When the iPhone first came out, Steve Jobs — quizzed why Apple had eschwed a stylus — famously quipped that in his opinion, “If you see a stylus, they blew it.”

It’s a great quote, but in reality, it’s always been a little too dismissive of the benefits of styluses. In truth, there’s a lot of uses for a stylus on a touchscreen — for example, in creating digital art. Styluses are also of great people to people trying to use touchscreen devices who can’t keep their hand steady: my mother, for example, has a hard time typing on her iPod Touch without one because she has had tremors since a stroke a few years back.

It’s nice to see, then, that Apple is softening a little bit on their position against styluses… at least when it comes to filing patents.

Hidden inside a sheathe of patents awarded to Apple today is a particularly interesting one that suggests that your future Mac just might be a slab of aluminum that glows.

If you look at the back of your MacBook, it’s pretty easy to piece together Apple’s current process in making the Apple logo glow. They carve a cut-out of the Apple logo in the MacBook lid, close it up with a sheet of opaque white plastic and when your display is on, the light leaking out causes the logo to emit light.

What Apple wants to do is make the logos and LED displays of future Macs glow without carving a hole in the aluminum. They basically want light-emitting logos and indicators to be invisible unless they are emitting light.

Apple has just been awarded a rather elaborate patent for gloves you can use to operate a capacitive touchscreen. You know, like . Or these. Prior art, much?

The Eastman Kodak Company has all but lost their patent infringement case against Apple over the image preview used in iOS today after an ITC judge dismissed Kodak’s claims.

Apple has been granted its first patent related to Liquidmetal, a space-age metal alloy. But the patent isn’t for a new iPad enclosure or iPhone antenna, as experts have predicted. Instead Apple’s Liquidmetal patent is for an internal component of a fuel cell.

Apple’s new patent describes “amorphous alloy” collector plates for fuel cells, an electrochemical battery that uses hydrogen to generate electricity. Although the patent doesn’t reference the Liquidmetal trademark, the material is an amorphous alloy or “metallic glass.”

Last year, Apple signed an exclusive agreement to use the Liquidmetal Technologies’ IP in consumer electronic products. But of course, the ever-secretive company hasn’t hinted at its plans for the material. The possibilites are endless. Liquidmetal is a super lightweight, high-strength, scratch-proof metal that NASA says is “poised to redefine materials science as we know it in the 21st century.”

Scientists who helped develop Liquidmetal have previously predicted that Apple will use it to build the next iPhone. So why is Apple interested in fuel cells?

Following its success built from offering Android-powered iPhone alternatives, Taiwan-based handset maker HTC seems to now have the iPad in its sights. The company reportedly filed a patent application Dec. 26 for a “handheld device, namely a tablet computer.”

According to the report, the device is named the “HTC Scribe” and is seen as the company’s inevitable move into the burgeoning tablet market now controlled by Apple. The HTC device may “provide an alternative to the iPad,” IDC program Will Stofega told Bloomberg. The new tablet would rival the iPad’s price while providing an experience “as good or better” than the device from Cupertino, the analyst adds.

Eager to keep your nubile teenage daughter from using the new iPhone she got for Christmas as a sexting terminal? Cupertino’s just patented technology to keep her blossoming libido as virginal as the App Store.

Apple will likely bid for part of some of the 4,000 patents worth $1 billion held by bankrupt Nortel Networks, according to a Monday report. Google is probably also competing against the Cupertino, Calif. company to lay claim on patents involving wireless-related technology, such as LTE.

“Sources expect the sale to draw wireless telecom newcomers Apple and Google , which want to build up patent war chests as they fight incumbents such as Nokia, which want to protect their patent positions, in the courts,” according to Reuters.

Did you know Apple is currently embroiled in 42 patent litigation actions against two major Android phone manufacturers, Motorola and HTC? As these things tend to do, resolution of the disputes will take years — and the legal battles surrounding Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android will enrich dozens of attorneys and their families in the process.

Outside of those attorneys there may be no one on earth who has followed the litigation more closely than Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents. Mueller published an exhaustive summary of the current state of affairs last week, and updated it on Monday with the handy graphic pictured above.

Click on the image for a larger view and read Mueller’s updated summary if you dare: it’s a document synthesized from thousands of court filings, organized into 13 “moves” — and fills 25 PDF pages.

[Fortune]

Steve Jobs has made no bones about being skeptical in regards to multitouch displays on desktop and notebook Macs, observing that multitouch works best when a display is horizontal: anything else just leads to gorilla arm.

Right now, that means that Macs’ multitouch options are limited to accessories like the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad, but given the iPad’s success, it’s natural Apple is trying to find a more directly interactive approach to horizontal multitouch, in which the display can convert flush with a lap or a desk when it’s in touch mode.

Now a bevy of new patents have been awarded to Apple, most interestingly in a convertible MacBook-to-iPad-like device, spotted by Patently Apple.