A California judge tossed out a lawsuit in which the Chinese firm Proview Electronics Co Ltd accused Apple Inc of tricking them into selling the “iPad” name for less than it might have.

The iPad trials were underway since 2011, and the House of Commons administration committee recently recommended the rapid rollout of suitable mobile tablet hardware to all 650 MPs.” And by tablet they meant iPad.

Good move. Let’s hope other governments follow.

Marco Arment on AppleInsider’s report about Apple working on multi-user support on the iPad:

That’s the standard “duplicate bug” response email. It’s a form letter. It means nothing, except that he was not the first person to make that suggestion.

Michael Markman:

Glenn, Mike, and I marched into Steve’s office to give him the pitch. Pretty much the way I outlined it in the previous paragraph. Steve’s eyes were sparkling through it all. By the time I got to, “and you as FDR,” I had made the sale.

And here is the video he’s talking about.

[Via MacStories]

Abdel Ibrahim:

When it comes to Android, though, my second in-depth experience wasn’t any less jarring than the first. Despite my time in the trenches with ICS on the Galaxy Nexus, HTC has slapped on so much paint with Sense that I often struggled to find my way. And what I recognized I still didn’t like. Granted, I cut my teeth on iOS devices, which pride themselves on simplicity, but I refuse to believe Android couldn’t be more user friendly. For all its options, there’s too much clutter. But if you can look past that or are accustomed to Android, I have little doubt you’d love the HTC One X.

Unfortunate for HTC that a review comes down to how much Android sucks balls.

EZkeys is a revolutionary plugin and stand alone instrument that combines a world-class piano player, songwriting partner, arranger and a meticulously sampled grand piano – all in one package.

Toontrack is taking its experience making one of the best drum plug-ins to piano.

There’s also the usual bickering over whether Samsung makes “copycat products” infringing Apple’s rights or, as the Korean company argues, “innovative, independently developed technologies”.

You kind of get the feeling that Samsung actually believes they’re innovative.

YOU COPY OTHER COMPANIES’ PRODUCTS. THAT’S NOT INNOVATIVE.

Apple posted the specifics of the security fixes in today’s release.

Alexander Sliwinski for Joystiq:

The rumored $99 up front Xbox 360 and $15 a month afterwards for two years is official. It includes a Kinect, Xbox Live Gold service, a two-year warranty.

To be clear, in order to get the $99 price you need to commit to a two-year subscription to Xbox Live Gold, Microsoft’s premium Xbox gaming service. And you can’t use renewal cards that will lower that rate, or tack it on to an existing subscription. Also, it’s a 4GB Xbox 360 – a model without a hard drive. You’ll need to upgrade its storage capability pretty quickly (Microsoft sells them as add-ons you can install yourself).

If you’ve held off getting an Xbox 360 until it was cheap enough, this may be the right time.

(via Engadget)

Jason Pontin for Technology Review:

So we created iOS and Android apps that were free for use; anyone could read our daily news and watch our videos, and people could pay to see digital replicas of the magazine. We launched the platforms in January of 2011. Complimenting myself on my conservative accounting, I budgeted less than $125,000 in revenue in the first year. That meant fewer than 5,000 subscriptions and a handful of single-issue sales. Easy, I thought.Like almost all publishers, I was badly disappointed. What went wrong? Everything.

As I read it, Pontin’s major problems were in underestimating development costs and overestimating the demand for his product.

Pontin spells out in detail the mistakes he and other publishers have made when it comes to releasing content on iOS. He makes a mistake to assume that he can paint his own experience with the same broad brush as everyone else, but certainly some of the lessons he learned translate to others, as well.

The bottom line is that each individual company needs to take a hard look at their business model and prospective revenue stream to decide if selling content through apps is going to be right for them.

Bloomberg News:

Proview Technology (Shenzhen) Co. said a “big gap” remains with Apple Inc. (AAPL) after the U.S. company offered compensation to settle their dispute over ownership of the iPad trademark in China. Apple proposed an amount of money to resolve the legal case as part of the mediation process being directed by the Higher People’s Court of Guangdong, Roger Xie, a lawyer for Proview, said by phone today. He declined to disclose the amount or when Apple made the offer.

Apple is in the midst of the trademark dispute after Proview, based in Shenzhen, said that it only paid Proview’s Taiwanese subsidiary to license the iPad marque, not the parent company.

BBEdit 10 from Bare Bones Software — The leading professional HTML and text editor for the Mac just keeps getting better, with more than one hundred new features. Download the demo and see for yourself!

I’ve been using BBEdit for almost 20 years and it has never let me down.

