Ars Technica:
The second blockbuster Apple v. Samsung patent trial has ended, and it looks like a Pyrrhic victory for Apple.The Cupertino company can notch a second win, but with far less damages than it requested. Apple wanted $2.2 billion, and the jury awarded it $119.6 million, or just over 5 percent of what Apple had requested.
I don’t think this ends here though.
As with any list, there will be much disagreement on what was included and left off the list. That aside, I found this to be a thoughtful read.
As far as I can tell, no truly huge world-shifting software product has ever existed in only one version (even Flappy Bird had updates). Just about every global software product of longevity grows, changes, adapts, and reacts to other software over time.
So I set myself the task of picking five great works of software. The criteria were simple: How long had it been around? Did people directly interact with it every day? Did people use it to do something meaningful? I came up with the office suite Microsoft Office, the image editor Photoshop, the videogame Pac-Man, the operating system Unix, and the text editor Emacs.
I would have placed Unix at #1, the original Mac OS at #2, Mac OS X at #3, and iOS at #4. But hey, that’s just me.
Don’t know if Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo, was the world’s most notorious drug lord, but I do know that this was one ripping yarn.
Washington Post:
Major U.S. technology companies have largely ended the practice of quietly complying with investigators’ demands for e-mail records and other online data, saying that users have a right to know in advance when their information is targeted for government seizure.“Later this month, Apple will update its policies so that in most cases when law enforcement requests personal information about a customer, the customer will receive a notification from Apple,” company spokeswoman Kristin Huguet said.
This is good news for the customer and brave of the companies involved to stand up to the government on this issue.
From the video’s about page:
The 12 basic principles of animation were developed by the ‘old men’ of Walt Disney Studios, amongst them Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, during the 1930s. Of course they weren’t old men at the time, but young men who were at the forefront of exciting discoveries that were contributing to the development of a new art form. These principles came as a result of reflection about their practice and through Disney’s desire to use animation to express character and personality.
This movie is my personal take about those principles, applied to simple shapes. Like a cube. Check also the animated gif gallery here.
Astonishing.
One of the most-requested features for Twitter’s mobile apps may be on the cusp of arriving. Some users of the company’s iOS and Android clients are now seeing an option to mute accounts that they follow, preventing another user’s tweets and retweets from appearing in their timeline. The user remains muted until you manually unmute them. In essence, then, the mute feature works as a kind of stealth unfollow — you won’t be seeing another person’s tweets, but they won’t know that.
I am a fan of the stealth unfollow. The first vital step in a more sophisticated curation process.
iCloud offers much more than cloud backup and storage solutions. For instance, iCloud provides features that make photo/video sharing with your friends and family members an enjoyable experience. You may share photos/videos using your iOS device, Mac (OS X v10.9 or later and either iPhoto or Aperture), Apple TV or Windows PC (Windows 7 or later) and iCloud Control Panel 3.0 or later. For the purpose of this article, we are going to show how you can share photos/videos on your iOS device or your Mac.
An updated how-to on photo sharing with iCloud, iOS, and your Mac.
The invitation says:
A new conversation about health is about to begin. Be there when it starts.
The event is planned for May 28th, 10:30 am, San Francisco.
The real value of a bridge into health care on the tablet, phone or wrist is in giving the user the opportunity to collect medical data and make it easier for a professional to diagnose and treat. Tracking my pulse rate while I run is certainly valuable, but, I’d argue, tracking a diabetic’s glucose level and making that data available to the appropriate diagnostician has more value, certainly to the diabetic.
If Samsung is dipping their toes in the latter space, sure hope they know what they are getting into. Sharing patient data, at least in the US, is an undertaking fraught with regulations and oversight (read about HIPAA and Title II privacy rules for a prime example).
I can only imagine that this is a defensive play in anticipation of Apple’s WWDC announcements. Think it’ll work? Think Samsung will take the wind out of Apple’s WWDC sails? Not a chance.
SI.com:
Bob Paulsen, co-founder of PlayerLync, told SI.com that teams have video and documents sent to their iPads—even when the device is asleep—within minutes after a game ends, allowing them to watch and review without an Internet connection (quite a popular feature for road teams that are sitting on a bus or taking off from a tarmac). Comments and information can easily be added and shared. “Coaches and players insert their own audio, visual, text and clips,” Paulsen says, “and securely send them to one another.”
We see some of this in Apple’s “Your Verse” TV ad.
John Biggs:
If you’ve ever wondered how some videos get popular while others languish in obscurity (or, on the flipside, if you’d like to know how to get some sweet views), look no further than an individual Samsung hired to push their video of a little, walking (Samsung-branded) SD card to social. I’ll refrain from linking to the video as it’s not very exciting.
I really do hate that company.
It would be difficult to choose just one quote from this article. I really enjoyed it.
You don’t need to pack a retail store from floor to ceiling to sell products. I really like the experience, as well.
code:deck is a standard playing card deck sporting a stylish modern design. Each individual card features a code excerpt describing it in one of many programming languages.
These are just great.
Kaleidoscope is one of the world’s best tools for spotting differences in images and text, and now it supports the ignoring of leading, trailing and line-ending whitespace too. Kaleidoscope integrates directly with Git, Subversion, Mercurial, P4, and Bazaar to fit perfectly in your workflow.
