interesting thing to me (don’t know if this is common to vector apps or not....) was that you could select a particular path and change what brush or tool was applied to it—that is, retroactively decide that you wanted to do that particular “brushstroke” using a completely different brush. There were also some rather unique brushes, in which a repeating pattern was extended along a path, but with “starting” and “finishing” aptterns at either end.
All the way around it was pretty powerful, and the file sizes were notably lightweight.
Posted on January 10, 2007
Peter Graffagnino will always be a lying, cheating Says:
These so called “Inventions” by Apple Computer are often initiated by a moron named “Peter Graffagnino” [sic].
They are as meaningless as they sound. This particular idea has been around since not long after Apple stole the GUI/Windows idea from Xerox (and tried to sue Microsoft for doing the same) and cannot be patented. Anyone heard of “Vector Graphics”? All we are doing is essentially applying the equivalent of vector graphics to GUI.
These morons just want to use apple’s vast financial resources, recently accumulated from iPod sales, and use it to file bogas patents in their own names. It is what I call the “Steve Complex”, where a person thinks that all existing ideas that they encounter were invented by themselves.
Posted on January 22, 2007
Peter the Beater again Says:
hahahaha more bullshit patents from Apple Con-puter, Guito Graffagnino and his little Mafia gang.
Ever notice these patents always have absolutely nothing to do with apple’s revenue stream which is based almost entirely on selling dinky $400 music players to dumb people?
Hey, I’ll bring over a truck and you can dump all your extra cash from iFraud & iPod sales in it rather than wasting it on filing more bullshit-inventions and shysters.
Don’t waste your time and money with WWDC 2007, unless you plan to get “enlightened” by the Masters of Bullshit, Film Studies majors, droupouts and more bullshitters and secret society stalkers.
Posted on June 04, 2007
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
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MacManic Says:
At some point, unless the icons are vector based, some scaling has to take place using whatever filter is deemed appropriate. I could understand this patent if it allowed a high res icon to be down sampled to minimise such artifacts but at this point the finer points are lost to me. Regardless it seems like an obvious idea to break the interface free from the resolution (DPI) of the screen, although I first thought of this using (I’m sorry, 14 years in the dark) windoze 3.0.
It baffles me that this type of thing can be patented in the first place.
m
Posted on December 21, 2006