Three new touch surface patent applications have surfaced from Apple. These patents seem less focussed on the iPhone and iPod touch but hint at larger devices. The applications focus on recognising the touch of a hand and identifying the various parts and they using this data to filter the incoming data. For example, the patent [...]

You know those small annoying CDs that don’t work in slot loading machines, that marketing firms seem so keen on? Well, I suspect they have been a small annoyance to Apple too — their customer support people must be forever fishing the little blighters out of people’s MacBooks. So, the senior vice president of hardware [...]

photo by dailyinvention
Today, nine Apple patent applications concerning Flash memory became available. Instead of Apple being a passive buyer of NAND memory as is generally supposed this shows Apple actively researching Flash memory, memory controllers and circuit boards and their applications. Obviously, the development of Flash memory technology has implications beyond the iPod sphere and [...]

I love Quick Look but when it doesn’t work for a certain file type it makes me sad– especially Illustrator files which by default are PDF compatible and should be quick-lookable.
I’m compiling a list of useful Quick Look plugins here. So far, including plugins for eps, zip, flash, XML, various image formats and folders
UPDATE
I’ve found [...]

So, the rumor mill is churning out rumors on the possibility of a new sub-notebook from Apple in the near future. One of the interesting details of the rumor as reported by 9to5mac.com is that:
There is something strange about the touchpad

This isn’t very useful as far as rumors go. However, Apple has made some interesting [...]

Leopard Spotlight is infintely better than Tiger Spotlight; it’s faster and is much more flexible. Apple has made the searching easy by adding simple nature language Attributes which make searching for particular metadata easy. I’ve been exploring what tags can used in the spotlight menu.
Attributes are the tags like date: or kind: etc. These are [...]

Screencapture is great, and Apple’s built in system allows you to capture the screen in a multitude of different ways (it’s surprising how often you need to screen capture). Anyway, most of these features aren’t new to Leopard but they are significantly improved (especially the new cute and useful cursors primarily context dependent cursor to [...]

Apple seems to be considering replacing the keyboard (say of a MacBook) with a touch sensitive surface. This would be great for browsing coverflow, zooming in on google maps, gesturing etc but many touch typists are probably screaming NO! In this patent application Apple (courtesy of an ex-Fingerworks director, Wayne Westerman) are trying incorporate tactility [...]

Recently, chatter has increased about the possibility of an ‘iPhone nano’ (a smaller lighter more-iPod-than-iPhone phone). I have no informer in a Taiwanese factory, nor saw one over someone’s shoulder at an airport neither do I have a friend who is a waiter at a restaurant who played with one. But, what I do [...]

A number of Apple patents have been released this week. Some of them deal with further refinement of touchpads (probably most of them represent versions which won’t make the light of day). One interesting example is a scroll touchpad for an iPhone that looks a lot like a present iPod. The innovation Apple suggests appears to resemble an old rotary telephone more than anything (everything old is new again!). Also, Apple seems to have got around to putting a patent application for the iChat interface - one version they show shows a three-way text chat. Another application has a description of a local area broadcast system for the iPhone (or similar product), allowing location/person specific information/applications to be sent to anyone in range. Imagine being in an Apple store/Ikea and being able to just click off on you iPhone the products you wanted and pay by credit card and then just pick them up at the counter. Mmmmh, we’ll see.