System and method for harmonious tiling search and publishing

• US 8,898,562 B2
• Filed: 03/05/2012
• Issued: 11/25/2014
• Est. Priority Date: 03/04/2011
• Status: Expired due to Fees

• Current Assignee: Rituwall, Inc.
• Original Assignee: Rituwall, Inc.
• Inventors: Tocchini, Dan, Vega, Javier, Axe, Brian
• Primary Examiner(s): RIES, LAURIE ANNE
• Application Number:
  US13/412,331
• Publication Number:
  US 20120226971A1
• Time in Patent Office: 995 Days
• Field of Search: 715/224, 715/225, 715/227, 715/228, 715/243, 715/244, 715/245, 715/246, 715/247
• US Class Current: 715/247
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9577 Optimising the visualization of content, e.g. distillation of HTML documents

Abstract

A new approach is proposed that contemplates systems and methods to provide harmonious tiling layout for a single heterogeneous data feed with a unique and brief syntax. The approach provides solutions to fit shapes into a container without having any holes by automatically providing the most optimum harmonious layout and tile presentation “win-out” over time, and a survival of the fittest of visual presentation based on configurable metrics. A single user interface combines the action of searching and publishing as a single process whereby search results are formatted with the intention to facilitate publishing the chosen items.

Claims

1. A computer-implemented system, comprising:

a tile evaluation engine, which in operation,

accepts a plurality of tiles in a tile collection from dynamically aggregated feed of content;

accepts and adjusts a plurality of tile templates and harmony configurations received from user input wherein said harmony configuration is to produce a hole-free segment of visual real estate on a screen;

evaluating structural layout data to ensure that the structural layout is harmonious;

a tile layout engine, which in operation,

calculates said structural layout data for the plurality of tiles and detecting if any of the tiles needs to be processed with one of the tile templates;

adjusts and applies the structural layout data to the plurality of tiles to create a harmonious layout of the plurality of tiles wherein said harmonious layout is a hole-free segment of visual real estate on a screen;

renders the harmonious layout of the plurality of tiles to the user on a user interface wherein said tile layout engine enables the harmonious layout of the tiles to be applied to any arbitrary, well-formed, HTML file.

2. The system of claim 1, further comprising:

a user interaction engine, which is operation, notifies tile layout engine to fetch more tiles from the tile collection and/or to provide metadata to tile layout engine in the event that display area and/or properties of the user interface have changed and a new layout is needed.

3. The system of claim 2, wherein:

the user interaction engine allows the user to trade or purchase tile space in order to promote its businesses via the user interface.

4. The system of claim 2, wherein:

the user interaction engine further provides global search capabilities in a publishing or sharing platform to enable easy publishing of searched content from the web using a single interface.

5. The system of claim 4, wherein:

the single user interface combines the action of searching and publishing as a single process whereby search results are formatted with the intention to facilitate publishing the chosen items.

6. The system of claim 2, wherein:

the user interaction engine provides a multi-user version of the user interface that enables multiple users to not only share the published content discovered from the saved searches, but also share their search results directly with each other so others can discover and publish content.

7. The system of claim 1, wherein:

each of the plurality of ties comprises a tile model and a tile view, wherein the tile collection applies harmonies logic to the tile model and the tile view then represents visual form of the tile model in its harmonized state for the harmonious layout.

8. The system of claim 1, wherein:

a clear API is defined for creating and using different types of the tiles and to give them a set of rules on how to generate the harmonious layout.

9. The system of claim 1, wherein:

the tile evaluation engine enables configuration of the harmonious tiling that produces ‘

vertical rhythm’ and

‘

horizontal rhythm’

to be input into the system that determine the visual properties of a subset of the tiles.

10. The system of claim 1, wherein:

the tile evaluation engine chooses parameters that will enable random variations of the harmonious layout to be produced and applied to the tiles.

11. The system of claim 1, wherein:

the tile layout engine enables an automatically generated harmonious layout to respond to the medium in which it is being rendered.

12. The system of claim 1, wherein:

the tile layout engine further enables replacing CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) based layout in an HTML browser by enabling configuration of the harmonious layout in metadata of HTML elements of the browser without comprising the semantic structure.

13. The system of claim 1, wherein:

the tile layout engine enables users to add an arbitrary number of tiles from other user to the harmonious layout which dynamically display the latest content from the other user based on various relevancy signals.

