&lt;p&gt;I love this whole unfolding future-of-Flash saga because it&amp;#8217;s a wonderful mix of politics and technology. It&amp;#8217;s complex and multivariate, but not &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; complex to get a handle on the basic gist. It occurred to me this week, after both reading and writing quite a bit regarding Flash Player&amp;#8217;s performance issues, that the whole performance angle is a distraction from the fundamental issues at hand.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/01/z"&gt;linked&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href="http://www.zeldman.com/2010/02/01/flash-ipad-standards/"&gt;this piece by Jeffrey Zeldman&lt;/a&gt; three weeks ago, but it&amp;#8217;s worth a re-link. His first paragraph nails it:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Lack of Flash in the iPad (and before that, in the iPhone) is a win for accessible, standards-based design. Not because Flash is bad, but because the increasing popularity of devices that don’t support Flash is going to force recalcitrant web developers to &lt;em&gt;build the semantic HTML layer first&lt;/em&gt;. Additional &lt;a href="http://www.alistapart.com/articles/semanticflash/"&gt;layers of Flash UX&lt;/a&gt; can then be optionally added in, just as, in proper, accessible, standards-based development, &lt;a href="http://www.alistapart.com/articles/behavioralseparation"&gt;JavaScript UX enhancements&lt;/a&gt; are added only after we verify that the site works without them.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I.e. if you think people using iPhone OS devices are an important segment of your intended audience, you can no longer build a Flash-dependent web site. (And if you &lt;em&gt;don&amp;#8217;t&lt;/em&gt; think people using iPhone OS devices are an important segment of your intended audience, you&amp;#8217;re probably wrong.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Flash&amp;#8217;s performance problems on Mac OS X and mobile devices are very much real. (As of today, note that there still is no shipping version of the full Flash Player for any major mobile platform.) And I do think these performance issues are a factor in Apple&amp;#8217;s decision not to include it in iPhone OS. But I believe the larger issue goes beyond performance. Apple sees the web as a platform based on open standards. Flash isn&amp;#8217;t part of that.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;So at the moment, Flash&amp;#8217;s performance issues provide Apple with a good apolitical explanation for why Flash Player isn&amp;#8217;t included with iPhone OS. It&amp;#8217;s a way for Apple to argue that they &lt;em&gt;can&amp;#8217;t&lt;/em&gt; rather than that they &lt;em&gt;won&amp;#8217;t&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Yes, I&amp;#8217;m skeptical about how Flash Player is going to perform on Android and WebOS devices. I hope I&amp;#8217;m wrong though. If Adobe&amp;#8217;s able to squeeze acceptable performance out of Flash Player 10.1 on these (relatively) low-power ARM devices, then it&amp;#8217;s very likely that Flash Player 10.1 for Mac OS X is going to be much improved as well. (In the same way the constraints imposed on iPhone OS have been great for Mac OS X &amp;#8212; performance tweaks to components like WebKit (and especially JavaScriptCore) made to get MobileSafari running as fast as possible on low-power iPhones have resulted in fantastic performance improvements to WebKit on high-power Macs.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#8217;s what I mean about Flash Player&amp;#8217;s performance being a distraction from the underlying story: Even if Adobe solves Flash&amp;#8217;s performance problems, I still doubt Apple will want to include it in iPhone OS.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;It boils down to control. I&amp;#8217;ve written several times that I believe Apple controls the entire source code to iPhone OS. (No one has disputed that.) There&amp;#8217;s no bug Apple can&amp;#8217;t try to fix on their own. No performance problem they can&amp;#8217;t try to tackle. No one they need to wait for. That&amp;#8217;s just not true for Mac OS X, where a component like Flash Player is controlled by Adobe.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I know there are some people who see Apple taking a stand against Flash and &lt;a href="http://twitter.com/davewiner/status/9664056169"&gt;worry&lt;/a&gt; that Apple may someday take a stand against the web itself. One thing that everyone who&amp;#8217;s paying attention can agree on is that Apple greatly values control. That&amp;#8217;s indisputable, regardless whether you consider it a virtue or vice. So I think the worriers see that the web is beyond anyone&amp;#8217;s control and conclude that Apple sees it as a threat.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I say what Apple cares about controlling is the &lt;em&gt;implementation&lt;/em&gt;. That&amp;#8217;s why they started the WebKit project. That&amp;#8217;s why Apple employees from the WebKit team are leaders and major contributors of the HTML5 standards drive. The bottom line for Apple, at the executive level, is selling devices. It may well be true that Steve Jobs doesn&amp;#8217;t really give a shit about the web in and of itself. It&amp;#8217;s just good business for Apple to control a best-of-breed web rendering engine. If Apple controls its own implementation, then no matter how popular the web gets as a platform, Apple will prosper so long as its implementation is superior. (Needless to say, Apple is &lt;a href="http://www.apple.com/ipad/"&gt;quite confident&lt;/a&gt; in this regard.