techflash.com

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is confirming Amazon.com’s controversial 1-Click patent following a re-examination that lasted more than four years.

That’s just depressing.

macgeneration.com

Time Machine aurait pu s’appeler Time Tunnel, ainsi que le relève le site Patently Apple. Cette marque, déposée par Apple à la fin de l’année 2006, est désormais abandonnée (Time Machine est arrivé avec Mac OS X Leopard en octobre 2007).

On comprend mieux, d’un coup, l’interface de Time Machine. Je me demande s’ils ont abandonné à cause de droits sur le nom, ou parce que la spirale donnait des vertiges aux utilisateurs.

techcrunch.com

Between the developers I spoke to, the consensus was this: Apple doesn’t appear to be opposed to ‘app generators’ and templates per se, but in the last month or so it has started cracking down on basic applications that are little more than RSS feeds or glorified business cards. In short, Apple doesn’t want people using native applications for things that a basic web app could accomplish.

Nevermind the part about pulling the rug from yet another bunch of iPhone-based businesses, as it’s par for the course by now, but this particular rule is bullshit. Some sites have dedicated readers who want to have a shortcut or two on their Springboard — and most users don’t know, or want to know, about manually adding a shortcut from within Safari. They just want to click a link and download an app, because Apple has spent the last year emphasizing that “there’s an app for that.”

I understand, and support, the desire to remove those apps from App Store listings — but not banning them altogether.

If Apple wants to approve everything that can be installed on an iPhone (for security’s sake, let’s say) and doesn’t want to pollute the App Store, here’s a novel idea: just approve the apps in such a way that they don’t appear in listings and search but are only accessible by using the direct URL. Or are they also trying to cut down the in-house testers’ workload?

beautifulpixels.com

I can’t believe this works.

Of course, it doubles or triples the amount of CPU power it takes for my Mac mini to play a video (haven’t even tried on the old iMac), and it’s not very pleasant to watch (do real Ambilight TVs lag so much?), but it’s a nice tech demo for HTML 5.

engadget.com

That looks much smaller than it did in my head — pretty much an iPad folded in two. It better have a super-high-resolution screen if it’s gonna be of any use.

As we’ve heard, the interface appears to be pen-based and centered around drawing and writing, with built-in handwriting recognition and a corresponding web site that allows access to everything entered into the device in a blog-like format complete with comments.

Cool.

gizmodo.com

After being recommended by Google to speak to HTC’s technical support, Crave was told that "putting a phone in a tight pair of jeans and sitting down would usually cause the kind of damage," and that "people sometimes forget that they don’t go in pockets."

Nice.

Apple’s humidity sensors don’t seem so bad now.

wired.com

You’re not crazy, and neither are we: The touchscreen on the Apple iPhone really is more responsive than the screens on the BlackBerry Storm, the Motorola Droid, the Nexus One and many other phones, even though all of these devices use essentially the same touch-sensing hardware.

Though handset makers buy their touchscreens as components from the same select pool of suppliers, a good touchscreen experience requires more than just hardware. It requires a bit of design alchemy blending software, engineering and calibration for the perfect feel. Few smartphone makers have managed to get that balance right, say experts.

Followed by a long article correctly concluding that Steve Jobs’s perfectionism is to thank for this.

iphonefreak.com

“My expectation is that there’s not going to be a lot of people out there looking for another subscription,” he said during a webcast of an investor conference, adding that the device would be a mainly “Wi-Fi driven product.”

Translation: “We absolutely haven’t planned to provide the network capacity needed for people to use the 3G data plan we’re offering. And if you do start using it, we’ll have to slap a 500MB ‘reasonable use’ limit. Unlimited data for $30? Come on, if you believed we actually meant it, it’s your own damn fault for being so gullible.”

mashable.com

Gesture Search is pretty straightforward: you open it up and then draw letters. Draw a M and you’ll get contacts, bookmarks, and apps that start with M. Draw an o and you’ll get results starting with “Mo,” and so on until you find what you’re looking for. Queries can also be erased by drawing a line left to right, while drawing right to left removes the last letter in the current sequence.

Want!

But for Apple to do that on the Spotlight home screen would mean to acknowledge that the software keyboard isn’t perfect, and I don’t see that happening.

googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com

An interesting point that I don’t remember giving much thought about, even though it should be obvious: nobody cares about the <title> that’s displayed on top of a browser window; it should be 100% optimized for when it’s show in search results.

