[ddlatham]

Here's the patent in question, #5,946,647, filed Feb. 1, 1996: http://www.google.com/patents/US5946647

"A system and method causes a computer to detect and perform actions on structures identified in computer data... uses a pattern analysis unit ... to detect structures in the data, and links relevant actions to the detected structures. .... Thus, the user interface can present and enable selection of the detected structures, and upon selection of a detected structure, present the linked candidate actions."

And here's an older article with more description http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/07/16/apple-vs-google-insid...

"When an iPhone receives a message that contains a phone number or an address -- e-mail, Web or street -- those bits of data are automatically highlighted, underlined and turned into clickable links.

Click on the phone number, and the iPhone asks if you want to dial it. Click on the Web address, and it opens in Safari. Click on the street address, and Maps will display it."

[jacobolus]

The best example of prior art that I know is Simson Garfinkel’s SBook, originally developed in 1991. Any steps required to get from Simson’s idea to Apple’s version seem (conceptually) trivial and obvious.

http://simson.net/ref/sbook5/

It’s remarkable to me how much better SBook is at dealing with info like address book entries than anything mainstream today, 20 years later.

[jamesgeck0]

WikiWikiWeb may also be an example of prior art. It went online in 1994, with CamelCase words automatically being made into hyperlinks. URLs were also automatically transformed into hyperlinks as early as 1996. Unfortunately archive.org doesn't go any farther back than that, so I don't know if the feature was there from the very beginning.

[patrickgzill]

yes, I distinctly remember being quite amazed at SBook, when I used it on a NeXT machine in 1995. A year before this patent.

[libraryatnight]

Sometimes, I feel like we're characters in a book of satire, mocking what a world would look like if it acted like ours.

[caf]

Really? My old featurephone did that!

[cbr]

Before 1996?

[einhverfr]

That sounds broad enough to cover syntax coloring in VIM and Visual Studio......

[rheeseyb]

Or links on a webpage?

[einhverfr]

Or web-mail making links clickable?

[viraptor]

Wasn't explorer in windows 95 (can't remember what 3.X did for context menus) a prior art for first fragment? Right-click "my computer" you get one context menu, right-click ".bat" (see - pattern analysis) you get another, right-click ".doc" ...

[chc]

I don't think so. You aren't acting on the ".bat", you're acting on the file itself. The patented technology has more in common with face detection algorithms than right-click menus.

[caf]

It would seem to have more in common with the way that Microsoft Word autodetects URLs and email address and turns them into clickable links, or the way in which the Skype browser plugin autodetects phone numbers on a web page and makes those into click-to-call-with-Skype links.