Several Apple patents have appeared today at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. Following is a summary of each.

Two patents involve battery technology. Patent number 20120153728 is for balancing voltages between battery banks and involves a system that that balances voltages between battery banks. The system includes battery banks, including a first bank and a second bank, and a first capacitor. William C. Athas and Thomas C. Greening are the inventors.

Patent number 20120153898 involves a method and system for charging a series battery. Some embodiments of the present invention provide a system for charging a series battery, wherein the series battery is comprised of a set of banks which are connected in series, so that the same charging current passes through each bank. During the charging process, the system measures a voltage across each bank in the set of banks. The system then compares the measured voltage with a target voltage for each bank, and adjusts the charging process based on results of the comparisons between the measured voltage and the target voltage. The inventors are Steven C. Michalske, Greening, Jeffrey P. Ungar and Athas.

Other Apple patents appearing today are:

° Patent number 20120154415 for a graphics animation and compositing operations framework has a layer tree for interfacing with the application and a render tree for interfacing with a render engine. Layers in the layer tree can be content, windows, views, video, images, text, media, or other types of objects for an application's user interface. The application commits state changes to the layers of the layer tree. The inventors are Ralph Brunner, John Harper and Peter N. Graffagnino.

° Patent number 20120154423 for systems and methods to enable the creation and the display of dithered images. Embodiments include techniques that use the relationship between the luminance and the color of a source image as a dithering heuristic. The inventors are Ulrich T. Barnhoefer and Taif Ahmed Syed.

° Patent number 20120154428 involves systems and methods are disclosed to enable the creation and the display of spatio-temporal dithered images. Embodiments include techniques that use color-shifting and luminance. Barnhoefer is the inventor.

° Patent number 20120155174 is for a system and method, including computer software, that allows reading data from a flash memory cell. The inventors are Michael Cornwell and Christopher P. Dudte.

° Patent number 20120155292 involves mobile hardware and network environment simulation. Per the patent, the technology provides an ability to simulate the performance of mobile content in a more realistic testing environment than previously available. The inventors are Ralph Zazula, Greg Gilley, Ryan Rowat Kiems and Mark Malone.

° Patent number 20120155638 involves security keys of a cipher using properties of the cipher process. In the field of computer enabled cryptography, such as a block cipher, the cipher is hardened against an attack by protecting the cipher key, by applying to it a predetermined linear permutation before using one key to encrypt or decrypt a message. Apple says this is especially advantageous in a "White Box" environment where an attacker has full access to the cipher algorithm, including the algorithm's internal state during its execution. The inventors are Augustin J. Farrugia, Benoit Chevalier- Mames, Mathiew Ciet and Thomas Icart.

° Patent number 20120157158 is for magnetometer accuracy and use. Per the patent, aparameter related to the Earth's magnetic field can be used to determine accuracy of a magnetometer of a mobile device. The inventors are Robert Mayor, Patrick Piemonte, Ronald Keryuan Hugan and Parin Patel.

° Patent number 20120158677 involves systems and methods for streaming compressed files via a non-volatile memory. This can relate to streaming compressed files via a non-volatile memory ("NVM") of a media player. Ron Shachar is the inventor.

° Patent number 20120158730 is for the automatic discovery of metadata. This is directed to processing stored data to automatically generate metadata for the stored data. In particular, this is directed to identifying metadata associated with stored data, and identifying other data that relates to the stored data from one or more sources. The inventors are Michael Ingrassia, Jeffrey Lee and Dave Rampel.

° Patent number 20120159011 involves enhancements to data-driven media management within an electronic device. The inventors are Andrew Rostaing, Anthony J. Guetta and Greg Chapman.

° Patent number 20120159186 is for securing the implementation of a cryptographic process using key expansion. The inventors are Farrugia, Chevalier-Mame, Ciet, Icart and Bruno Kindarji.