10 Inventions on Command Buttons in a Graphical User Interface

The recent trend in software development shows more and more importance on graphical user interface. A graphical user interface is often seen as just indispensable. There are several important components of a graphical user interface, such as, menu, listbox, toolbox, command button, scrollbar, tree navigator, dialog box etc. A command button is a very fundamental element of a graphical user interface. A command button provides an easy access to a command or function in the system. The user can click on the command button with a pointing device to execute the operation. A command button may contain a textual label or a graphic image or both. It may be static or animated. There can be many different features to make a command button attractive and effective. As command button is a typical GUI element, most improvement on GUI in general will also be applicable to command buttons. Besides, there are also inventions to improve various aspects of command buttons in specific. This article illustrates 10 selected inventions from US patent database. Each invention is followed by a TRIZ based analysis in brief. Background problem Many programs use a command line prompt where the user can submit a command to be processed. This has the drawback that the user has to remember the commands; besides there is a possibility of spelling errors while typing the commands. Moreover, the users also find difficulties with two different " standards " , viz., the GUI and command line. There is a need to convert the pre-existing programs for user convenience and to protect the investment base. Solution provided by the invention Patent 5617527 (invented by Kressin et al., assigned to IBM, issued April 1997) disclosed a method of adding graphical user interface to existing command line applications. According to invention a set of GUI " buttons " are set up for different command line commands. The user can operate the buttons with mouse and run the associated command line command. This method avoids typing of the commands from command line interface by converting them into GUI buttons. Thus the invention displays an array of " buttons " each of which is associated with different commands. The user selects a button with mouse, which sends the command to the application to execute. TRIZ based analysis The invention converts the command line commands and parameters into GUI buttons. The buttons are operated through mouse buttons avoiding …