The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Jan. 23, 2001
Filed:
Oct. 08, 1998
Sven Pleyer, Redmond, WA (US);
Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA (US);
Abstract
A graphics control for an interactive user interface includes a plurality of individually specified graphics components. Each graphics component has non-transparent portions and potentially also has transparent portions. In one embodiment, the graphics components include a background component, a face component, a frame component, and a focus component. The components are overlaid on each other from bottom to top, creating a layered effect. The face component is selectable by the user input to perform an action, and selecting the face component changes the appearance of the face component. Other than the background component, the components each are constructed of a texture bitmap and one or more luminance bitmaps. The texture bitmaps are tiled to conserve memory and data bandwidth. The luminance bitmaps can be supplied in a small size, and scaled using a special tiling technique.