The next major release of Apple’s Mac OS may blow competition out of the water

Feb 19, 2013 14:30 GMT  ·  By

The US Patent and Trademark Office has just published 36 “granted” patents for Apple Inc., and one of them in particular covers a multi-dimensional version of the company’s Mac operating system.

Among the 36 newly granted patents today, Apple has won the invention relating to a 3D version of OS X titled Multi-Dimensional Application Environment, reports Patently Apple.

Apple filed for this patent years ago (December 2008), but the US Patent & Trademark Office only awarded it to Apple today.

In response to reports presenting “granted” patents to insinuate that Apple has just revealed a new technology, PatentlyApple carefully points out that “Granted patents are approved patent applications that Apple applied for months or even years ago.”

Apple is free to use the invention at will, but that doesn’t mean the 3D OS X is just around the corner.

With that out of the way, let’s have a look at what the documentation actually has to say about this Multi-Dimensional Application Environment.

“As the capabilities of processing devices progress […] so do the demands on the graphical user interface to convey information to the users in an intuitive manner,” Apple acknowledges.

So the company proposes “a back surface […] axially disposed from a viewing surface, and one or more side surfaces extend from the back surface to the viewing surface.”

“An application content frame for an executing application is generated on the back surface. One or more application control elements for the execution application are generating on the one or more side surfaces,” the patent reads.

In another embodiment, or implementation, “generating a graphical user interface includes axially disposing a back surface from a viewing surface, extending one or more side surfaces from the back surface to the viewing surface, generating an application content frame for an application on the back surface, and generating one or more application control elements for the application on the one or more side surfaces.”