I always found many car manufacturers badly lacking in this area.
I’m sure there could be more.
I usually keep my levels at -6db to -10db as well. It’s going to fluctuate during the recording, but I like to leave some headroom.
Sony Corp slashed its earnings guidance for the third time in a year on Thursday to barely 10 percent of its initial outlook as further losses from its PC exit cast a pall over its struggling electronics division.
Harsh.
James Dempsey rounds up a few apps that he really likes on the Mac. I hadn’t heard of a few of these.
Each key is a little OLED screen. I’d imagine you could use the entire keyboard as a single discrete display, or switch keyboards on the fly, to an accounting keyboard, for example.
Fascinating possibilities.
From Quartz:
Facebook’s moves today point to its ambition to become the glue that holds the mobile internet together the same way Google is the glue that holds the web together. Google achieved dominance on the pre-mobile internet world wide web with a similar strategy. Not only did it bring people to the websites via search, it also created a massive data-gathering machine that tracks people across the web and runs AdSense, the web’s biggest ad network.
Facebook made a series of announcements at F8, the Facebook developer’s conference, laying out its agenda to achieve that same position in mobile.
It is arguable that with Applinks (Facebook’s platform for deep-linking), it could wield more power than Google, which makes mobile operating systems and apps but doesn’t have insight into what its users are doing when they’re in other apps.
Facebook certainly has ambition. Seems like they are missing a key ingredient, search. Though they do have the massive postings of their user base to data mine.
Apple offers Pages, Numbers, and Keynotes, counterparts to Microsoft’s recently released Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. As you might expect, Google has now joined the fray with their Google Docs and Google Sheets iOS apps.
From a comment on Google’s official blog:
This whole thing is rather odd. First Google made Docs and Sheets part of Drive. Now it’s breaking them back out into their own standalone apps. Except that they’re still part of Drive as well.
I agree. An odd branding move. Google’s version of Keynote and PowerPoint, Slides, is said to be on its way to iOS soon. [Via 9to5Mac]
Seems Hoskins died yesterday. Best known for Mona Lisa and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, though my personal favorite was his take on Nikita Kruschev in the excellent Enemy at the Gates.
I knew it!
Whether it’s playing “Stairway to Heaven” until your fingers bleed or always finding yourself in the center of a group of people intent on singing “Wagon Wheel,” some things are common to all guitarists.
Including, as it turns out, their brain chemistry.
Fascinating. [Via Brother Stu]
You know all those movies where someone takes a selfie in the same position once a year, then flows them together so you can watch someone grow up? Well the movie Boyhood takes this one amazing step further.
Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused, School of Rock, A Scanner Darkly, to name a few) found the star, Ellar Coltrane, when he was 7 years old and visited him for a few days of shooting every year. The growing up that occurs in the movie is real. Unbelievable. Can’t wait to see it.
Here’s the trailer… [Via kottke.org]
Earlier reports that Google is building a new Silver brand of handsets got a big boost in this report (subscription required). This Tech Crunch article lays out the details.
To me, the biggest impact is this:
The phones would be designed to extend Google’s recent efforts to control its presence on Android devices more than it has in the past, like the mandatory ‘Powered by Android’ logo on boot screens and the folder of Google-created apps. Silver devices will also get more timely Android updates, like Nexus hardware.
Seems like a shot across Samsung’s bow.
In fact, part of the motivation behind Google’s Silver program is said to be winning back more control of Android from Samsung in particular. Reports have long suggested there could be some unease at Google about the amount of influence Samsung has over Android given its dominant global market share.
This move is sure to extend the fragmentation in the Android market, meaning fewer phones will be running the latest and greatest.
The store is called Amazon Wearable Technology. Sections include Fitness and Wellness, Healthcare Devices, Wearable Cameras, Smart Watches, and Families, Kids, and Pets.
Here’s a link to the US version of the store. Not sure if this has yet rolled out in your country.
Mercury News:
Harold McElhinny, Apple’s lead attorney, urged the jury to side with Apple and order Samsung to pay as much as $2.2 billion in damages for violating the patents on five iPhone and iPad software features, such as slide-to-unlock and auto-word correct. Samsung, Apple estimates, has sold 37 million of the nine smartphone models and one tablet alleged to have copied those patents.
“Apple cannot simply walk away from its inventions,” McElhinny told the jury. “And so, here we are, 37 million acts of infringement later, and we’re counting on you for justice. The size of this illegal (conduct) is beyond comprehension.”
Samsung lawyers, however, again stressed that Apple’s allegations center on Google’s Android technology, which ran the Samsung devices, and that Apple is carrying out late CEO Steve Jobs’ 2010 internal pledge to conduct a “holy war” on the Mountain View search giant.
Hoping for justice here.
I just can’t tell you how much I love this song.
Every once in a while in my travels, I come across a place I just have to share with people. I spent the last week in Kilkenny, Ireland, much of it at the Zuni Hotel. This is a quaint place in the center of Kilkenny, close to all of the major sites, pubs and restaurants. The rooms were clean and modern, the restaurant superb, but the friendly, helpful staff really made my stay something to write about—they couldn’t do enough to try and make me comfortable and happy. If you ever go to Kilkenny, do yourself a favor and stay at Zuni.