On April 8, 2008, the US Patent & Trademark Office published three newly granted patents of Apple’s that covered subject matters relating to ‘Methods and apparatuses for the automated display of visual effects,’ ‘Computing visible regions for a hierarchical view‘ and ‘Method and apparatus for marking content during distribution of the content to a client.’

Patent: Methods and apparatuses for the automated display of visual effects: Apple’s first granted patent of the day generally relates to the display of visual effects, and more particular to the generation of visual effects for real time display on a data processing system. According to Apple’s patent, gaming developers would find this technique a time saver. Apple lists Michael James Paquette as the sole inventor of this granted patent which was originally filed in April 2007.

Patent: Computing visible regions for a hierarchical view: Apple’s second granted patent of the day generally to display systems and more particularly to display systems utilizing graphical user interfaces. Apple’s patent covers a method, apparatus, system, and signal-bearing medium that in an embodiment determines the visible regions of potentially overlapping views and writes the visible regions to an output device. The visible regions may be determined using the visible-above region associated with a view. The views may have child, parent, and sibling views. A view may be any object capable of being displayed. In this way, the number of times that a pixel is written to the output device is reduced.

Apple lists Ed Voas (Sunnyvale, CA) and Guyerik B. Fullerton (Mountain View, CA) as the inventors of this granted patent which was originally filed in August 2002.

Patent: Method and apparatus for marking content during distribution of the content to a client: Apple’s third granted patent of the day generally relates to computer networks. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for marking content during distribution of the content to a client, so that markings on the content facilitate identification of the client.

Apple lists Bruce Gaya as the sole inventor of this granted patent which was originally filed in September 2002.

NOTICE: MacNN presents only a brief summary of patents with associated graphic(s) for journalistic news purposes as each such patent application and/or grant is revealed by the U.S. Patent & Trade Office. Readers are cautioned that the full text of any patent applications and/or grants should be read in its entirety for further details.

Written and researched by Neo.