We are talking about a invention patent which will probably never end up being implemented in iOS for iDevices, but if Apple decided to do it, how much would it change things? The patent registered by Apple describes a method to implement web clip widgets in iOS. For those who don't know, web clip widgets are part of a technology presented by Apple at WWDC 2006 that allows users to save a part of a website in the Mac OS X Dashboard as a widget and receive updates live from that page. Every time the respective site was updated, the user saw the update in the dashboard and accessed the site.
Apple has been granted a patent for Web Clip Widgets on iOS Devices. The original idea for Web Clip creation for the Mac was first introduced at Apple's WWDC in August 2006. With Web Clip, you're able to make a portion of your favorite webpage into a Web Clip widget and add it to Dashboard – a built in feature of OS X. When the webpage's content is updated, your Web Clip widget is also updated. When you click a Web Clip widget in Dashboard, the webpage you used to create it opens. Today's granted patent is about using the Web Clip feature to create widgets on iOS devices. The first iOS device to receive this feature was the iPhone.
Apple describes in this patent a method to implement widgets in Safari for iOS, but for now there is not even a dashboard in iOS. Such a function would be more than useful for iDevice owners, but it is hard to believe that we will ever see something like this. I for one would be interested in being able to use web clips in such a way on the iPad tablet and even on the iPhone.
