New Apple Patents Come to Light
New Apple Patents have surfaced to make your iPhone more secure. The two patents, laid bare for all the interwebs to see by the folks at Unwiredview and MacRumors, are for two very interesting innovations in areas that most geeks can't hear enough about: Biometrics and Graphical User Interface (GUI) tweaks.On the security front, Apple has applied for a patent for a hardware/software mashup allowing an iPhone to identify it's user by measuring their heartbeat. In Apple's own words:To determine the user's heart rate, heartbeat, or other cardiac signals, the electronic device can include one or more sensors embedded in the device. The one or more sensors can include leads for receiving electrical signals from the user's heart. . . . To provide an electrical signal from the user to the processing circuitry, the leads can be exposed such that the user may directly contact the leads, or may instead or in addition be coupled to an electrically conductive portion of the device enclosure (e.g., a metallic bezel or housing forming the exterior of the device).With each person's heartbeat being as unique as they are, the proposed technology would allow for security that's just a wee bit tighter than that trusty old four digit code we're all currently relying on.The second patent, and certainly not the least of the pair presented here today, details Apple's proposal that the venerable desktop widget needn't be a one-dimentional affair:... For example, a three-dimensional widget with four or fewer functions can be of the form of a tetrahedron; a three-dimensional widget with five or six functions can be of the form of a hexahedron; a three-dimensional widget with seven or eight functions can be of the form of a octahedron; and a three-dimensional widget with nine functions can be of the form of a dodecahedron. Thus, if a user specifies ten stock tickers for quotes and technicals, the widget 420 can expand from a hexahedron to a dodecahedron.The patent might not have had us at hello, but it certainly captured our attention at hexahedron. By allowing for more than one page or view of each widget application, deeper information and richer services can be offered without taking up more valuable screen real estate. Now that's a good idea.Bear in mind, that Apple loves them some patents, and files scads of them every year. While both of today's offerings are forward thinking and seem like it would fit nicely in that revolutionary and magical niche that Apple loves to occupy, neither may ever see the light of day.
http://www.maclife.com/article/news/new_apple_patents_come_light
