The US Patent and Trademark Office officially published a series of seven newly granted patents for Apple Inc. today. The notables within this group include one relating to a design win for Apple’s second generation iPod nano, another for Dashboard, Apple’s OS X feature for hosting widgets and an iPhone related patent titled “Multimedia data transfer for a personal communication device.” Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs appears in the credits of two patents, notably one for the iPod nano and one for presentation software, likely Keynote, titled “Dynamic guides.”

Second Generation iPod nano Design Win

Apple has been granted a design win for their second generation iPod nano which debuted in September 2006. This is also the date of their original patent filing. Apple credits CEO Steve Jobs, Senior Design VP Jonathan Ives and the following engineers as the inventors of design patent D593, 994:

Andre; Bartley K. (Menlo Park, CA), Coster; Daniel J. (San Francisco, CA), De Iuliis; Daniele (San Francisco, CA), Howarth; Richard P. (San Francisco, CA), Ive; Jonathan P. (San Francisco, CA), Jobs; Steve (San Francisco, CA), Kerr; Duncan Robert (San Francisco, CA), Nishibori; Shin (San Francisco, CA), Rohrbach; Matthew Dean (San Francisco, CA), Satzger; Douglas B. (Menlo Park, CA), Seid; Calvin Q. (Palo Alto, CA), Stringer; Christopher J. (Portola Valley, CA), Whang; Eugene Antony (San Francisco, CA) and Zorkendorfer; Rico (San Francisco, CA)

OS X Dashboard

Apple has been granted a patent for their OS X feature known as Dashboard. Dashboard is an application used for hosting mini-applications known as widgets. First introduced in Tiger, it is a semi-transparent layer that is invisible to the user unless activated by clicking its icon in the Dock.

Alternatively, the user can invoke Dashboard by moving the cursor into a preassigned hot corner, or by pressing a hot key, both of which can be set to the user’s preference.

Apple’s patent FIG. 5B shows a document user interface 500a for editing the back side of a user interface element, or widget 303, according to one embodiment of the present invention. Like the front side document user interface 500A, the back side document user interface 500B includes a user interface element display area 505, a contents area 510, and a library area 515.

Apple credits John O. Louch (San Luis Obispo, CA), Andrew M. Grignon (Campbell, CA), Timothy Wayne Bumgarner (Sharpsburg, MD), Eric Steven Peyton (Lisle, IL) and Max Drukman (San Francisco, CA) as the inventors of Issued Patent 7,546,543 titled “Widget authoring and editing environment,” originally filed in June 2005.

Other Granted Patents Issued Today: An iPhone related patent titled “Multimedia data transfer for a personal communication device” (7,546,083); Another granted patent which credits Steve Jobs as one of the inventors titled “Dynamic guides.” This particular patent generally relates to document processing and particularly to the creation and editing of objects in documents, presentation software, graphical user interface (GUI) development tools, drafting and drawing applications, various other single-media and multimedia creation/editing tools using a dynamic guide (7,545,392). Lastly there are three other patents respectfully titled “Method and apparatus for creating multimedia presentations” (7,546,544), “Method and apparatus for digital image manipulation to remove image blemishes” (7,545,994) and “Electrical connector with flexible interconnect” (7,544,066).

NOTICE: MacNN presents only a brief summary of patents with associated graphic(s) for journalistic news purposes as each such patent application and/or Issued Patent is revealed by the U.S. Patent & Trade Office. Readers are cautioned that the full text of any patent application and/or Issued Patent should be read in its entirety for further details. For additional information on any granted patent noted above, simply feed the patent number(s) into this search engine.

Jack Purcher, MacNN Senior Patent Editor