Also, the report mentions that you can go to Google’s Webmaster Tools and decide which variants of your URLs should be prioritized for which geographical user base; I have to check that out. Nah, it’s useless except for some very exceptional cases.

engadget.com

The upshot of this whole thing — with patents covering very basic aspects of object-oriented operating system development — is that you can’t create a new operating system nowadays (or a phone, or much of anything) unless you have a portfolio of patents of your own so that you can force every other player in the field to sign a non-aggression pact with you, like Microsoft and Apple did back then.

Or you can stay in Europe. (For now.)

arstechnica.com

We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.

Of course, most of those are bullshit patents. Uh, I mean, software patents.

Gotta wonder what’s the ultimate motivation for this. I guess it still smarts Apple, and Jobs personally, that Microsoft was able to copy all it could from MacOS and, now that Apple has pretty much reinvented the smartphone and does own patents, it’s tempting to use them.

But the timing is weird, right after Nokia slapped Apple with the same kind of suit, and just about the same rhetoric. Is Apple bullying forward, going after the smallest possible actor of the field, the one who won’t have patents of its own to fight back with? Or could they think it will make them look more serious in their negotiations (or trials) with Nokia?

arstechnica.com

So there’s a very good chance that the issue here is an honest error. What is remarkable, though, is that it exists. This browser ballot, as simple as it is, has been months in the making. The decision to do the randomization client-side, where it depends on the web browser, rather than server-side, where it would be consistent for all users, is a little surprising. But most remarkable at all is that no one responsible for signing off and saying "that’s an acceptable response to the Competition Commission’s complaint" bothered to do this testing.

Or it would be remarkable if we weren’t talking about Microsoft.

9to5mac.com

Sulcer, who is a 70 year old grandfather to nine, won by purchasing Johnny Cash’s “Guess Things Happen That Way”.  He had no idea Apple was even having a contest.

Oh, come on. You want me to believe that the person who downloaded the 10-billionth iTunes song just happens to be a technology-literate 70-year-old grandfather who knows who Steve Jobs is — and listens to Johnny Cash?

macstories.net

Squeeze is very simple and straightforward: basically, it can keep track of some selected folders and compress them without visible differences to the user, but saving space in the background. It uses the latest HFS-comrpession technology built in Snow Leopard to compress all the files within a folder you choose to be processed. After the compression process, Mac OS will read the file again just fine […]

I’ve downloaded it (hey, it’s free on MacHeist, and they’re not even forcing you to tweet this time), but before I decide whether to install it I’ll wait for the technical reviews that don’t gush about it.

There’s a reason why OS X doesn’t compress the whole drive by default, and until I read more about the trade-offs implied by using Squeeze, I’ll stay on the fence. (The reason could simply be that it makes the drive unreadable from not-10.6 machines, which isn’t much of a problem.)

daringfireball.net

And if a bunch of [former] Apple geniuses can’t kick butt on their own at Palm, how are they going to kick butt without Steve at Apple?

That’s an interesting point, and I disagree with Gruber’s arguments about it. The thing is, though, that Palm failed for three reasons: (1) they were going against Apple, (2) they were two years late on the iPhone market, and (3) they didn’t have enough cash for the first webOS phone to be really good hardware.

None of those reasons will apply to Apple post-Jobs (for a while).

blogs.wsj.com

Last night, in an embarrassing glitch for Facebook that raises questions about privacy on the site, some users of the social-networking service began getting hundreds of personal messages that weren’t intended for them.

Jesus-Christ, you can not afford to fuck that up.

Well, I guess you can, evidently.

boingboing.net

For $24.95, the buyer gets a 2x4-inch, velcro-backed commando patch with a cryptic design, and a unique QRcode. Not "unique" as in "remarkable", but rather "unique" as in "each patch is different from every other". Each patch has a short URL embedded on it that is controlled by the owner. You can choose to send it to your RSS feed, a PayPal donation page, or a YouTube video of last week’s comedically inept attempt to sled down a hill.

I kinda totally want one. (But $25?)

gizmodo.com

He just got off the telephone with Apple, who confirmed the removal. According to the developer, Apple said that, while they are thinking about it, "it’s not going to happen anytime soon."

Goddamnit, stop toying with us!

tuaw.com

We received a tip and a screenshot (seen above) from a developer who pointed out the new "Explicit" category in the tool used to submit apps into the store.

What, now?!