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New Apple Patent Imagines an OLED Screen As a Keyboard For MacBooks (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The United States Patent and Trademark Office has granted Apple a patent titled "dual display equipment with enhanced visibility and suppressed reflections." The documentation for what is patent number 9,904,502 outlines a device that would use a second display as a dynamic keyboard. Two implementations of this design are described in the patent application, according to Patently Apple. The first utilizes a permanent hinge, while the second allows the screen to be removed and used separately, along the lines of Microsoft's Surface Pro range and other two-in-one computers. The patent documentation makes it clear that the implementation is not intended as an accessory that would allow two iPads to be paired together, with one serving as the keyboard. Additionally, illustrations associated with the application explicitly state that one screen is an OLED display, while the other is an LCD. A double-display set-up could provide easy access to a different keyboard layout language, context-sensitive controls, or even a large sketching surface to use in conjunction with something like an Apple Pencil. However, that flexibility would come at the cost of the traditional typing experience offered by a mechanical keyboard.
An external OLED screen you use as a configurable keyboard basically describes the TouchBar.
Maybe Apple means to make a larger version of it for desktops - one of my biggest gripes is that I actually LIKE the TouchBar and the features it offers across different apps, but I can't get used to them because I often use an external keyboard with my laptop in clamshell mode, and so I never really get used to use the TouchBar as there is no external keyboard that has one.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
DO NOT WANT!
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Is a Nintendo DS that you can tear in half, but with more OLED! and Laptop size!
I already have trouble with the low-profile keyboards on the new MacBooks.
A touchscreen would make it even worse.
Soon to be followed with iOS Pro as the only OS available for the Macbook. The iPhonification of the Mac line is nearly complete!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
and mac laptops will be banned from the bar test if they do this.
on these might have expired. I mean, if the goal is to make a crappy keyboard, why stop at half measures?
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At least that was a proper keyboard with pressable keys and all. Each key had it's own display.
http://www.artlebedev.com/optimus/tactus/
http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/9836/
https://store.artlebedev.com/for-programmers/objects/optimus-popularis/
Holy crap, that will be typing hell. My hands drift on the keyboard all the time on the flat key keyboard as it is. I hope they don't do that on laptops that developers are supposed to be using. That would be just as awful as removing the headphone jack. But courage right.... or maybe another $500 on wireless headphones and a keyboard.
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The sad part is that you have to buy a mac if you want to develop anything for iPhone. Yet the keyboards are crap for developers.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
That's what this sounds like. No thanks, I prefer an actual keyboard.
As snidely as you suggest this, I would be very happy if apple did it. I've never used an apple product, and wouldn't use this one, but I want a nice clamshell style smartphone, and if apple does it then everyone else will copy it in short order and I'll get something like the phone I actually want.
combined with rotation detection, if you accidentally put your laptop down upside down, no need to turn it over!
Except part of this patent is to specifically stop reflections. Or you'd end up with overhead lights and the main screen making the keyboard hard to read.
Now that I've typed that out, why the hell do you need to read a keyboard? You don't have eyes on your fingers unless you're Beetlejuice's mate.
They should include a pair of these: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Licen...
The firewall at my office doesn't let me see that website due to "Adult Themes"
That just makes me want to see it more.
Apple won't be happy until they've turned Macbooks into a useless slab of semi-translucent plastic whose only real difference with the future iPad is that you'll be allowed to run apps you've signed with your own key, instead of being restricted to running only apps already-approved and downloaded from Apple's store.
The first 21 claims are based on a claim of the device having two display separated by a hinge.
What in the claims distinguishes this invention from Nintendo DS?
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO-2
The OLPC XO-2 did have two identical displays, maybe having one be OLED makes it novel enough to call their own...
Probably has more rounded corners too!
Sorry, but would it allow
1) Typing faster than on standard keyboard?
2) Typing with less errors than on standard keyboard?
3) Typing easier and with less health problems than on standard keyboard?
4) Typing at least not so expensively that on specialized ergo keyboards?
No. This keyboard is made for the single segment of market: Consumer, not professional.
And now I should remember the words of (then) education minister of Russia: Communists were not right when they tried to grow a creator-man. Now we should grow a qualified consumer of all the things the mankind has been created.
I find the touchbar is shit. If's different for every app so it's impossible to get used to
That's the whole reason I like it; as for getting used to it, it's VERY possible for apps you use a lot. Which is the point, for those apps you get extra custom functions that can work in ways keys do not (like sliding control over values).
However like I said, that getting used to part is more of a problem than it should be because there is no external keyboard with a TouchBar.
The volume down was always in the same place.
They still are. At most you have to tap away custom features to reveal them again, but mostly (just like Esc) they are always up there.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Seems like apple is still stuck in the past...
They even gave microsoft the idea for clippy...but with Bill the Science Guy (predates him too:)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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So basically it's an updated Acer Iconia Dual screen or Toshiba Libretto W105? How is that not prior-art?
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Well played!
The proposed XO-2 was a clamshell where both halves were touchscreens, and one mode of using it was to use the lower half as a keyboard.
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO-2
I'm not a lawyer but I'm pretty sure you can make something like this despite Apple's patents.
Now, Apple is making claims that their devices have good visibility outdoors, even if the user is wearing sunglasses, so maybe there is something of value in their new patents. But the patents cannot simply be "computing device using touchscreen as a keyboard" because it would have flunked the prior art test.
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How did they actually manage to make this patentable ?
There have been countless variations of this "software is controlling the faces of the keys" since forever.
- Entire second touchscreens working as a keyboard.
- individual LCD, eInk or OLED screens behind every key (Art Lebedev Studio's Optimus Keyboard was attracting lots of attention back in the days).
- whole LCDs/OLED screens behind the whole keyboard (what Art Lebedev eventually settled with to make it less expensive to produce than the earlier models)
- laser projecting a keyboard on any surface
etc.
How the fuck did Apple manage to file a patent about a horse that has been beaten to death during the past 15 years ?
(Reads TFA,...)
Ah, okay. They have "improved" the technology by adding polarized filter, because glare can be a problem with the kind of glossy surface they use.
Yay for innovation !
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Touch typing is for wimps. And I am a card carrying member of the Touch Typing Wimps Club. You can (try to) pry it out of my cold dead hands.
I also have trouble touch typing on Mac chiclet keyboards. Something's not right about the spacing of the keys, but I didn't try to scientifically figure out what. It feels like the keys are ever so slightly further apart than what I'm used to and I end up pressing in the gaps between the keys.
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This can only sound good to those who have to look at their keyboard to type anyway. Otherwise it's an incredibly annoying distraction. I look at my hands maybe once ever 10 minutes.
It might be different if I was a hunt-n-pecker like Tim Cook.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
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