Rene Ritchie:
No one can look at Samsung’s mobile products over the last decade and not consider them anything other than a ruthless, relentless copy of everything popular that’s came before. It’s not that Samsung doesn’t continuously push the limits of hardware specifications and capabilities as much if not more than anyone else. They do. But they do so by systematically, institutionally copying what other vendors have already done first.
Rene just goes off on Samsung.
A really nice message from Om Malik to John Gruber, congratulating him the 10 year anniversary of Daring Fireball.
Handy.
Apple on Tuesday updated its retail store pages in Canada noting the opening of two stores on Saturday, August 18. One store will open in Coquitlam, British Columbia and the other in my hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia. […]
A new Web site aims to help end-user confusion over lengthy Terms of Service agreements with various sites by summarizing and grading them.
iNeedHelp sends your location via text message and email at the push of a button to your HelpList.
Seems ideal for children or senior citizens.
We’ve all heard how using an iPad in the classroom improves a child’s literacy scores and now a new study is showing the same is true for math students as well. […]
Great article from Daniel Eran Dilger at AppleInsider.
Davin O’Dwyer for the Irish Times talking about his experience with a Samsung phone:
All the time I had it, I kept wondering who at Samsung let this thing out the door? Did anybody actually use it before it was released? And if so, what kind of contempt for their user did they have?Five minutes with that phone would have the jury awarding full damages to Apple, no doubt about it.
I love the Irish.
Objective-Cologne is an Objective-C & Cocoa community-organized conference taking place next month in Cologne Germany. Speakers include Mike Lee, Jason Harris and Ken Aspeslagh.
A great looking line-up of speakers. I wish I was going to Germany.
I love it when people are taken to task for avoiding questions they should answer.
I took a minute today to call John Gruber and congratulate him on his 10th anniversary of running Daring Fireball. John has had a tremendous influence on me as a writer and on my current business model. […]
PC Mag:
While Apple could still make a physical TV, I think this move incorporating Hulu and Amazon is very telling of Apple’s future TV strategy. The key here is that for Apple’s current TV device to make money, it needs content. By biting the bullet and offering competing services to iTunes, the value proposition of an Apple TV device rises. Apple can now accelerate its TV plans through areas it excels in, namely software and human interfaces. I believe that it can do all that it wants to do in these areas through an external box that connects to a TV and delivers iTunes and its cloud services.The problem with TVs is that people buy them and hold on to them for five to seven years on average. While Apple could design a TV that could be upgraded in software, it makes more sense to create a sophisticated box that works with all televisions and allows the company to innovate around this model.
Bajarin has been around for a long time and is a smart guy. I’ve been saying the same thing about Apple’s direction with regards to the Apple TV set-top box but The Esteemed Publisher of The Loop still believes Apple will still produce an actual HD television set. Time will tell.
Florian Mueller on Apple’s victory in excluding the President of Samsung Telecommunications America, Dale Sohn. Samsung said Sohn “may testify regarding Samsung’s innovative technology and products,” but that wasn’t their original position:
An even bigger issue is that Samsung allegedly “fought tooth-and-nail to prevent Apple from taking Mr. Sohn’s deposition”, and in doing so, Samsung argued that Apple failed to show that Mr. Sohn had any unique “first-hand material knowledge”. Samsung had even denied that he had any “personal knowledge that is relevant to this case” and any “relationship to the accused products or the patents-in-suit other than [his] place atop Samsung’s organizational hierarchy”. The court finally granted an Apple motion to compel Mr. Sohn’s testimony, but was granted only three hours, which Apple considered insufficient, and only so late in the game that Apple was deprived of the opportunity to “to conduct any follow-up discovery in connection with [Mr. Sohn’s testimony]”.
