Apple patents range from display screens to cables
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Nov 17, 2009 at 11:25am
Several Apple patents have appeared at the US Patent & Trademark Office. Here’s a summary of each.
Patent number D604305 is for the graphical user interface for a display screen or portion thereof. The inventors are Freddy Anzures and Imran Chaudhri.
Patent number 7619618 is for identifying contacts on a touch surface. Apparatus and methods are disclosed for simultaneously tracking multiple finger and palm contacts as hands approach, touch, and slide across a proximity-sensing, multi-touch surface. Identification and classification of intuitive hand configurations and motions enables unprecedented integration of typing, resting, pointing, scrolling, 3D manipulation, and handwriting into a versatile, ergonomic computer input device. The inventors are Carl Wayne Westerman and John G. Elias.
Patent number 7620753 involves lockless access to a ring buffer. It involves a reader and writer access a ring buffer without using a locking mechanism, thereby avoiding any delays attendant to using a locking mechanism when performing read operations to supply the reader with data from the ring buffer. Other measures are used to reduce delayed performance of read operations. If data requested by a reader is not available in the ring buffer, rather than waiting until the data becomes available, substitute data not from the ring buffer is provided instead. The ring buffer’s size may be dynamically increased or decreased to improve performance of read and write operations and/or to conserve computer resources. The inventors are Alexander B. Beaman and Daniel Steinberg.
Apple has also been granted patents involving the MacBook Pro (patents D604292, D604293, D604290 and D604291), the MacBook Air (patents D604294 and D604289), the iPhone (patent D604297), a keyboard (patent D604300) and a cable (patent D604253).
For more info on patents, check out Patents.com, a free patent search site.
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 10,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
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