Inventions on Tree Navigators used in Graphical User Interface

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. One of the popular example of tree navigator is the file explorer in Microsoft Windows. A conventional tree navigator works well when the numbers of nodes are small. The problem starts with the size of the tree navigator. To navigate a thousand nodes in multiple hierarchies, the user has to do a lot of expansion, contraction, scrolling and many difficult exercises. 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. Background problem A tree navigator is used in a GUI to display hierarchical data in a tree structure. This structure is used in File Manager (Win 3.x) and Explorer (Win 95 and later) to display the contents of disk drives, directories, sub-directories and files. However, these utilities can only be used with the data storage devices and file system directories provided by the computer. There is a need for a utility that allows user to display and traverse the hierarchical structure of applications or documents and their elements. Solution provided by the invention Patent 6078327 (invented by Liman et al., assigned by IBM, issued Jun 2000) discloses a method of using a navigator window to display and traverse application programs. The navigator window comprises of a collapse-expand tree control for traversing one or more applications created by the application program. Each of the applications is comprised of one or more objects and the application program window displays an application or object selected in the Navigator window. TRIZ based analysis (The tree navigator is known to the prior art. The invention discloses to use that mechanism with an application program). Invention displays a navigator window for an application …