Apr 04

New Apple Patents

Just like software updates, it seems Apple's patent applications come in packs, because most of the time, they file for at least 2 or 3 patents at once, just as it happened yesterday...

Ancient Apple Patent

First, we have 3 patents related to the iPod touch and the iPhone. One of them describes a way to rearrange the Home screen, and the other two are related to the unique touchscreen keyboard able to handle functions such as email editing.

On the other hand, there's also a very interesting patent concerning "episodic" gaming, but this is nothing new, in my opinion - each title is just a part of a greater entity, as it happens in Half-Life 2. Anyway, the interesting part is that Apple's patent covers a new way of marketing such games, by detecting what someone already has bought and played, and this will probably lead to game updates via iTunes or something like that.

At last, Apple also filed patents concerning online stores - it's basically about users of an online shop being allowed to research products themselves and learn about their features, but the site design will take care of recommending what you need, as submitted by other people. Well, I guess we'll see more about this when the AppStore opens, in June...