[OSGeo-Discuss] About "Interactive Map" patent application by Apple Inc.

[Puneet Kishor]

It was tl;dr, but the quick scan I did seems to have two things that I haven't seen yet --

1. multi-touch: touch two points on a map and the best route is displayed immediately;

2. dim everything else thereby highlighting only what one wants to look at.

There may be other new things in that long application.

Interestingly #2 above reminds me of line graphs that Manish Agarwala from Berkeley had invented a long time ago that MapBlast incorporated in its routing algorithms. Then MapBlast was bought out by MS maps outfit (I think it was called MSN) and the feature existed for a while; and then that morphed into Bing and it even existed in Bing Labs for a while and then seems to have vanished. I used to love that line drawing feature. You could ask for a route as a line drawing, and it would only highlight the most important thing, the route, along with associated land marks, and dim everything else.


On Dec 20, 2013, at 11:03 PM, Simon (SPDBA) Greener <simon at spatialdbadvisor.com> wrote:

> While I am not sure of the features in osgeo software to which Venkatesh refers, most of what appears in the patent application are natural improvements to existing map functionality that is common to any mapping software. I can't see Google letting this through without a fight. I agree with Venkatesh that an objection be lodged.
> Simon Greener
> 
> On 21 Dec 2013 17:05, Venkatesh Raghavan <raghavan at media.osaka-cu.ac.jp> wrote:
>> 
>> Dear All, 
>> 
>> I think the OSGeo should express strong objection to the "Interactive Map" 
>> patent filed by Apple on 17 Dec 2012 [1]. The contents of the patent [1] 
>> describe features that OSGeo software already provides for over a decade. 
>> 
>> Best 
>> 
>> Venka 
>> 
>> [1] 
>> http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.html&r=2&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PG01&S1=%28715%2F771.CCLS.+AND+20131219.PD.%29&OS=ccl/715/771+and+pd/12/19/2013&RS=%28CCL/715/771+AND+PD/20131219%29 ..