14. The system of claim 1, wherein:

the tile layout engine allows multiple content contributors to publish the tiles to a single website.

15. The system of claim 1, wherein:

the tile layout engine creates a dashboard displaying media related to the user'"'"'s interests.

16. The system of claim 1, wherein:

the tile layout engine generates the harmonious layout geared toward a specific application of a set of layout logic.

17. The system of claim 1, wherein:

the tile layout engine detects the most efficient visual layout based on predetermined usage metrics and self-optimizes the visual layout.

18. The system of claim 17, wherein:

the tile layout engine optimizes the visual layout of a website'"'"'s content to determine the placement and percentage of ad tiles vs. content tiles.

19. A method, comprising:

accepting a plurality of tiles from dynamically aggregated feed of content;

accepting and adjusting a plurality of tile templates and harmony configurations received from user input wherein said harmony configuration is to produce a hole-free segment of visual real estate on a screen;

calculating structural layout data for the plurality of tiles and detecting if any of the tiles needs to be processed with one of the tile templates;

evaluating the structural layout data to ensure that the structural layout is harmonious;

adjusting and applying the structural layout data to the plurality of tiles to create a harmonious layout of the plurality of tiles wherein said harmonious layout is a hole-free segment of visual real estate on a screen;

rendering the harmonious layout of the plurality of tiles to the user enabling the harmonious tiling layout to be applied to any arbitrary, well-formed, HTML file.

20. The method of claim 19, further comprising:

reducing the amount of time designing interfaces or presenting content is spent in implementing a fixed layout.

21. The method of claim 19, further comprising fitting different size tiles into a fixed or fluid size container efficiently.

22. The method of claim 19, further comprising:

producing variations in layout and the size and presentation of the tiles automatically to produce a harmonious and fresh visual experience, one without gaping holes in the tiled structure of content and where one data feed can be rendered in different ways.

23. The method of claim 19, further comprising:

providing the most optimum layout and tile presentation “

win-out”

over time, and a survival of the fittest of visual presentation automatically based on configurable metrics.

24. The method of claim 19, further comprising:

removing the hard-work of manually laying information out on a screen put the focus on inputting quality data while trusting that it will be presented in a manner that will maximize configurable goals.

25. The method of claim 19, further comprising:

allowing all types of content, including but not limited to, video, text, audio, images, ads, products, and the like, to be rendered in a magazine like manner with the ability to make itself appear novel by calculated changes in visual presentation.

26. The method of claim 19, further comprising:

defining a clear API for creating and using different types of tiles and to give them a set of rules on how to respond to the layout.

27. The method of claim 19, further comprising:

fixing the relative position and/or order of tiles or particular harmonies.

28. The method of claim 19, further comprising

enabling the automatically generated layout to respond to the medium in which it is being rendered.

29. The method of claim 19, further comprising:

replacing CSS based layouts in HTML browsers by enabling web developers to configure a Harmonious Tiling Layout in the metadata of HTML elements without comprising the semantic structure.

30. The method of claim 19, further comprising:

enabling animated, asynchronous interaction with the harmonies and the tiles.

31. The method of claim 19, further comprising

producing ads, products, promotions and other monetized pieces of content an equal footing in visual real estate as the rest of content, including but not limited to, potentially supplement a data feed with ads and render it such that the it is not apparent what is the ad and the normal content, and to auto-optimize the position of the ad and its visual properties.

32. The method of claim 19, further comprising:

allowing users to trade or purchase tile space in order to promote their businesses.

33. The method of claim 19, further comprising:

providing a rich set of functionality for manipulating the data, without compromising the layout algorithm, such as ordering the tiles by most comments or most social signals, are done on the client in runtime and fed back into the algorithm, or filtering to just show items with a particular tag.

34. The method of claim 19, further comprising:

enabling multiple content contributors to publish tiles to a single website.

35. The method of claim 19, further comprising:

creating and using a single user interface to combine the action of searching and publishing as a single process whereby search results are formatted with the intention to facilitate publishing the chosen items.

36. The method of claim 19, further comprising:

creating a dashboard displaying media related to a user'"'"'s interests, wherein the related media may be implicitly determined by extracting concepts or keywords from the user'"'"'s websites, blogs, social media posts, posts of people followed, posts re-shared, posts liked, etc or explicitly by capturing keywords directly from the user.