An Apple patent (number 8245147) for a system and method for reordering an user interface has appeared at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. It relates to dynamic user interfaces and more specifically to reordering groups of user interface elements accessing a highly structured document.

The patent involves systems, computer-implemented methods, and tangible computer-readable storage media for customizing a user interface. The method displays an interface to a user. In the interface, a slice has interface elements, a stack has a group of slices, a window has a group of stacks, and each interface element is associated with a segment of a highly structured document.

The interface includes a panel having one or more containers, each container representing one stack, and one or more tokens, each token representing one slice. The method relocates at least one token to a different location in the container based on user input, displays in the panel a preview based on the relocated token, generates a user interface workflow based on the one or more containers and the relocated token, and displays the generated user interface workflow.

The inventors are Trevor Ashton Danger Benjamin Copland and Stephen Hayden Cotterill.