Quote:
Originally Posted by murraypaul
I would imagine the difference being that you can interact with a scroll bar to change document position.
|
While I agree that what they're patenting is "well duh!", it is different from a scroll bar.
When you drag down on a traditional scroll bar the page scrolls up from bottom to top, and you drag yourself down through the document towards the end.
When you drag down on a touch screen the page scrolls from top to bottom towards the start of the document.
What they're patenting is a position marker on the right side in the place of a scroll bar that indicates where you are in a document. As you drag the touchscreen down this marker would move up; as you drag the touchscreen up, this marker would move down.
Was Apple the first company to use a marker in that way? I don't know.
However, it's such an obvious extension of allowing you to scroll on a touchscreen by dragging the body of the screen with a finger. Once you've decided you want to do that then the obvious next problem is that the scroll bar works the opposite way. So to make things simpler (and because it's no longer necessary to have to scrabble about at the side of the screen) you would naturally disable the scroll bar's functionality and leave it just as a position indicator (which you do need).
It would be fair to argue that the clause about making the bar disappear after a certain time might be an innovation, but do we really want to allow stylistic screen effects like that to be patented? Film editors the world over, take note.
Graham