Apple’s “Documents in the Cloud” Patent Surfaces

Grazed from PatentlyApple. Author: Editorial Staff.

On August 8, 2013, the US Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple that revealed their original iCloud service for Documents in the Cloud. Our report provides a basic overview of the patent related to Documents in the Cloud along with a video of Steve Jobs introducing the new service at WWDC 2011.

Apple’s Patent Background

Conventionally, a user’s computing experiences were typically focused upon a particular device within a given environment. For instance, the user might interact with a desktop computer in the work environment, to store and access work-related documents, and might also have a home computer for storing and accessing personal documents. Alternatively, the user might employ a portable computer, e.g., a laptop computer, for use in both the work and home environments. In either case, the documents that the user created, edited, or otherwise interacted with, were typically stored on the user’s computing device, or accessed via a network to which the computing device was connected…

More recently, the user’s experience hasn’t been limited to a single device for a given environment. Rather, the user might employ a number of different computing devices, such as a laptop or desktop computer, a tablet computer, a smartphone, and the like. At any given time, the user might view, and otherwise interact with, a particular document on any one of these different devices. To enable the user to access and interact with documents via any one of these different devices, the documents are stored both locally on the devices, and on a remote server that functions to synchronize the stored documents on all of the various computing devices. Thus, regardless of which computing device the user employs to access a document, the same version of the document will be present on each device. This type of computing experience is sometimes referred to as "cloud computing."…

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