August 6, 2012
Written by Peter Cohen
David Christopher, for AT&T’s Consumer Blog:
Our new AT&T Mobile Share plans will be available starting Thursday, Aug. 23.As families prepare to send students back to school, many are looking for a convenient way to connect tablets and laptops or add new smartphones. AT&T Mobile Share plans are a great option.
Whether they’re “a great option” depends entirely on your current plan and how much data you’re using on your devices. But for some families, the plan may make more sense than paying for individual data plans for each phone. A “Mobile Share Planner” tool AT&T has put on the Web site may make it easier for you to figure that out.
Written by Peter Cohen
Mike Williams for Gamesindustry.biz:
Electronic Arts has filed a lawsuit against Zynga for infringing on copyrights related to The Sims Social. In EA’s complaint filed today in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, the publisher has accused Zynga’s The Ville of standing as willful copyright infringement. The Sims Social launched in August of 2011, while The Ville launched in June of 2012.
I admit that I haven’t play either, but my wife was an avid Sims Social player until The Ville launched. She switched because she says that The Ville is less crash-prone than Sims Social.
Samsung is pulling out all the stops to protect itself from Apple’s lawsuit, but so far everything they’ve done seems like more of a distraction from the truth — they copied Apple’s iPhone.
One of the interesting things that I’ve noticed is that Samsung hasn’t actually come out and denied copying Apple, instead their tactic seems to be to say that Apple copied the design from Sony. Of course, as John Gruber noted this argument has already been discredited.
Here’s the thing, though — it’s not a Sony phone. It’s an in-house mockup by an Apple designer inspired by a very broad description of Sony devices. There is no actual circa 2006 Sony phone that looks like this.
Exactly right. The so-called “Jony” phone was a concept phone that Apple built. It was conceived and designed by Apple.
When that argument failed, Samsung moved to the F700 and tried to show that Samsung had the design first. Not even Android-focused Web sites bought that story.
Cory Gunther from Android Community:
This picture above says the F700 was shown at CeBit 2006, and then released in 2007, making Apple and the iPhone the one that copied them. This is completely false.
Samsung fans that have contacted me on Twitter and email have used the same argument that Samsung seems to be using now — you can’t patent a rectangle. That is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard.
Using that argument doesn’t do justice to the billions of dollars in research and development that Apple has spent over the last decade to make the iPhone.
Apple has done more than patent a rectangle. They developed and perfected a new way to interact with a personal computing device that fits in your hand. They called it the iPhone.
Apple didn’t spend all of that time and money developing the iPhone so Samsung could just copy it and release products that looked the same. No matter how you look at it, copying Apple’s iPhone design is not right. That’s exactly what Samsung did.
The cell phone and nascent smartphone industry hadn’t changed in years when Apple showed the iPhone in 2007. If developing a new way of doing things was so easy, why didn’t Samsung do it earlier? Why did they wait until after Apple showed the iPhone to develop their phones?
The answer is simple — because they copied Apple.
Samsung would have you believe that they have designers that develop products themselves. These products, Samsung would argue, have not been copied from Apple, even though Apple released the product first.
Let’s look at the Galaxy Tab. Again, a Samsung product released after Apple’s iPad, but one Samsung says wasn’t copied.
It’s interesting then that not even Samsung’s lawyers could identify the Galaxy Tab when placed next to an iPad by the judge.
Katie Marsal for AppleInsider:
U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh this week held both a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and iPad above her head, and asked Kathleen Sullivan, a lawyer representing Samsung, to identify what company made which. According to Reuters, she could not do it from a distance of about 10 feet.
Perhaps lawyers don’t know about design. I suppose you could make that argument if you were desperate. How about consumers — surely they know what they’re buying, right?
According to Best Buy, “Samsung tablets were being returned because customers thought they were getting iPads.”
And that is Samsung’s strategy. Watch what Apple is doing, copy that design as closely as possible in hopes of confusing the consumer and then sell millions of devices. It’s illegal and makes you a scumbag, but they thought they could get away with it.