Brian X. Chen at the New York Times:

Old-school train conductors are finally ready to give up their hole punchers to try something new: the iPhone.Amtrak, the government-owned corporation that oversees the nation’s railroad train services, has been training conductors since November to use the Apple handset as an electronic ticket scanner on a few routes, including from Boston to Portland, Me., and San Jose, Calif., to Sacramento.

Ken Bensinger for the Los Angeles Times

But all the miles they and 64 other unlimited AAirpass holders racked up went far beyond what American had expected. As its finances began deteriorating a few years ago, the carrier took a hard look at the AAirpass program.

Customers paid American Airlines $350,000 for a lifetime, first class ticket.

Matt Gemmell:

But knee-jerk design decisions are worryingly commonplace, and pose substantially more risk to software users. Familiarity is only one factor, and it’s often a deceptive one. Consider the entire scenario and context, and take the time to truly design your user’s experience.

Great stuff from Matt.

I always think that RIM can’t get any worse, any more stupid than they already are, and then they do something like this. This is the ending of its ridiculous “Wake Up” campaign against Apple.

The source code was supposed to document how Samsung had worked around design or technical elements Apple had patented, including the “overscroll bounce” described in U.S. Patent No. 7,469,381.Instead of producing this evidence, which could be used to help Samsung’s case (but could also be used by Apple to prove additional or continued infringement) the company chose instead to keep Apple and the court waiting.

Sasha Frere-Jones, for the New Yorker:

The ideal memorial is written from distance, a generous calculation of merit that proceeds honorably without abandoning accuracy. I have to apologize right now for being unable to give you that—Adam Yauch was a part of my childhood, an ambassador to America from our New York, which is now gone, as is he.

AppleInsider:

Chitika Insights, the research arm of the Chitika ad network, sifted through its database of ad impressions and found that 94.64 percent of all tablet web traffic can be attributed to the iPad.In comparison, the second place Samsung Galaxy Tab only managed 1.22 percent of the market, while the Asus Transformer Prime eked out 1.2 percent.

So much for the competition.

Julianne Pepitone for CNN Money:

The proxy fight between Yahoo and activist shareholder firm Third Point just got extra nasty. Third Point came out swinging late Thursday with an allegation that Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson lied about his college degree — and on Friday, the activist shareholder firm called for Thompson’s ouster.

It’s worth noting that Third Point CEO Dan Loeb is bucking for a spot on Yahoo’s board of directors. This is ugly. But let this be a lesson: eventually, you’ll get caught if you pad your resume.

New York Times:

Randall Stephenson, AT&T’s chief executive said that he wished the company had never offered an unlimited data plan for the device and that he loses sleep over free texting services like Apple’s iMessage.“If you’re using iMessage, you’re not using one of our messaging services, right? That’s disruptive to our messaging revenue stream.”

Perhaps if Mr Stephenson’s company hadn’t consistently boned their customers with ridiculous charges, he wouldn’t find so many of us happy to use iMessage or Skype or any number of other services to get around the usurious costs we are forced to pay by AT&T.

Jim and Dan discuss the Apple TV set, the App Store kill switch, the Samsung Galaxy S III, Kindles, Target, the UK Ministry of Defence, Rock Band’s iOS cancellation notice, guitar stands, and more.Sponsored by Textastic, TapTyping, and Squarespace.

Gizmodo:

If you never attended a shuttle launch, you must watch this perfect video. Watch it with good and big headphones. Or better yet, with an amazing sound system. In fact, this is the perfect video to test your audio setup with gigantic subwoofer.But beware. It’s loud. Deliciously loud and crispy.

Zach Weigand:

I find it much more likely that Apple will just keep the phone the same width (as claimed in all the rumors), get rid of the dead space on both sides of the screen, and keep the aspect ratio 3:2.

Many thanks to Rogue Amoeba for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed on The Loop.

Want to send audio on your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad? Airfoil Speakers Touch has you covered! With it, you can send audio via AirPlay directly from iTunes or from one iOS device to another. There’s no reason to spend hundreds on costly third-party AirPlay receivers – the iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch you already own can do the job!

Airfoil Speakers Touch also receives audio from Airfoil, making it possible to send any audio from your Mac or PC to your iOS device. Cool!

Download Airfoil Speakers Touch from the iOS App Store and check out Airfoil right from our site.

Sara Forden for Bloomberg:

Google Inc. (GOOG) is negotiating with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission over how big a fine it will have to pay for its breach of Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s Safari Internet browser, a person familiar with the matter said.

Google ran into trouble when it was discovered that the company had bypassed Apple’s Safari security settings to plant cookies to track what Web pages users were looking at. Google hasn’t denied the claim, but it says that the cookies were not used to track personal information. The action indicates that Google allegedly violated the terms of a consent decree it signed last year.