Gadget Lab

Apple’s autocorrect functionality could take your WPM into account. Photo: Peter McCollough/Wired

You can always count on Apple to file an eclectic array of patent applications, ranging from never-before-seen technology, to patents seemingly describing shipping products. On Thursday, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office published an Apple-perfect bunch: One describes new virtual keyboard functionality, another delves into mobile optics, and the third would seem to patentize GarageBand itself.

The first deals with how Apple’s autocorrect in iOS and OS X could differ from the competition. Typical autocorrect methods might compare typed words with entries in an internal dictionary. And some methods will fix incorrectly spelled words by looking at the fixed QWERTY keyboard layout. So, for example, when you type “snafi,” the autocorrect engine recognizes that the “i” key is adjacent to the “u” key, and suggests “snafu” instead.

But Apple’s proposed implementation adds one more level — keystroke timing — to the mix.

This could be implemented a few different ways. In one scenario, your mobile device determines your baseline typing speed, and when there’s an anomaly (like if you hit successive characters super quickly), this can be flagged as a possible error. Those characters then rank more highly as ones that might need to be replaced or transposed than other letters in the word. The patent filing uses the misspelled “theere” as an example, where the word “there” would be recommended with the highest score.

GarageBand by any other name. Image: Free Patents Online

Apple also moved to patent its music recorder and virtual instrument player, GarageBand. Apple contends that electronic musical input systems, by too closely resembling their real-world counterparts, often have requirements that “make the systems less useful, less enjoyable, and less popular” to novice users who may not have a background playing an actual instrument.

“Therefore, a need exists for a system that strikes a balance between simulating a traditional musical instrument and providing an optimized user interface that allows effective musical input and performance,” the patent filing states.

Titled “Musical Systems and Methods,” the patent specifically details the GarageBand user interface and how it lets users create music using a set of related chords onscreen, as well as how it can accept multiple user inputs.

Today’s third noteworthy patent filing deals with camera optics, something Apple seems to be particularly interested in. It describes a device with dual image sensors, one for a black-and-white camera and one for a color camera. Images and data from both sensors (luma or light data from the first, chroma or color data from the second) could be combined to create a resulting image.

This harkens back to a patent filing we saw a few weeks ago detailing a way to create swappable camera optics using configurable back panels on a portable device like the iPhone. In that implementation, you’d change out the rear panel of the electronic device to switch from say, a black-and-white optimized optical component like an IR filter to one containing an optical zoom or image stabilizer, for example.