Phil Schiller addressed this during his testimony last week:
“[Copying] creates a huge problem in marketing on many levels. We market our product as the hero and how distinctive it is, how consistent we’ve kept it over time,” said Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, as he was questioned by Apple lawyer Harold McElhinny. “Now when someone comes up with a product that copies that design and copies that marketing, then customers can get confused on whose product is whose…. If you steal [the way the iPhone looks] you’re stealing all the value we’ve created.”
I think Apple’s Scott Forstall summed up the company’s feelings about Samsung:
Asked if he told anyone at Apple to copy Samsung’s designs, Forstall replied, “I never directed anyone to go and copy something from Samsung. We wanted to build something great. There was no reason to look at anything they had done.”
Of all the people that contacted me, of all the arguments Samsung made, the one thing nobody said is that they didn’t copy Apple. That just seems to be a given. The argument is whether stealing from Apple is legal or not.
It’s impossible to argue that this lawsuit is about rectangles. Samsung ripped off Apple’s design because it wanted to confuse consumers and they thought they could get away with it. Samsung’s designed changed remarkably in 2007, after the iPhone was introduced.
That’s not a coincidence. That’s theft.
August 5, 2012
Written by Shawn King
Reuters:
The full moon rises through the Olympic Rings hanging beneath Tower Bridge during the London 2012 Olympic Games.
As a photographer, you dream about getting perfect shots like these.
A few days ago I asked my Twitter peeps for recommendations for a Railroad Tycoon-type game for iOS. There are quite a few railroad-themed games for iOS, but I was looking for the modern day equivalent of the classic Sid Meier strategy game (first published when dinosaurs roamed the earth by Microprose).
One game floated to the top pretty quickly: Railroad Story from Alawar Games. (It’s available as Railroad Story HD for iPad for $1.99, or regular for iPhone/iPod touch for a buck. “Free” versions are also available.) I’ve seen it advertised on Web sites, and when I looked at the screens, I thought it might have the elements I’m looking for, but on further inspection, I have to say it’s come up short. On its own merits, it’s a good game, but it wasn’t what I had hoped for.
Railroad Story puts you in the role of an enterprising railroad magnate trying to build his empire during the industrial revolution, across the expanding United States. The game features a series of missions in which you connect towns and cities by rail, then manage the traffic on the rails, effecting repairs, and making changes to routes where you need to. You have a specific budget to start with, and an end goal to win each mission (deliver a certain number of railroad cars to a location, make a certain amount of money).
Railroad Story uses an isometric (three-quarters) view and is fun to use to lay out tracks – you can build tunnels through mountains, bridges over bodies of water, and have to work around obstacles. Track layout is pretty straightforward, but you can’t lay tracks diagonally (just at 90 degree angles), and you can install switches and stops if you want to adjust the flow of traffic more effectively.
Each town has a station where the trains depart, each carrying mail, freight or passengers, occasionally one will be marked as an express. You collect money depending on the cargo and the quantity. You have a specific time limit for when the train needs to arrive at its destination; if you fail, you lose money.
In addition to track repairs (which cost you income), you’ll also have to spend money to clean up accidents (if you occasionally send two trains at each other on the same track, there’s no way to reverse one), and every so often one town or another will pop up with a civil disturbance, plague or famine you have to fix by sending “special” trains their way before you can restore the flow of commerce. New towns will appear over time, as well, requiring you to modify your track layouts to accommodate them. Sometimes this can require quite a bit of adjustment because of the limits of track geometry.
Railroad Story comes with 15 missions and three “bonus” missions that you can play sequentially in Campaign mode, then return to later as you want, but that’s it – there’s no sandbox mode that lets you play indefinitely, and little of the depth I was hoping for. By the second or third mission you’ve mastered the basic gameplay mechanics; all that’s left is timing, smart track layout and hitting your goals. Some of the missions are quite challenging.
Alawar also earns dings for lousy proofreader jobs in this essay: there are numerous misspellings and awkward grammatical constructions that mark this as a product from people who don’t speak English natively (Alawar is a Russian developer). I also ran into an occasional problem getting the game to recognize input; returning to the home screen and restarting the game invariably fixed it.
