Typical situation in UI design: you do design of some UI and, say, came up with some bright new idea like "ribbon" or "kinetic scroll past end".

What would be the strategy about such thing? Register patent, don't like it, but anyway would like to ask: how long it takes to do all this stuff and how much it will cost in average?

If to forget about patents, will the idea have something like "prior art" status or some such if someone will try to patent this in future?

All this about project / product published by solo developer.