Apple
A few things going on over with Apple:
Couple new Commercials
An interesting article about the iPhone
“other computer manufacturers are the Fords of technology, creating mass-produced machines lacking in personality.”
And this could be the most interesting:
Apple patents keyboard with click wheel
According to MacNN:
On April 12th, 2007 the US Patent & Trademark Office published Apple’s continuation patent application titled Method and Apparatus for Accelerated Scrolling. They continue to say that the patent relates to the iPod click wheel and how to integrate this feature into the keyboard in the area of the numeric pad. And how this would work more like the iPhone’s touch screen. And the possibility of replacing the mouse.
While all of that is very exciting, I was curious as to how much truth there was behind it. So I went the US Patent & Trademark’s site to try and find out some more info. But was not successful in finding this particular one. Then I tried Googles patent search and was still not able to find anything. Then I came across an article dated April 28th, 2003 titled Apple applies for mouse, scroll pad patents and this backed up some of the information on MacNN.
-The patent describes a mouse where the main body is replaced by a rotating, tilting wheel, which in addition to the usual clickability, provides the ability to scroll backwards and forwards through documents.
-Another advantage of the invention is that pressing down on the disc for clicking does not cause the disc to rotate, i.e., since the motion of the disc is orthogonal to the direction of clicking (button press) the user can press on the disc itself to activate the button.
So this leads me to believe that this truly is something that Apple has up their sleeve. And could be very exciting. But at the same time it could still be something to lead all of us astray from what they really have going on.
And in other Apple news; Leopard’s release has been pushed back to October due to a small bugaboo.