The last bit of news we got from Apple's latest display-actuator toy was a press report from AppleInsider of Apple filing patents overseas and of their engineers giving some details of the device. Also provided there was a schematic from the patent application featuring the control mechanisms that make the display move, rotate, and click at a finger's command. And that's it. A device that promises to (probably) eliminate conventional control buttons and maximize gadget-surface real estate, and that's all the details we can get.

Until now. A report at the MacNN site finally gives details of the display actuator, also based on the patent applications Apple has filed and which the US Patent & Trademark Office and European Patent Office published. If you happen to be engineering-inclined and have a great tolerance for reading long blocks of text, you can read the source article at the link below, along with their caveat that "MacNN presents only a brief summary of patents with associated graphic(s) for journalistic news purposes as each such patent application and/or grant is revealed by the U.S. Patent & Trade Office. Readers are cautioned that the full text of any patent applications and/or grants should be read in its entirety for further details."

Now if the MacNN details were not enough for you and you have a really great tolerance for reading long blocks of text conveniently unedited by a government office, then you can probably have a crack at the USP&TO's or EPO's publication of said patent (in case you're wondering, the USP&TO's website doesn't have the publication yet, but it probably will be uploaded in the future).

If you're neither, and you're still curious as to the future of touch-controlled technology, we've summarized things for you. Read on, and we hope you can follow along.

The display is designed to function like as a control device. Think of an iPod (which is probably where they'll use this technology, anyway; it's also likely that the patent can be licensed to Pocket PC/smartphone manufacturers) where the control dial has been deleted and the screen expanded to fill the entire unit. If they ever implement this tech (are we kidding? Of course they'll implement this tech!) we can guess Apple's tag line: "All video. No buttons. Ever."

(The following pictures are sourced from the illustrations accompanying the patent publication, as found in MacNN.)

The actuator will work like a movable display. The display screen could be mounted on a pivot providing from one to even three degrees of motion. Depending on where the pivot is located, and how the screen is mated to it, the display can be tilted like a D-pad, and can even be rotated like a dial on the z-axis. Spring-mount the pivot, and you can even "click" commands by pressing the screen straight down.

The actuator will work like a touch-screen display. Besides acting like a D-pad, it will also act like a traditional touch-screen display as already present on many stylus-operated mobiles. Depending on the gadget and setup, the touch-screen input can be used in conjunction with or separately from the D-pad-style actuator. In the first case, the gadget will respond appropriately to a simultaneous touch-screen and D-pad actuator input (and can probably treat that as a separate command from touch screen-only and D-pad-only commands). In the second case the gadget only one input will be accepted at a time; either the touch screen input or the D-pad actuator input, and will ignore the other command as appropriate.

We'll try to explain our interpretations with a possible example: instead of pressing straight down on the screen for a general "click" command, the gadget could interpret a touch-screen input over a graphic button, plus a substantial tilt in that direction, as a "click" or "click-hold" on the button. Or lightly touching the icon would be "click," and plus-tilt would be a...more aggressive command. (What's a more aggressive command than "click"? Self-destruct?).

By altering the means of mounting the touch-sensitive display screen - the patent indicates a "ball-and-socket joint" here - the actuator can pivot in multiple directions, "thereby allowing a plurality of button zones to be created." We don't know how to interpret this - and the guy typing this is already on his eighth cup of coffee - but we're guessing either (a) the actuator will be sensitive across the entire 360 degrees of the compass rose, like an analog stick, or (b) also like an analog stick, it will interpret different degrees of tilt as different commands (like "halfway tilted" is different from "fully tilted." Or (c) both. We can only speculate. We don't have those wonderful demo packages Apple must have given the USP&TO and the EPO to play with.

Speaking of which, why can't we ever get video feeds of those wonderful patent demo toys in action? It would make the job of translating these patent publications a whole lot simpler! So since we're denied this convenience, all we're left with is our imagination (and a mind racked from reading patent abstracts). Can you imagine a world without buttons?