Apple’s Dashboard adds ‘Web clips’ feature.
Back in March 1998 Mitch Brisebois and I filed a patent on what we figured would be a very useful feature for web browsers.
We called it enhanced bookmarks and it allowed users to pull up a specific portion of a web page with a single click. This would be useful for pages which are frequently accessed to get information such as a stock quote, the weather, a sports score, and so on. Furthermore, a collage option would allow you to pull up specific portions from dozens of web pages at the same time. Initially we had thought it’d be very useful for mobile devices, but we did not limit the patent to a specific device. It could be instantiated in a web browser on your computer, on your palm top, or on your cell phone.
With the upcoming release of Mac OS Leopard, Dashboard will now support ‘web clips’ which allow users to grab a portion of a web page to display on the dashboard. It works in very much the same way as we described in our patent back in 1998. It’s really nice to see one of our patent ideas materialize years later.
US Patent # 6,219,679
A system and method for providing improved bookmarking of remotely provided user-interactive information such as WWW page content are provided. When a bookmark of a page is created, in addition to storing a remote file access pointer such as a universal resource locator, a locator element is stored which identifies a particular subset of the page. When the bookmark is subsequently accessed, only the updated particular subset is displayed, thereby eliminating the need for users to repeatedly scroll through material in which they are not interested.
A super-bookmarking option is provided which provides for a bookmark which results in the display of a collage of previously created bookmarked material.
Apple should be releasing Mac OS X Leopard in the spring of 2007. We anxiously await!