Technologies the company has adopted protect Apple customers’ content so well that in many situations it’s impossible for law enforcement to perform forensic examinations of devices seized from criminals. Most significant is the increasing use of encryption, which is beginning to cause problems for law enforcement agencies when they encounter systems with encrypted drives.“I can tell you from the Department of Justice perspective, if that drive is encrypted, you’re done,” Ovie Carroll, director of the cyber-crime lab at the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section in the Department of Justice, said during his keynote address at the DFRWS computer forensics conference in Washington, D.C., last Monday. “When conducting criminal investigations, if you pull the power on a drive that is whole-disk encrypted you have lost any chance of recovering that data.”
Matthew Panzarino:
The patents were apparently licensed to Microsoft with an “anti-cloning agreement” in place in order to stop Microsoft from turning out copies of the iPhone and iPad. Samsung and Apple have, notably, met several times to discuss licensing patents, but the design patents covering the ‘user experience’ of Apple’s tablets and phones were, according to Samsung, not on the table.
Nice, an anti-cloning agreement.
Day4:
How easy is it to spread disinformation?One afternoon we sketched out a screw in our 3D program, a very strange screw where the head was neither a star, tracks, pentalobe or whatever, but a unique form, also very impractical. We rendered the image, put it in an email, sent it to ourselves, took a picture of the screen with the mail and anonymously uploaded the image to the forum Reddit with the text ”A friend took a photo a while ago at that fruit company, they are obviously even creating their own screws ”.Then we waited …
If you ever wonder where all these untrue Apple rumors come from, this will answer the question for at least some of them. It also shows how many web sites post “information” with little to no facts, research, details or common sense attached.
Bryan Beverly sent this to me this morning and it fits the Apple, Samsung trial so well.
“The more original a discovery the more obvious it seems afterward.” — Arthur Koestler in The Act of Creation, 1964.
There are some people that believe that Apple’s lawsuit against Samsung is all about rectangles and that Apple has no right to sue based on that criteria. That’s just false and I think I’ve found a way to explain it so everyone can understand. […]
Maria Popova writing about how Hitchcock affected one child.
The new <a href=”http://loopu.in/P7xRCA>TextExpander 4 from Smile dramatically increases the options for automating your work with advanced “fill-in” snippet types. They are great for creating form letter templates that can be personalized on the fly. Check out the video demo and see the new multi-line text fields, multiple choice popups, and optional text blocks in action.
Registered TextExpander users can upgrade for $15. (There’s no charge for the upgrade if you purchased after January 15, 2012.)
Still haven’t tried TextExpander? <a href=”http://loopu.in/P7xRCA>Download the free demo! There’s even a new Snippet Creation Snippet to get you started.
We saw more than 150 million Tweets about the Olympics over the past 16 days. Let’s take a look at some of the big trends within that massive conversation.
Truly some great moments at the Olympics.
Anil Dash:
If anyone questioned whether Microsoft could get back in the fight once the cuffs finally came off, Surface should put those doubts to rest. The gorgeous PC/tablet hybrid is the only example in recent memory of a company clearly and emphatically going toe to toe with Apple on the industrial design front. The iPad will have to improve. Android tablets will have to improve. Surface isn’t another me-too device—it moves the entire category forward.
Incredibly kind words for a product that nobody has even used yet. “Moves an entire category forward”? Bullshit.
Six Revisions:
Icon fonts are font files that have symbols and glyphs (e.g. arrows, folders, magnifying glasses) instead of standard alphanumeric characters.
There are a few really good collections.
Dwindling inventories of Kindles and Kindle accessories suggest that Amazon is getting ready to refresh its line of tablets.
Ben Brooks questions about and Samsung’s design teams were funny.
Google is adding a new feature to its search algorithm that will make it harder to find pirated material, effectively making it extremely difficult for you to keep up with Game of Thrones next season.
In October 2010, Apple offered to license its portfolio of patents to Samsung provided the Korean company was willing to pay on the order of $30 per smartphone and $40 per tablet.
Gabe Weatherhead from Macdrifter.com recently moved his Wordpress site to the static-file based Pelican system. He gives a wonderfully detailed look at why and how he did it.
Today marks the 25th anniversary of HyperCard, Apple’s groundbreaking visual programming tool.