Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> Apple's interface held to the fire in dubious suit
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | An Illinois-based company and its Nevada partner have filed a lawsuit
> | against Apple Inc., alleging that Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" treads on
> | an interface patent that affects the operating system's nearly
> | universal use of tabs.
> `----
>
>
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/04/21/apples_interface_held_to_the_fire_in_dubious_suit.html
> http://tinyurl.com/2gqe4e
>
Tommy rot.
The first screens ever used on any computer were in effect tabbed screens,
without the tabs. You only have the one screen to play with so to switch
pages from a menu item you paint the entire alternate display or view.
Even in the first programming on Windows I didn't often bother with multiple
dialogs or main Windows, I just put all of it into one main Window and one
modal dialog and made visible those things that I currently want, invisible
for those things currently out of view,
That gradually changed to using buttons and/or menus, normally owner drawn,
across one of the edges so the users could swich views easily.
I wasn't mega clever coming up with that, many other programmers went that
way too of their own accord. You could say we all invented it at the same
time. Why? Because particularly in the first versions of Windows it was
much qucker to redraw the current window with updated control properties
than to create a new one for each of the potential views. Also less
resource hungry on the clients of the day.
So I will not accept that this Illinois company nor Xerox have a right to
claim that as their own. It was a natural progression of the code/view idea
that was already in use to formalize these screens into a single control.
In fact many a programmer had already done that, pre-class objects, by
making universal controls where you just tell it how many pages you want
and which controls on which page.
But even so, when did this first appear as a formal tabbed control? Well the
first time I ever came across this was in UNIX, sam on a HP-UX, various
Xwindows displays because it reduces the amount passed as well as making
for a better means of switching views on a range of terminals.
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