Apple Wins Major Patents for Final Cut Pro, GarageBand, OS X, More
The US Patent and Trademark Office officially published a series of six newly granted patents for Apple Inc. today. The notables within this group include patents for Final Cut Pro, GarageBand and the OS X layout engine. Other interesting patents cover a flash memory system that relates to Apple's iPhone and iPod touch and finally one relating to enhancing Intel x86 instruction sets.
Apple Wins Patent for Final Cut Pro
Apple's patent is directed towards a method and apparatus for reducing data events that represent a user's interaction with a control interface.
Some embodiments of the invention provide a method for reducing data events representing a parameter of a signal as adjusted by a user through a control interface during a time period. The method includes receiving a series of data events where each data event has a parameter value of the signal and a time-based value associated with the parameter value that corresponds to an instance in time during the time period. The method further includes processing three data events in the series of data events and eliminating one of the three data events based in part on the parameter values of the three data events relative to each other.
Apple's patent FIG. 18 above shows us an example of a Final Cut Pro screenshot of a peaks-only representation of a stream of data events.
Crafting Tetro - Francis Ford Coppola and Walter Murch on Final Cut Studio
Apple credits Kelly Jacklin, Alan Cannistraro and Roger Powell as the inventors of granted patent 7,610,553 for Final Cut Pro, which was originally filed back in Q2 2003.
Apple Wins Patent for GarageBand
Apple's patent generally relates to their iLife application known as GarageBand. The patent focuses on GarageBand's interface and methods of manipulating duration-of-time and guiding notes for staff-based musical notation.
Noted above is Apple's patent FIG. 2 which illustrates GarageBand's notation window along with FIGS. 9A, 9B and 9C which illustrate notes of various durations with duration indicators.
Noted below is Apple's patent FIG. 15 which illustrates an input of a musical instrument within a display window, wherein the input has an octave picker.
Apple credits Matt Evans as the sole inventor of granted patent 7,608,775 for GarageBand which was originally filed back in Q1 2007.
Apple Wins an OS X Patent for a Data-Driven Layout Engine
Apple's patent FIG. 4 illustrates an exemplary architecture showing theme and application interaction.
Apple's Abstract: Systems and methods for providing a user with increased flexibility and control over the appearance and behavior of objects on a user interface are described. Sets of objects can be grouped into themes to provide a user with a distinct overall impression of the interface. These themes can be switched dynamically by switching pointers to drawing procedures or switching data being supplied to these procedures. To buffer applications from the switchable nature of graphical user interfaces according to the present invention, colors and patterns used to implement the interface objects are abstracted from the interface by, for example, pattern look-up tables.
Apple credits Joseph Ruff Robert Johnston, Jr. and Robert Ulrich as the inventors of granted patent 7,609,279 for a Data-Driven Layout Engine, which was originally filed for back in Q2 2005.
Apple's patent generally relates to flash memory devices, and particular implementations may relate to methods and systems for disabling faulty dies in flash memory devices. Apple uses NAND memory in their iPhone and iPod touch.
Apple's patent FIG. 2 is a schematic diagram of a flash memory system illustrating a variety of disabling mechanisms for disabling individual die in a flash memory device.
In some flash memory manufacturing environments, a small percentage of flash memory dies may have defects that may be detected by testing. One example of a defect is a bit error at a particular memory location. Some defects may be compensated for by techniques such as redirecting read/write accesses from defective memory locations to a set of redundant memory locations.
In some cases, more than one die of flash memory may be assembled together into a single integrated circuit (IC) package. In such multi-die flash memory packages, tests may be performed to detect defects in any of the flash memory dies in the package. The entire package may be discarded if any individual flash memory die in the package has more than an acceptable number of defects.
Apple credits Michael Cornwell and Christopher Dudte as the inventors of granted patent 7,609,561 relating to Disabling Faulty Flash Memory Dies. The patent was originally filed for back in Q1 2006.
Granted Patent: Performing Variable and/or Bitwise Shift Operation for a Shift Instruction that does not provide a Variable or Bitwise Shift Option
Some embodiments present a method of performing a variable shift operation. This method can be used by a microprocessor that does not allow variable shift operation for certain operand sizes. The method simulates a shift instruction that shifts an operand by a shift count. The method identifies a first shift command and a second shift command. The method computes a mask value. The mask value depends on whether the shift count is less than half of the operand size or greater than or equal to half of the operand size. The method uses the mask value to cause one of the first shift command and the second shift command to produce no shift. In some embodiments, the method allows for the shift count to be specified in bytes or in bits.
For example, in Intel's x86 architecture, the instruction for shifting a double quadword (where a word is 16 bits or 2 bytes) does not allow shifting in bits but the instruction for shifting a quadword does allow shifting in bits. Accordingly, in this architecture, some programmers who want to shift a double quadword register would write code to use the quadword shift instruction to generate missing bits from the other side and then would perform a logical `or` operation on them to make the final result. Other such examples could found in this patent.
Apple's patent FIG. 1 presents a process that illustrates the method of implementing the double quadword shift with a variable shift operand.
Apple credits Hyeonkuk Jeong and Paul Chang as the inventors of granted patent 7,610,472 which was originally filed for in Q2 2006.
Apple was also granted a patent for Color Management for Limited Gamut Devices under number 7,609,413.
Notice: Patently Apple presents only a brief summary of patents with associated graphic(s) for journalistic news purposes as each such patent application and/or Granted 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 reviewed here today, simply feed the individual patent number noted above into this search engine. To read this report in another major language, use Yahoo! Babel Fish
Thanks for the Coppola and Walter Murch video. I hadn't seen that before. Very nice.
Also your Ghostly fun graphic is cool, an important message without being "preachy". Well done.
Posted by: Laura C. | October 27, 2009 at 08:30 AM