Appeal No. 2003-1614 Page 2
Application No. 09/817,692
According to the appellant, existing menuing mechanisms arrange menu items
rigidly. Fixed content menus are never rearranged, no matter how often a user selects
or ignores certain items. Variable content menus change only in strict sequence with
the order of past selections such that only recent selections appear on the menu. (Id.)
In contrast, the appellant's invention "provides comprehensive menu
arrangement control by providing several discrete, yet complementary, features." (Id.
at 4.) "Automatic ranking" uses "heuristics" to control the order in which items such as
uniform resource locators ("URLs") are arranged in a menu. Heuristics describe past
use, e.g., frequency of selection, recency of selection, and time-of-day of selection.
Using "manual control" a user can override an automatic ranking by placing a URL at a
specific location (e.g., first), (Appeal Br. at 3), or to specify a time-of-day during which
individual items are to appear near the top of the menu. (Spec. at 4.) Using a "smart
load facility" the user can choose to have a web browser automatically load a selected
web page after initialization or to have the web browser automatically load the web page
that appears at the top of a list of URLs. (Id. at 5.)
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007