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Apple Patents The Invisible Button

Posted by tracyanne on · 5 comments
Tech Crunch; By Erick Schonfeld 		Mail this story
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One of Apple’s famous minimalist design principles is to get rid of buttons whenever possible. With touchscreen devices like the iPhone and iPad, almost all of the buttons appear when needed on the screen. But what about Macbooks with aluminum casings? A new patent application titled “Disappearing Button or Slider” shows that Apple is at least thinking about how to bring elements of touch computing to all devices by replacing buttons and other controls with capacitive controls which appear only when needed.

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Comments (5)

azerthoth ·
oh you mean like "Confirm or Deny", "Reboot Later", etc ... little things like that? Sorry I can think of a plethora of similar functions in computers. Whats the term I'm looking for in regards to patents and obviousness?
tracyanne Story submitter ·
They'll still get a patent on it.
hkwint ·
Quoting:Whats the term I'm looking for in regards to patents and obviousness?


Something with 'inventive step' I believe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obviousn...
gus3 ·
Microsoft already had the "disappearing [thing]" in Win95, with the Taskbar that hid until the user bumped the mouse pointer against the taskbar's hidden location.

This smacks of the earlier patents, that were nothing but prior art, "but on the Internet, using XML!". In this case, it's "but we're making scrollbars disappear!"

If M$ and APPL start squabbling over this, I'll bring the popcorn.
tuxchick ·
I'm so fed up with Apple and MS and all the other corporate [expletive deleteds] I want to bring my little .22 repeating plinker rifle. Make all the bozos dance.

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