Apple has been granted a patent (number 11,243,570) for “systems and methods for displaying groups of applications via inputs received at a touch-sensitive secondary display.” It involves the company’s Sidecar feature.
Sidecar, introduced with macOS Catalina, allows users to extend their Mac desktop by using their iPad as a second display or as a high-precision input device across creative Mac apps.
About the patent
Integrating touch-sensitive secondary displays into computing systems has resulted in new ways for users to interact with these systems. However, Apple says that sometimes users can’t to easily locate items on the secondary display while using certain applications. The tech giant wants to improve this by allowing users to easily switch between different display modes for the secondary display. Apple also wants to allow users to associate display modes for the secondary display with different apps.
Summary of the patent
Here’s Apple’s abstract of the patent with the technical details: “Disclosed herein are systems and methods that enable users to customize operation of a touch-sensitive secondary display. An example method includes displaying, at the touch-sensitive secondary display, a system-level affordance for controlling a system-level feature and an affordance for causing display of representations of user-defined workspaces. Receiving a first input at the affordance for causing display of the representations the user-defined workspaces.
“In response to receiving the first input, displaying, at the touch-sensitive secondary display, a selectable user interface object corresponding to a first window from a first application and a second window from a second application. Receiving a selection, and in response to receiving the second input corresponding to selection of the selectable user interface object corresponding to the first window from the first application and the second window from the second application, displaying the first window from the first application and the second window from the second application.”
