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 <[email protected]> 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 <[email protected]> > 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 >> .. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