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The weird thing about a completely open platform based on open standards is that while no single vendor, such as Apple, can control the content or the standards, it &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; control its implementation. (And it can &lt;em&gt;influence&lt;/em&gt; the content and the standards.) That&amp;#8217;s all they need.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Likewise with Google&amp;#8217;s interest in the open web and HTML5. It&amp;#8217;s reasonable to be cynical and believe that Google is concerned only with making money, not with the open web simply for virtue&amp;#8217;s sake. So long as the web is open, Google&amp;#8217;s success rests within its own control. And in the same way Apple is confident in its ability to deliver devices with best-of-breed browsing experiences, Google is confident in its ability to provide best-of-breed search results and relevant ads. In short, Google and Apple have found different ways to bet &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; the web, rather than &lt;em&gt;against&lt;/em&gt; the web.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The best counter-argument is perhaps that, given Apple&amp;#8217;s desire for control, they&amp;#8217;re always going to prefer their wholly owned proprietary platforms &amp;#8212; native iPhone and Mac apps &amp;#8212; over the web, and will eventually come to see the web as a threat. I don&amp;#8217;t think Apple sees it that way, though. There is always going to be a lowest common denominator platform. That used to be Windows. Now it&amp;#8217;s the web. Apple doesn&amp;#8217;t build lowest common denominator platforms. Before, when Windows was the LCD, Apple was in a hard place because they were locked out of that platform: their platform was at odds with it. Now, with the web as the LCD, Apple has it both ways: their platforms gracefully coexist with it. Apple isn&amp;#8217;t a web company, but the web might be the best thing that ever happened to them.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;From Apple&amp;#8217;s perspective, when it comes to software platforms, &lt;em&gt;theirs&lt;/em&gt; is best (Cocoa/Cocoa Touch), because they have complete control. &lt;em&gt;Everyone&amp;#8217;s&lt;/em&gt; is good (the web), because Apple has control over their own implementation and can influence the future direction of the standards. What Apple doesn&amp;#8217;t want is &lt;em&gt;someone else&amp;#8217;s&lt;/em&gt; proprietary platform, where they have no control at all. That&amp;#8217;s what Flash is.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I&amp;#8217;ve said this &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/2008/02/flash_iphone_calculus"&gt;before&lt;/a&gt; and will say it again. There&amp;#8217;s only one path for Flash Player to make its way to iPhone OS:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;ol&gt; &lt;li&gt;It appears first on other competing mobile platforms.&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;It works well on those platforms.&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;Its presence and popularity on those competing platforms shifts consumer demand and adversely affects iPhone OS device sales.&lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ol&gt; &lt;p&gt;#1 will happen. Regarding #2, I&amp;#8217;m skeptical, but Adobe has smart engineers and their back is to the wall. #3, though, would require a major shift in momentum.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;HP is banking heavily on the inclusion of Flash to be a selling point vs. the iPad. My gut feeling is that Flash will prove irrelevant, and that this thing will go nowhere simply because Windows 7 is terribly suited to a touchscreen tablet.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;(And what in the world is the deal with the crazy server name in HP&amp;#8217;s weblog URLs?)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘New Promo Video From HP and Adobe on Upcoming &amp;#8216;Slate Device&amp;#8217;’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/08/hp-adobe"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;New site from Gabe Rivera: &amp;#8220;Mediagazer is to media as Techmeme is to tech.&amp;#8221;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Mediagazer’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/08/mediagazer"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Speaking of game-related Apple news.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘GDC Summit Devoted Entirely to iPhone OS Gaming’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/08/gdc"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Big news for the Mac as a game platform:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;If players already own the PC versions of Valve games, they’ll get Mac versions at no extra charge through a feature called Steam Play. [&amp;#8230;] By using the Steam Cloud feature that the company introduced in 2008, players can save in-progress games online, then call up those saved games no matter which version they’re playing. If you’re playing Half-Life 2 on your home PC but then head out on the road with your MacBook, you can continue your game-in-progress.