In short, Railroad Story is a time management game with fun and challenging moments, but it’s not Railroad Tycoon. I’m not dinging it for that, I just want to make it clear to other gamers who were hoping for something similar. But if you’re fond of trains and trying to play beat the clock, it will keep you quite busy until you run out of missions to play.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
Mat Honan:
I know how it was done now. Confirmed with both the hacker and Apple. It wasn’t password related. They got in via Apple tech support and some clever social engineering that let them bypass security questions.
The good news is the hacker didn’t brute-force the password. The bad news… yeah.
August 4, 2012
Written by Jim Dalrymple
Mat Honan:
At 4:50 PM, someone got into my iCloud account, reset the password and sent the confirmation message about the reset to the trash. My password was a 7 digit alphanumeric that I didn’t use elsewhere. When I set it up, years and years ago, that seemed pretty secure at the time. But it’s not. Especially given that I’ve been using it for, well, years and years. My guess is they used brute force to get the password (see update) and then reset it to do the damage to my devices.
I’ve known Mat for a lot of years and he’s a really smart guy. This should be a lesson to all of us.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
Eric Slivka at Mac Rumors has a number of links from yesterday’s testimony at the Samsung trial that indicate Steve Jobs was receptive to the idea of Apple making a 7-inch iPad.
August 3, 2012
Written by Jim Dalrymple
John Kirk for Techpinions:
I do not ask silly questions, like whether a tablet is a consumption device. I do not ask whether a phone or a tablet does “real” work. I do not obsess on the exceptionally rare times when I may use my phone as a tablet, my tablet as a notebook or my notebook as a tablet. Instead, I simply use the right tool at the right time.
That’s exactly what I do.
Written by Shawn King
Wired:
The moment is almost here. In just a couple days, NASA’s new Mars rover, Curiosity, will begin its descent to the Martian surface and hopefully start beaming back amazing images and data.Unfortunately, there’s no way to watch the probe actually plunge into the Martian atmosphere and undertake the carefully orchestrated sequence of landing events known as the “Seven Minutes of Terror.” Even the radio waves that indicate the rover’s position have to obey the laws of physics and recognize the 14-minute communications delay between Earth and Mars.But there are still plenty of ways to catch the action online and feel like you’re getting a front-row seat for NASA’s next big mission.
If you can, spare some time on Sunday to watch this event – and it’s on less of a tape delay than NBC’s Olympic coverage.
Written by Peter Cohen
Harry McCracken:
Gadget-retailing giant Radio Shack unveiled the TRS-80 Model I at a press conference at New York’s Warwick Hotel 35 years ago today, on August 3, 1977. (The company didn’t call it the Model I at the time: Like Apple’s Apple I, it only became the I after a II was introduced.)
Lots of great info about the TRS-80’s place in personal computer history. How it got started, how Radio Shack configured it, and its enduring legacy.
Harry’s valentine to the TRS-80 strikes a chord with me. I’m a few years younger than he is; I was 7 when the TRS-80 went on sale. The man I knew through our local Big Brother program introduced me to his a year or two later, and when I asked whether it could play games, he told me, “Sure, if you write them.”
So I learned how. (Boy, I wish I’d maintained that ability to program.) I’ve loved computers ever since.
So yeah, for many of us of a certain age, the TRS-80 will always occupy a spot in our hearts. And as Harry says, please don’t call it a Trash-80.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
“[Copying] creates a huge problem in marketing on many levels. We market our product as the hero and how distinctive it is, how consistent we’ve kept it over time,” said Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, as he was questioned by Apple lawyer Harold McElhinny. “Now when someone comes up with a product that copies that design and copies that marketing, then customers can get confused on whose product is whose… If you steal [the way the iPhone looks] you’re stealing all the value we’ve created.”
Sounds like Schiller did a great job in court today.
