On April 22, 2008, Apple was granted three patents by the US Patent & Trademark Office. The first patent relates to computer documents and the concurrent use of frameworks. The second patent relates to the movement of GUI objects such as windows and icons and the third patent relates to method for vectorized table lookups.

Patent: Method and Apparatus for Supporting Real-Time Collaboration

Apple’s first granted patent of the day generally relates to computer documents and more particularly to concurrent use of frameworks. Apple’s patent FIG. 27 below, illustrates an example of a model based tracker loop.

Apple’s Abstract: A collaboration system synchronizes an application or applications running on one or more computer systems. Each of the applications has a local data copy and the applications commence operation by creating consistent local copies from a common third copy. The consistency is maintained by distributing address space independent selections and commands to each application as they are entered at a controlling system. The selections and commands are generated by directly manipulating a presentation of each local data copy. When a selection and command arrive at a destination, the selection is used to find and selection the data and the command is applied to the data located by the selection.

Apple lists Arnold Schaeffer (Belmont, CA), David R. Anderson (Cupertino, CA) and Jack H. Palevich (Sunnyvale, CA) as the inventors of this granted patent which was originally filed in July 2002.

Patent: Time-Based, Non-Constant Translation of User Interface Objects Between States

Apple’s second granted patent of the day generally to graphical user interfaces for computer systems. More particularly, the present invention relates to the movement of user-interface objects, such as icons and windows, within a graphical user interface of a computer operating system.

Apple’s Abstract: The present invention relates to a method for moving objects within the graphical user interface (GUI) of an operating system in a manner that provides a transitional effect between window states, which is pleasing to the user. This transitional effect includes changing the shape of a window while scaling and moving the window between two different sizes and positions. In one embodiment of the present invention, the transitional effect may be employed as a window is minimized into an icon, or restored from an icon. In another embodiment of the present invention, the transitional effect is employed as a window is minimized within its title bar, or restored therefrom. The rate of movement of objects is controlled in a non-linear manner, to further enhance the pleasing effect.

Apple lists Bas Ording (Sunnyvale, CA) as the sole inventor of this granted patent which was originally filed in January 2001. Apple’s patent FIG. 9, above, is an illustration of the incremental movement that occurs when a sinusoidal function is employed for the movement animation.

Patent: Retrieving Multi-Byte Vector Elements from Byte Indexed Table using Replicated and Consecutive Number Added Indices for Each Element Index

Apple’s third granted patent of the day is generally directed to methods by which data is retrieved from tables in the operation of a computer, and more particularly to a vectorized table lookup method which is not restricted to tables of a relatively small size.

Apple’s Abstract: A lookup operation is carried out on a data table by logically dividing the data table into a number of smaller sets of data that can be indexed with a single byte of data. Each set of data consists of two vectors, which constitute the operands for a permute instruction. Only a limited number of bits are required to index into the table during the execution of this instruction. The remaining bits of each index are used as masks into a series of select instructions. The select instruction chooses between two vector components, based on the mask, and places the selected components into a new vector. The mask is generated by shifting one of the higher order bits of the index to the most significant position, and then propagating that bit throughout a byte, for example by means of an arithmetic shift. This procedure is carried out for all of the index bytes in the vector, to generate a select mask. The select mask is then used during a select operation, to choose between the results of permute instructions on different ones of the logically divided sets of data. Multi-byte table entries are retrieved by replicating each index value and adding consecutive values to form multiple consecutive index values that are then used in multiple permute operations.

Apple lists Ali Sazegari (Cupertino, CA) as the sole inventor of this granted patent which was originally filed in March 2005. Apple’s patent FIG. 12, above, is a block diagram illustrating the replication of an original index register to form multiple addresses for each index.

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.