==== From: Russell Nelson [SMTP:nelson@crynwr.com] Sent: Friday, January 02, 1998 8:06 AM To: Hopkins, Don Subject: piewm Hi. I'm dragging piewm, kicking and screaming, into the late 90's. Could you make a link to it from your pie menus page? The URL is http://www.crynwr.com/piewm. I added your shaped pie menu code to it. Looks way cool. Did you see that some luser patented a variant of pie menus where the labels are lined up in two columns? He claims they're easier to read, although he presents no evidence for it on his web page. It's patent #5,596,699 - spider menus. And yes, it's full of references to pie menus, and yes, he got the patent anyway. -- -russ http://www.crynwr.com/~nelson | Freedom is the Crynwr Software supports freed software | PGPok | primary cause of peace. 521 Pleasant Valley Rd. | +1 315 268 1925 voice | Obedient, Christian, statist: Potsdam, NY 13676-3213 | +1 315 268 9201 FAX | you only get to pick two. ==== From: Hopkins, Don [mailto:Hopkins, Don] Sent: Monday, January 05, 1998 6:07 PM To: Russell Nelson Cc: Hopkins, Don Subject: RE: piewm I assume you mean this guy, Stanley Driskell: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~driskell/ It's a nice way to lay out the labels, which wouldn't be hard to generalize and improve upon. How about I add a new layout style that looks like spider menus, but nicer and more flexable. The best way to deal with a patent of a variant is to make an unpatented variant of the variant, that's even better. I wonder if this guy has actually implemented them or just wrote up and patented the idea? What other URLs do you have? I found his home page with the spider menu pictures, his head, and his resume, but have not looked up the patent yet. I like the idea of mental and physical effort metrics, but they're hardly his "invention" or a new idea. Just common sense that every user interface programmer should be aware of, not patentable. And as for his "Method to Generate Usable Human-Computer Interfaces", well what can I say? You just can't patent a lot of hard work and sweat, or get around the fact that there's no substitute. I saw his proposal for a user interface course project that mentioned spider menus: http://sandcastle.cosc.brocku.ca/Offerings/3P99/new/ifde3.html Backing up from the URL reveals an interesting independent study course at Brock university, and it seems like this is just a proposal for a project for a student to work on, that hasn't been done yet. It's really very poorly written, trying to use fancy academic language to make a mountain out of a mole hill. I hope the students don't mistake the proposal as an example of a writing style to emulate! Alias marketing bozos managed to fool Kinetics programmers into thinking that Alias patented "marking menus", so Kinetics isn't using them, and they even lied to my face about it, saying Bill Buxton invented and patented them. Appearently there is no patent, but they just say so to generate Fear Uncertainty and Doubt with their competitors. Cheaper than paying the lawyers to process the paperwork, I suppose. -Don ====