RandomFailure

Title: Graphical user interface for computers having variable size icons

Patent application publication number: 20070079255 (12 pages)

Publication date: April 5, 2007

Filing date: December 8, 2006 (priority to January 5, 2000)

AIPW Summary: This is a divisional of another application (this link won’t show you the actual application; just that it exists), which should be issuing in a few weeks. (Note: This link might not work. I noticed an issue with it; something funky with accessing file histories at the USPTO.) The earlier application was filed prior to the time the USPTO started publishing applications, which is why it was not published (and why you can’t look at a copy electronically just yet). From a brief look at the file history of that case (which I’ll review in more detail once the patent issues), it went through the ringer to get issued.

This application is about resizing icons in a GUI based on a user’s preference or predetermined characteristics. Resizing an icon based on its importance makes the icon’s importance clearer than using labels. For example, Figure 3 shows folders that increase in size based on the number of items in the folder. Figure 4 shows an application icon larger than the other icons; this change is based on user preferences. Figure 5 shows an example of a data structure that can be used to track information about the icons shown on the screen, including the sizes of the icons. By using different values in the data structure, the different icon sizes can be represented, such as predetermined sizes, user-designated relative sizes, or user-designated absolute sizes (see paragraphs 0036-0038).

When displaying the icons, they are sorted based on the characteristic to be applied. The maximum and minimum characteristic values are located and those values are used to base the sizes of the largest and smallest icons. Any other icons with similar characteristics are scaled to fit between the maximum and minimum sizes based on the characteristic value. This permits dynamic resizing of icons based on the underlying characteristics. (See paragraphs 0041-0043.) Based on the icon sizes, the gap between the icons is calculated (paragraphs 0045-0046).

The claims cover assigning relative sizes to the icons based on an underlying object characteristic, such as number of items assigned to an object (e.g., folders) or memory used by the object.