Something most certainly can be both useful and trivial (in the sense of trivial to do, which is how it is used here). For example, it would be trivial for me to stop leaving the toilet seat up, but my girlfriend would definitely find it useful.
Computers have been able to do this at least since the Mutt e-mail client allowed you to populate your signature with the output of a dynamically-run script rather than the contents of a static file (2002 at latest).
Were these genuine, albeit minor, advances in their respective fields? Were they non-obvious to those familiar with the state of the art? Because as a possibly naïve layman, I thought that’s what patents were for: to reward those whose inventions expand the boundaries of knowledge, even if only in small, incremental ways.
This is not such an invention. This is not an invention at all. This is a feature request. It does nothing to advance the state of the art. At best it gives some (badly worded and largely untestable) requirements. There is nothing in here a half-way competent developer (or systems analyst, or even business analyst) couldn’t work out for themselves.
This is where the hostility to software patents comes from. So many define problems, rather than solutions, and are then used to claim ownership of all possible solutions to those problems.
