On October 3, the US Patent & Trademark Office published two of Apple’ newly granted patents which include ‘Method and apparatus for archiving and unarchiving objects’ and ‘Method and apparatus for determining font attributes.’

Method and apparatus for archiving and unarchiving objects

Apple’s Abstract: The invention is directed towards methods and apparatuses for archiving and unarchiving objects. Some embodiments of the invention archive and unarchive objects that have global and user settings in multi-user environments. To archive objects, these embodiments identify which object settings are global settings and which settings are user settings. They store the global settings in an archive, and then store the user settings in another archive. To unarchive each object, some embodiments identify the object’s settings in one or both archives. These embodiments instantiate the object, and retrieve its settings from the data archives and use the retrieved settings to define the values of the settings of the instantiated object. Some embodiments use key-value coding techniques to retrieve values and load values in an object. Key-value coding allows an archiving or unarchiving process to retrieve and load setting values for an object by using the setting names.

The inventors listed on granted patent 7,117,293: John Graziano and Anders Bertelrud.

Method and apparatus for determining font attributes

The invention relates to Graphical User Interfaces (GUI), and more particularly to a GUI for determining font attributes.

Apple’s Abstract: A method to determine a font attribute includes: determining a first number and a second number; receiving input resulting from repositioning of a thumb of a slider to a position; and determining a value for the font attribute from the position relative to the first and second numbers. A font attribute is one of: a) font size; b) boldness; c) italic angle; d) baseline offset; e) line spacing; and f) character spacing. In one example, when the thumb is pushed against one end of the slider, at least one of the first number or the second number is adjusted. Another example shows at least one of the first number or the second number is updated when an input such as selecting a value from a list or typing in a value or pushing a thumb against one end of a slider is received.

The sole inventor of granted patent 7,117,450 is Imran Chaudhri.

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Written and researched by Neo.