Satpal Sharma

Apple Awarded Patent for OS X Dock, Nine Years Later

If you’re a PC, you may be unfamiliar with The Dock, the bar of icons that sits at the bottom or side of a Mac and provides easy access to Apple applications. But don’t count on it becoming a standard on the PC.

Nearly nine years after filing for a patent on the Dock in OS X, it’s finally been awarded to Apple. Steve Jobs is listed as one of its three inventors. Besides the general idea of a userbar with “a plurality of item representations” that consolidates features like “launching and managing running applications,” the patent focuses particularly on the Dock’s magnification feature that makes icons bigger as you sweep by them with a cursor.

reference: gizmodo | slashdot