Apple Patents: Portable Home Folders And Bono Wannabes In The Works

Our sister site Gadget Lab dug up a new Apple patent for “Portable Home Folders,” which could mean that it'll soon be easier to carry your entire User folder on all your portable devices like the iPhone or iPod.

It's possible to achieve this now with a bit of hacking, but be sure to check out Gadget Lab for the details on how Apple plans to do it.

In other Apple patent news, AppleInsider reports that the company has filed for a patent that allows dynamic lyrics display for iPods and iPhones.

The gist of the system outlined in the patent is that your iPod (or iPhone) would store lyric information and if the information isn't already available would then query a service to retrieve it. In the case of the iPhone this could probably happen from the device via WiFi or Edge, but otherwise would be tied to iTunes (unless a WiFi iPod is in the works).

The process as described in the patent works like this:

identifying an audio file for a media item to be played, the identified audio file including at least encoded audio content for the media item and encoded lyric codes for the media item; accessing lyrics pertaining to the media item; processing the identified audio file to extract and decode the encoded audio content and the encoded lyric codes; playing of the audio content that has been extracted and decoded from the identified audio file; displaying a portion of the lyrics such that the portion of the lyrics being displayed corresponds to that portion of the audio content being played; and distinguishably displaying, based on the lyric codes, a specific part of the portion of the lyrics being displayed from at least one other part of the lyrics being displayed.

Can a mobile karoke phenomena be far behind?