14 DAY TRIAL // Apple is one of the companies that keep delivering new things to the world and the rate seems to be accelerating. I am sure you are interested in the future as much as I am, so let's take a closer look at these various inventions that range from clip content presentations to the Mighty Mouse.
The first two patents pertain to the Dashboard and widgets, their titles being "Presenting clips of content" and "Webview applications".
The first one describes an implementation that allows a user to select an area of interest in a content source and to clip content from that area, with various configuration parameters being able to be stored for future retrieval.
The Webview Applications abstract is about the same subject, but this time, the clip of content is replaced by web content, and the method for displaying it in a user interface includes identifying a source, selecting a portion of this source's content to be included in a view, maintaining information associated with the web content source including a name and identifying information for designating the selected portion and, finally, displaying the view of the selected portion of the web content source.
The "Clipview applications" abstract is closely related to the previous two ones, but it's focused on spreadhseets and could be indirectly linked to Apple's "Numbers" trademark, according to Macnn.
The fourth patent published yesterday deals with enhancing instruction sets for microprocessors and refers to a double quadword target operation in the Intel SSE2 instruction set, being named "Performing variable and/or Bitwise Shift Operation for a Shift Instruction that does not provide a Variable or Bitwise Shift option".
Apple's Mighty Mouse already incorporates eight patents registered in 2002/2003, and the new one published yesterday was filed in mid 2005, its name being "Mouse with improved input mechanisms". This mouse is configured with touch sensing areas capable of generating input signals. The touch sensing areas may for example be used to differentiate between left and right clicks in a single button mouse and may additionally be configured with a speaker for providing audio feedback when the various input devices are activated by a user.
All these things sound great in theory, and I hardly wait to see them become reality, but there's one thing we should have until then: patience...