I find it curious that the menu bar in these patent example images is no longer pinned to an edge of the "screen." The major historical justification for the Mac OS X having a single global menu bar was to exploit Fitt's Law by giving the menu bar an effective "infinite" height. Unless there is a pointing device that handles 3-D positioning or otherwise provides some feedback or scroll dampening when traversing a corner of this "virtual room," Apple may as just as well give up and pin menus with each window like all the more recent GUIs do...