Data processing: database and file management or data structures – Database design – Data structure types
Reexamination Certificate
1998-04-07
2001-03-27
Amsbury, Wayne (Department: 2777)
Data processing: database and file management or data structures
Database design
Data structure types
C707S793000, C707S793000, C707S793000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06209009
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to the display of information on small display screens, and in particular to methods for displaying structured information comprising selectable and non-selectable elements, wherein some of the selectable elements have a width greater than the screen display width.
2. Description of Related Art
Pocket size or mobile devices such as cellular telephones and pagers as well as desk-top telephones are now capable of receiving and displaying structured information that originates from outside of the device. Nowadays these devices usually have display screens with varying screen sizes and consequently varying screen display widths. Thus, an author of the structured information cannot customize the layout of the information for the screen size of a specific device because the screen size is device dependent.
In view of the variations in screen size among devices, prior art solutions for displaying structured information have attempted to enable a user adapt to the information being received and to display the information in a way that makes the information usable to the user.
Currently, there are three alternative solutions to the problem of displaying text which exceeds the width of a small screen display such as those on cellular telephones or pagers. In a first method, if the text of an element
110
is longer than screen display width
101
, the text is wrapped and made to flow down a display screen
125
as illustrated in FIG.
1
A. In
FIGS. 1A
to
1
D, a rectangle
108
defined by the solid lines represents display screen
125
. The other elements in the structured textual information are shown simply to provide context for the following description.
In this method, the elements that do not fit on display screen
125
, e.g., choices
111
to
113
, are clipped and can be accessed by scrolling down vertically. This is similar to the method used by computer word processors for example. The fact that the text is structured into four elements
110
to
113
is not considered in displaying the text. Elements
110
to
113
are considered one continuous text message.
The vertical scrolling can be one line at a time, one screen display at a time (See the discussion of
FIGS. 3A
to
3
D below), or a fraction of a screen display at a time. In this example, one line is scrolled at a time and so after a scroll operation, display screen
125
is as shown in FIG.
1
B. The user sees a portion of element
110
and a portion of element
111
.
FIG. 1C
illustrates display screen
125
after another one line scroll operation.
FIG. 1D
illustrates display screen displaying the fourth test element
113
which would be obtained by many one line scroll operations from the state of the display screen
125
in FIG.
3
C.
As illustrated in
FIGS. 1A
to
1
D, at any instant, the user is not able to view even a portion of all four of the choices in the list on display screen
125
. In this embodiment, with a four-line display screen, the user can view at most one complete selectable element or choice. The user must scroll vertically to see the other selectable elements or choices. This makes it very hard for the user to remember what the choices are available, particularly after the user has to perform various scrolling operations to see other choices.
A second display method has been to display a message with multiple lines as a single line and automatically scroll the resulting single line horizontally across the screen display. This is similar to the way one line of information is displayed for example on Times Square in New York City.
The second method, where the text is fit on one line and scrolled horizontally, would not be at all suitable for the example discussed above with reference to
FIGS. 1A
to
1
D. Scrolling the concatenated text of the four choices on one line, as illustrated in
FIG. 2
, would make the devices with small screens unusable for the user.
A last display method used is a hybrid of the two methods described above. Text is wrapped on the screen display and after a short pause, long enough for the text to be read, the text automatically scrolls vertically, usually a full screen display at a time. This display method is illustrated in
FIGS. 3A
to
3
D where each element is displayed individually in this example.
The last method has the same pitfalls as the first method. In particular, the user is able to see only one choice at a time. The fact that the screen display scrolls automatically to the next screen display makes it harder for the user to remember the choices as the automatic scroll can occur before the user has had time to understand the choices presented to him or her.
The three scrolling methods described above are well suited to the display of unstructured textual information such as a text message. They are often used in pagers or cellular telephones that support paging.
However, as illustrated above, the methods do not work well for structured elements, such as those in a list of user choices, a menu of user options, or a list of data that are presented on a display screen which is too small to display all of the structured elements in their entirety. In each of the methods discussed above, although structured information could be used, the methods would simply process the structured information as one continuous string of text without regard to the elements within the structure.
Presenting a structured list on a small display screen presents many unresolved challenges. The reason this problem has not been solved is that up to now devices with a small display such as pagers or cellular telephones either displayed information that had been preprogrammed into the device, or displayed non-structured textual information. In the case of information that had been preprogrammed and designed into the device, such as a menu of choices pertaining to the configuration of the device, the developers who programmed these menus made sure that the information had been optimized to the device and chose the wording to make sure that the choices fit within the width of the screen display.
When information originates outside of the device, only the case of non-structured information has been implemented and the methods described above are used with good results. When structured information originates outside of the device and is meant to be displayed on devices with various display screen sizes, there has been no efficient way to layout, i.e., preprogram, the information for a particular screen display size.
Thus, a solution of the problems associated with displaying structured information on small display screens is needed before structured information, such as a list of choices and long texts (selectable elements) and short text (non-selectable elements), can be advantageously used on telephones, cellular telephones, pagers and other devices with small display screens.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
According to the principles of this invention, a structured screen display process presents structured information that includes a plurality of elements on any width screen display so that the user is able to see as many of the elements as possible at once, and is able to see the complete text of any element as needed. The process of this invention dynamically adapts the display of structured information to the width of the screen display. Further, with this dynamic adaptation, the user is able to see at a glance as many as possible of the elements of the structure and read any one of the elements at the user's discretion in a way that is compatible with using the structured information such as a list of selectable elements along with non-selectable elements.
In one embodiment of the method of this invention, structured information is presented on a screen display by displaying at least a portion of each selectable element in a plurality of selectable and non-selectable elements on the screen display where at least one of the selectable elements has a width greater than a width of the display s
Rossmann Alain S.
Schwartz Bruce V.
Amsbury Wayne
Do Thuy
M. Alan D.
Phone.com, Inc.
Zheng Joe
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