> The design needs a bit of polish, but the core concept is just so damn good it's blatantly going to be copied.

Chris Lacy (the author) delayed the release because he was encouraged to patent the idea. Looks to me like that was a good move.

Indeed, patenting ideas is an excellent way to prevent free software from usign those ideas while proprietary software can just get the licensing costs from their profits.

Also, if the browser concept was patented, how could someone else innovate over browsers, if theres a need to pay for the privilege of being inventive?

Patents and free software aren't necessarily incompatible. For example Raph Levien provides a royalty-free patent grant to software licensed under the GNU GPL that implements his patents.

http://levien.com/patents.html

Patenting ideas is also an excellent way to prevent someone else from doing what you suggest; the patent-holder merely needs to grant a royalty-free patent license to everyone once they have the patent.

(See Sections 7 and 8 of GPLv2, for an example.)

> Looks to me like that was a good move

Yeah until a point that nobody will be able to innovate anymore, even being original and inventive, because of patents into nuclear ideas or generic ideas..

Its the difference of "everybody against everybody" to "everybody working for everybody"

I hope software patents became a thing of the past soon.. the concept of property and the concept of ideas do not belong to each other

How can this be patented? It doesn't seem functionally no different than "open tab" and "open tab in the background", except that it opens a round notification instead of a tab-shaped one. Is there something else in it that's novel? Maybe the protocol for coordinating apps for opening the link in the background from a different app?

My immediate thought when I saw the video was "this is basically the same functionality as middle-clicking a link in Firefox".

It looks like a very good implementation for Android, and good implementations are valuable and important, but the concept itself isn't original.

I recommend everyone to check out his Android Launcher: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chrislacy....

Im a big fan of it and find it makes my phone faster to use than any other launcher without having to learn new ui concepts.

For what it's worth, he explains his reasoning here:

https://plus.google.com/104649936579980037256/posts/GAWL1HpQ...

"A few casual emails later and my new patent lawyer warned me that I might be unable to apply for a patent in certain important countries if I sell the app before filing an application.."

That's what people that make a living with the patents system will do.. they will convice you how patents are important, and make you fear to not have any patents..

I did'nt see any conceptual explanation for why he is filling for patents.. only that his moved by fear and bad advices from actors that have something to gain for making people like him, entering into this game

Also let my say that this is a bad strategy for a underdog.. because the base crowd for a underdog is the "green" folks.. hipsters, geeks, etc..

This crowd is very sensitive to this sort of things these days.. much more well-educated than the previous generations.. and they are the opinion leaders that can give a sustainable growth to a underdog..

Of course, there are curious people that will download it, and say "cool!!", but then, another app-dujour will beg for attention, and they will just move away..

The evangelizer type is very important, and they probably will move away once they are aware of the patent game.. unless of course instead of a cosmetic innovation you did a really important innovation.. something that everybody needs.. than people can just be arrogant and do whatever they want.. but for underdogs this is a risky game to play

As I said in my post, I definitely thought long and hard about the implications of applying for such a patent. Your points were definitely at the forefront of my thinking.

In the end, I concluded that Loren Brichter's pull to refresh patent proved rather valuable, so I might as well not close the door on such an opportunity myself.

of course, some mogul like google could get interested, and because of the patent, will be forced to acquihire him.. than he can live a confortable life somewhere.. but in the end, this game only privilege the big ones.. so they can have control over innovation and platforms.. :/

So he hates patents and the lawsuits they bring, but he feels it'll be a great asset to have in the future?

It really doesn't sound like he hates them to me.

I think he's just playing the game as the rules are written right now. He doesn't have to like patents to know that they are currently one of the best ways to protect himself. I'm not a fan of the current system, but if I found myself in a similar position, I'd certainly review my options as well.

I'm not sure what you mean by protect himself here. What does he protect himself from?

If you mean he protects himself from people 'taking' his idea, then he clearly doesn't hate software patents because that's what they achieve. What do you hate about them if you want this protection?

If you mean he protects himself from someone else patenting the same idea, filing a patent doesn't do this. As long as he has his ducks in a row to demonstrate that his work constitutes prior art (which he might have to do anyways if, say facebook comes out and tries to patent what sounds like a similar idea). Realistically, the odds that, against a larger competitor, he wouldn't have to go through the same process either way (a legal battle and/or settlement) seem strikingly low to me.

If you mean he can play the defensive patent shell game and cross-license to settle, one patent won't really do that unless you pool in with an NPE that collects patents, and that also seems rather contrary to the idea of hating software patents.

I have not installed this app, but perhaps this app itself copied "concept" from the facebook messenger?

That is like saying the IPhone is a copied "concept" from other touchscreen devices.

Well, to be fair, Facebook was the company that created the always open "floating bubble" concept, to my knowledge.

Link Bubble behaves very similarly to Facebook Messenger in this way (the way the bubbles move, how you interact with them, close them, etc), and I can't help but think that Facebook was inspiration for the project.

This is actually a good thing because I always thought that the Chat Heads were a novel idea, though Link Bubble's implementation of the concept is rougher around the edges than Facebook (e.g. "laggier", not quite as clean in design).

According to the developer, Chris Lacy[1], Link Bubble was in development before Facebook's Messenger was released.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7454918

Ehh. I'm not convinced this point really matters. If you ship a great idea first, you shipped it first.. no?

>Well, to be fair, Facebook was the company that created the always open "floating bubble" concept, to my knowledge.

I believe Holo in Paranoid Android's ROM was first, beating Facebook's app by a few months at least.

There are a lot of apps that draw over other apps on Android before Facebook Chatheads.

>Brilliant, especially the redirect handling.

That was what got me to click the install button just now. And he used my least favorite example, Instagram out of Twitter with the t.co redirects and yada yada—I've always felt like that was super awkward.

This, as well as staring a Chrome waiting anywhere up to 5 seconds or more for t.co links to resolve is what largely inspired me to write Link Bubble.

I've wondered why the Twitter app doesn't automatically replace t.co links with the final destination URL itself.

I assume because they use the t.co link to verify items have been clicked for their ad services, but I can't be sure. Either way, as I user I couldn't stand that wasted time, so I went about trying to fix it.

My point is that the app can record that click asynchronously. They have full control of everything in the app, and it bothers me in the first world problems section of my brain that they haven't tackled a lot of low hanging fruit for speeding up user interactions.

Yeah, I don't have any Android anythings but this concept is immediately compelling and good. One of those things that should have been obvious, really.