Our friends at IBM are trying to patent the "progress bar." EDN has an article about it titled U.S. patent office looking for prior art on IBM patent application. As a result of the Peer-to-Patent: Community Patent Review process, there’s actually a chance that this stupid patent will not get granted.
There are 11 days left to comment on the Pre-Grant Publication Number: 20070220238. If you don’t want to go through the brain damage of setting up an account, just leave a comment on this blog post and I’ll consolidate and post them on the Peer-to-Patent site. If you really want to dig into this yourself because you’ve actually written the code for a progress board, you take a look at the overview and the claims (keep a barf bag handy.)
Dave – do you have any of that Clarion code from the late 1980’s with progress bars in them? I know I’ve got some examples written in Basic for Petcom’s PCEconomics from 1984 – now all I’ve got to do is find something that can read a 5.25" floppy disk. Nari – thanks for the heads up on this.