Written by Peter Cohen
Alexis Santos for Engadget:
…Sure, Apple machines aren’t exactly en vogue when it comes to playing video games, but Cupertino’s ultra-high-resolution Mac simply begs to be put to the test. We loaded up Windows 7 on a MacBook Pro carrying an NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 1 GB of VRAM, the stock 2.3GHz processor and 16GB of RAM (upgraded from the vanilla 8GB configuration) and put it through its paces to see how it performs.
An interesting batch of tests that show the Retina Display-equipped MacBook Pro is an able game machine on Windows. Also worth noting that some games which run on both Windows and OS X run faster on Windows than they do on OS X.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California claims Zynga’s recently released Facebook game “The Ville” willfully and intentionally “copied and misappropriated the original and distinctive expressive elements of the Sims Social.
Sounds like Samsung designers are working for Zynga.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
“The longer hair provides a higher UPF at the smaller SZA, but the difference between the protection provided by the longer hair compared with the shorter hair reduces with increasing SZA. Protection from UVR is provided by the facial hair; however, it is not very high, particularly at the higher SZA.”
In other words, you bastards are going to die a miserable death, while I live forever.
The Pixelmator Team has a major update coming to its image editing app and it should arrive on August 9, the team told The Loop.
As is the norm with Pixelmator, they zeroed in on some important features for Mac users. Pixelmator 2.1 will offer support for Apple’s new Retina display Macs, so the interface will even better and it will also support OS X Mountain Lion.
One of the big new features is the addition of iCloud support. Version 2.1 will allow users to create, edit, and save documents in iCloud, meaning that you can work on Pixelmator projects on any of your Macs.
Pixelmator 2.1 also comes with a new Effects Browser that allows you to collect, organize and see an animated preview of all Pixelmator’s Color Adjustments. A number of new effects like Vintage, Miniaturize, Black and White, Snow and Rain, that are also included in the update.
The new version will be offered as a free update to existing users.
Written by Peter Cohen
James Brightman for GamesIndustry.biz:
One of the standout data points from Activision’s earnings announcement today was that the company’s subscription numbers for World of Warcraft have fallen by more than a million in just the last three months. WoW now stands at just 9.1 million subs, but that isn’t making Blizzard boss Mike Morhaime nervous.
Morhaime said on the investors call that it’s actually quite normal with each WoW expansion pack for players to drop off. Moreover, this time around, before Blizzard launches the Mists of Pandaria expansion, Blizzard fans were pre-occupied with Diablo III, which Morhaime acknowledged had an impact on WoW as well.
Diablo III got off to a rocky start – players have complained about the game’s requirement to keep a live Internet connection to Blizzard’s servers (as a form of copy protection and to keep cheating to a minimum), Blizzard’s slow activation of an auction house, and other issues.
Written by Peter Cohen
Griffin McElroy for The Verge:
id Software’s mobile development branch has been shut down as the company focuses its efforts on getting Doom 4 out the door, John Carmack confirmed during his QuakeCon 2012 keynote speech.
Id Software’s mobile efforts netted several games for iPhone and iPad, including a game based on its “Rage” property, Doom Classic, Wolfenstein 3D Classic, Doom Resurrection and Doom II RPG.
Carmack explained that they wanted to bring developers from the mobile group into the Doom 4 development team, which necessitated shutting it down for now. He added that the mobile group was making money, “but it’s not a grand slam sort of thing on there.”
Carmack also indicated that there’s at least one iPhone project on the back burner, but is vague about whether it’ll get finished. One possible milestone seems to be the forthcoming release of Doom III: BFG Edition, which is scheduled to be released in October.
Carmack remains mum on what the release schedule is for Doom 4, other than to say “every decade there will be a Doom.”
Written by Peter Cohen
David McLaughlin for Bloomberg:
Eastman Kodak Co. (EKDKQ) won a partial victory against Apple Inc. over patents, defeating Apple’s ownership claims to two of 10 patents that Kodak plans to sell as part of its bankruptcy restructuring.
Kodak claims that Apple is trying to disrupt its plans to sell the patents at auction – part of Kodak’s attempt to restructure from its bankruptcy.
