Author: Umakant Mishra
Abstract:
A tree view or tree navigator is used to display
hierarchical data organized in the form of a tree. In a tree structure there
are parent and child nodes. The child nodes may further have descendants to n
levels.
There are many methods to make the navigation easy. Some of
these are expanding and collapsing branches, splitting the tree, displaying a
parent node in a separate tree, zooming branches, scrolling in various
directions etc. It is still a difficult exercise to handle large trees
efficiently. The effort still continues to manage large number of nodes with
faster speed, greater control, user friendliness and aesthetics.
This article illustrates five inventions on tree navigators
selected from US patent database. Each of them tries to solve various problems
relating to the tree navigator in different ways. Each invention is also
analyzed from a TRIZ perspective.
Keywords: TRIZ, Software Inventions, Graphical User
Interface, Software inventions, Software Patents, Inventive Problem Solving,
GUI, Tree view, Tree navigator, tree structure, parent node, child node,
Scrolling, Scrollbar, GUI aesthetics
Mishra, Umakant, Inventions on Tree Navigators Used in
Graphical User Interface. (December 6, 2006 ), Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=949244
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