Type of Article: MacTech Blog

Apple has been granted a patent (number 20120042174) for a remote container. Apparently, it involves the company’s iCloud service.

An Apple patent (number 20120042028) for methods and systems for managing to-do items or notes and electronic messages has appeared at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office.

Methods and systems for managing to-do items and/or notes and/or emails (or other electronic messages) are described. A record, such as a To do item, in a database maintained locally by the data processing system is encoded into metadata. The metadata is sent as a false email message by an email client application executing on the data processing system to a remote email message server.

A handful of Apple patents involving population segmentation have appeared at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. They relate to electronic content delivery and, more specifically, to intelligent targeting of invitational content to a user based on user characteristics.

There seems to be no end to the sales potential of the iPad. A new customer survey conducted by B2B daily deals service RapidBuyr (http://www.RapidBuyr.com) has found that mobile technologies and travel deals top the list of purchases that small business owners plan to make in the coming year.

Not surprisingly, tablet computers, like the iPad, appear to be in high demand, with 49%t saying they intend to purchase one in the next six to 12 months. In addition, 44% plan to buy mobile phones, which can only be good news for the iPhone.

John Gruber at “Daring Fireball” (http://www.daringfireball.net) points out that Safari’s “hovering-over-a-link pointing-finger” cursor looks a little different in Mac OS X 10.7.3 and could hint at “retina display” Macs in the near future. I’d love to see that happen, though I’m a bit dubious.

Noting that several icons and images have gotten the “high-DPI treatment in 10.7.3,” Gruber says that “the simplest explanation is that Apple only just now got around to increasing the resolution of these elements for the benefit of users who use the cursor-zooming Universal Access feature.”