Creative Technologies, the folks behind the Zen series of digital media players, gives a hint of how your next MP3 player might look in a newly filed patent application.
The application, for “improvements in and relating to searching on a user interface,” proposes a type of two-tier menu for sorting through your music collection. You could still scroll through your tunes by artist, say, but a click to the right would take you to another menu column where you could see resulted organized by categories such as genre or date. Creative engineers says it offers “a method which provides quicker and easier searching for a user and which also allows the user to easily locate a particular item from the list even if he or she cannot remember in full the details of that item.”
While Creative has continued to run a distant second or third to Apple in the media player market, it does have bonafides in the user interface area, having recently snagged $100 milllion from Apple to cover use of Creative’s patented menu scheme.
Via: U.S. Patent Office
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