View this article at: http://dev.macnn.com/articles/08/04/15/optical.scrolling.patent
Tuesday, Apr 15, 2008 7:00pm

Patents: optical scrolling ...

The US Patent and Trademark Office today published five Apple patents that have been granted: one for the Mighty Mouse, an iPod lanyard, a Digital-to-Analogue Converter, an Exceptional Situation Manager, as well as one for a device which has yet to be seen in an Apple product. According to the report, the device could be a media player, storage device, or other mobile device. Other theories could indicate the device to be a "smart" media remote, an updated design of the iPod nano or Shuffle, among others.

Another patent indicates an optical scrolling surface to replace the scroll ball in the Mighty Mouse, while yet another relates to exception handling during computations.