Umakant Mishra

Inventions on Tree Navigators Used in Graphical User Interface

A tree view or tree navigator is used to display hierarchical data organized in the form of a tree. In a tree structure there are parent and child nodes. The child nodes may further have descendants to n levels. There are many methods to make the navigation easy. Some of these are expanding and collapsing branches, splitting the tree, displaying a parent node in a separate tree, zooming branches, scrolling in various directions etc. It is still a difficult exercise to handle large trees efficiently. The effort still continues to manage large number of nodes with faster speed, greater control, user friendliness and aesthetics. This article illustrates five inventions on tree navigators selected from US patent database. Each of them tries to solve various problems relating to the tree navigator in different ways. Each invention is also analyzed from a TRIZ perspective.

Inventions on GUI for Eye Cursor Controls Systems

Operating a GUI through eyeball is a complex mechanism and not used as often as mouse or trackball. But there are situations where eye-mouse devices can play a tremendous role especially where the hands of the user are not available or busy to perform other activities. The difficulties of implementing an eye-cursor control system are many. The article illustrates some inventions on eye-cursor control system, which attempt to eliminate the difficulties of the prior art mechanisms.

Inventions on Using Sound and Speech in GUI

Voice recognition facilitates a human interaction with the machine. VR may be used to replace the manual task of pushing buttons on a wireless telephone keypad. This is particularly useful when the hands of the user are busy with other activities like driving a car. However, the VRS system has several limitations. The VRS requires lot of training and customization in order to be effectively used by individual users as each individual falls into different voice patterns. Besides the voice interface is complex and is not as reliable as the keyboard or mouse. This article illustrates some interesting inventions on using sound and voice in Graphical User Interfaces.

Inventions on Drag and Drop in GUI

Drag and drop operation is one of the key capabilities of any Graphical User Interface. The user can do quite complex operations simply by visually dragging and dropping objects from one location to another. It saves user from remembering and typing a lot of commands. The result of a drag and drop operation may vary depending the type of source object and type of destination object. For example dragging a file and dropping on a folder may copy or move the file to the destination folder, dropping that file to a remote ftp location may upload that file using internet, dropping that file on a printer icon may print that file, dropping that file on the trash can may delete that file, and dropping that file on an executable may play or open or compute or manipulate that file. Although a drag and drop operation prima facie seems to be a simple operation, it can become extremely complicated depending on the type of source objects dragged and the type of destination objects selected for dropping. There are many limitations of a conventional drag and drop operation. This article points out the difficulties of a drag and drop operation and illustrates the solutions disclosed by various inventions to overcome those difficulties.

Inventions on Displaying and Resizing Windows

Windows are used quite frequently in a GUI environment. The greatest advantage of using windows is that each window creates a virtual screen space. Hence, although the physical screen space is limited to a few inches, use of windows can create unlimited screen space to display innumerable items. The use of windows facilitates the user to open and interact with multiple programs or documents simultaneously in different windows. Sometimes a single program may also open multiple windows to display various items. The user can resize the windows and move their location time to time as desired. However, there are several concerns of a window relating to its size, appearance, positioning, color, visibility, resizability etc. For example, the window should have a minimum and a maximum size, dragging and resizing the window should be easy, one window should not be obscured by another window, windows should adjust their size and location in order to match with the changes in the resolution and display environment etc. This article illustrates six patents from US Patent database solving problems relating to displaying and resizing of windows. The inventions include automatic resizing and relocating of windows, alternative modes of displaying windows to accommodate within the limited display area, combining both spatial and temporal methods to resize the window, locking and minimizing windows and making the windows invisible on specific situations.

10 Inventions on Improving Toolbars: A TRIZ Based Analysis

Toolbar is one among the popular elements of a graphical user interface. The other popular elements of graphical user interface are buttons, menu, scrollbar, dialog box etc., all of which provide easy access to various functions of a GUI system. A toolbar often does a similar function as the menu but with certain differences. A menu has the advantage of holding a large number of items without needing any additional screen space. In contrast, each button on the toolbar permanently occupies some space on the screen. Its not possible to implement large number of functions through a toolbar, as they will occupy more and more valuable screen space. However, the toolbar has an advantage as it gives a single click access to any function unlike a menu system where the user has to navigate through sub-menus to ultimate discover the item he is looking for. This article explores the desired features of a toolbar and the ideal features of an advanced toolbar. The contradictions are described from a TRIZ perspective and solutions are derived using Inventive principles. Besides the article illustrates 10 inventions on improving Toolbars selected from US patent database.

Inventions on Selecting GUI Elements

Selecting an object or element is a fundamental operation in any graphic user interface. It is necessary to select an object before doing any operation (such as, dragging, copying, opening, deleting etc.) on that object. The GUI may provide features to select any single object or even multiple objects. The feature of selecting multiple objects can provides tremendous power to the GUI as the user can do complex operations on multiple objects in one go. However, the process of selection is not as simple as it appears to the user of a GUI. The internal logic of a selection mechanism can be very complex in some situations. The article describes some fundamental difficulties associated with the selection mechanism, and illustrates the solutions provided by different inventions selected from US patent database.

Inventions on Presenting Textual Items in Graphical User Interface

Although a GUI largely replaces textual descriptions by graphical icons, the textual items are not completely removed. The textual items are inevitably used in window titles, message boxes, help items, menu items and popup items. Textual items are necessary for communicating messages that are beyond the limitation of graphical messages. However, it is necessary to harness the textual items on the graphical interface in such a way that they complement each other to produce the best effect. One has to keep various considerations in mind while applying textual items in Graphical User Interface. This article illustrates a few inventions on putting textual items in a Graphical user Interface.

Inventions on GUI for Touch Sensitive Screens

A touch sensitive screen displays the information on the screen and also receives the input by sensing a users touch on the same screen. This mechanism facilitates system interaction directly through the screen without needing a mouse or keyboard. This method has the advantage to make the system compact by removing keyboard, mouse and similar interactive device. However there are certain difficulties to implement a touch screen interface. The display screens of portable devices are becoming smaller thereby leaving lesser space for display of data, menu or touch screen interaction. Besides some screens need to display so much of information that they hardly can afford any space to display touch screen buttons. This article illustrates various inventions which have successfully eliminated these difficulties by applying appropriate Inventive principles.

10 Inventions on Keyboard Key Layout

The standard QWERTY keyboard was developed in the late 1800s for the typewriters. As people were acquainted with that the same layout was retained for the computer keyboards. Many people feel that the QWERTY layout is not very efficient layout and there have been many inventions on different layouts of character keys. In order to improve the key arrangement, two major issues should be addressed. (i) The improved key arrangement should offer significantly improved productivity. (ii) The training time for learning the improved key arrangement should be minimized. This article analyzes 10 inventions from US patent database each of which have proposed a new layout giving us some specific advantage. The inventions try to achieve one or more of the following advantages, viz., to reduce finger movements during typing, to achieve speed in data entry, to reduce errors in typing, making keyboard easy to learn, making easy for children to find keys, reduce stress in hands and finger and suitability for special purpose computers.