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.

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.

Maria Popova writing about how Hitchcock affected one child.

The new 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.

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Still haven’t tried TextExpander? 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.

[Via Matt Alexander]

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.

Dante D’Orazio for The Verge:

Amazon’s collection of E Ink Kindles is getting thinned out in what looks quite clearly to be preparation for new models.

Jim’s fond of saying that Kindles are stupid, but I know a lot of people that own them and love them. So news that new Kindles are coming shouldn’t be a total surprise, especially with the new school year coming up soon and the holiday buying season not far behind it. It’ll be interesting to see what Amazon does next.

Ben Brooks questions about Apple 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.

Kelly Guimont for TUAW:

Twenty-five years ago today, HyperCard was released at Macworld Expo Boston. Apple’s software construction kit for the rest of us began shipping on every new Mac as of August 11, 1987; you could also buy it for $49. It required 1 MB of memory (yes, one megabyte) and a pair of 800K floppy drives, or one floppy drive + a hard disk. (Announced at the same time: the ImageWriter LQ, the Apple Fax Modem, and MultiFinder.) Times have indeed changed.

HyperCard inspired a generation of Mac users to think about how they could interact with their machines in ways they never could before – creating their own stacks to do everything from keep track of recipes to business applications to games (Myst, famously, started as a HyperCard stack).

Nicklas Lind put together a nice list with pics. Seriously, it shouldn’t be this easy folks.

Bryan Bishop for The Verge:

During cross-examination, Samsung attorney Kevin Johnson attempted to discredit Balakrishnan, first by trying to insinuate that two slides presented by Apple were incorrect. In fact, the images Johnson showed featured representative stills from a video the slides actually contained; the video itself was consistent with the labeling and testimony. Johnson then challenged Balakrishnan by giving a live demonstration of a 7-inch Galaxy Tab that didn’t incorporate the bounce-back feature — while neglecting to mention what operating system or skin it was running. He followed it up with a video that he said proved the Galaxy Tab 10.1 didn’t use the feature either. Unfortunately for Johnson, Balakrishnan had to point out that in the video the user wasn’t actually scrolling to the end of the web page in question — a requirement to trigger the feature in the first place.

The only reason you would do this is if you’re guilty.

Most important are the designer’s statements regarding the handset’s design inspiration, which she claims came from a bowl of water and not from any Apple patents.

I would have guessed a bucket of shit, but okay.

NASA:

On the nights of Aug. 11th through 13th, the best meteor shower of the year will fill pre-dawn skies with hundreds of shooting stars. And that’s just for starters. The brightest planets in the solar system are lining up right in the middle of the display. The Perseid meteor shower peaks on the nights around August 12th as Earth passes through a stream of debris from Comet Swift-Tuttle.“We expect to see meteor rates as high as a hundred per hour,” says Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. “The Perseids always put on a good show.”

NASA even has a free app you can use to count meteors and upload the data to researchers.

LogMyRun now supports kilometers for distance and Celsius for temperature in addition to miles and Fahrenheit. You can convert the distance or temperature units for your entire log in Settings. You can also log individual runs in either kilometers or miles when adding a new run or editing an existing run.