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Valve Announces That Its Games and Steam Service Are Coming to the Mac’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/08/valve"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Interviews, readings, and more, &amp;#8220;lovingly collected by Ryan Walsh in early 2009&amp;#8221;. It&amp;#8217;s a gold mine.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘The David Foster Wallace Audio Project’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/08/dfw-audio-project"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;He thinks it&amp;#8217;s a scam to make it harder for iPhone (and soon, iPad) owners to use Wi-Fi, so that they instead use 3G and run up service charges. This is nutty. The carriers &amp;#8212; AT&amp;amp;T especially &amp;#8212; really do want iPhone owners to use Wi-Fi. AT&amp;amp;T CEO Randall Stephenson is &lt;a href="http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/ipad-att/"&gt;practically begging iPad users to use Wi-Fi&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Plus, the iPhone has built-in features for finding open Wi-Fi networks, right there in the Settings app. By default it even lets you know when it finds an open network. It boggles the mind that anyone would think there&amp;#8217;s something fishy about these apps being removed.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Carmi Levy&amp;#8217;s Conspiracy Theory Regarding Apple&amp;#8217;s Removal of Wi-Fi Scanning Apps from the App Store’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/08/levy"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;He&amp;#8217;s very kind to state that DF was an inspiration. I stole the intermingled short-links-and-longer-articles format from Kottke, though.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Cameron Moll on His Weblog Redesign’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/08/cameron-moll"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Saved, perhaps, by the iPhone. They turned a profit last year and expect $100 million in revenue this year.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘New York Times Profile on Pandora and Founder Tim Westergren’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/08/pandora"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;DailyDeeds is the simplest new way to keep laser focused on your everyday goals. Launch DailyDeeds on your iPhone or iPod Touch and set some new habits for yourself: 30 minutes sketching, take 10 photos, practice guitar, you name it. Things you tend &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to do, but things you &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to do &amp;#8212; and do often. &lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Each day you pull off a task, just tap the box and over time DailyDeeds conjures up a visual history for you. No fuss, hands down the easiest solution ever for everyday diary keeping. &lt;a href="http://spoonjuice.com/dailydeeds"&gt;For more details stop by our site&lt;/a&gt; or click through &lt;a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/daily-deeds/id358401617?mt=8"&gt;to the App Store&lt;/a&gt; for an instant download.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Jason Snell &amp;#8212; editorial director at Macworld &amp;#8212; wrote &lt;a href="http://jsnell.intertext.com/post/419218293/merlin-wants-free-full-text-rss-feeds"&gt;an interesting piece on his personal site&lt;/a&gt; regarding full-text RSS feeds, prompted by &lt;a href="http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/416273227/feed-me-atlantic"&gt;Merlin Mann&amp;#8217;s piece&lt;/a&gt; last week regarding The Atlantic.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Snell writes:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;RSS doesn’t generate revenue directly. There are ads in RSS, sure, but they’re cheap and lousy and don’t have remotely the return as ads on web pages. The question is, if you publish all your content in RSS, does the resulting drop in traffic get offset by the fringe benefits? In the mind of some — presumably including Merlin Mann and John Gruber — you may lose a small percentage of tech-savvy people, but those people tend to be the ones who pass links around to friends and on their blogs and on Twitter, and a lot of those people will come to your web site from there, so in the end it’s a net benefit. Plus, more people will care about you and your brand and that’s a good thing.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I agree, that’s good. I wish someone could cite some studies that prove that giving away your full-text RSS doesn’t hurt traffic, but helps it.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;It should go without saying that what works for me here at Daring Fireball, as a one-man show, may well not work (or work nearly as well) for a large operation with a full editorial staff such as Macworld. But: &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/feeds/"&gt;DF&amp;#8217;s RSS feed&lt;/a&gt;, which contains the full content of the site, not only generates money directly, but has grown to become the single largest source of revenue on the site.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The ads in most sponsored RSS feeds are indeed cheap and lousy. The ads in DF&amp;#8217;s RSS feed are neither. They&amp;#8217;re priced at a premium, and have attracted (if I do say so myself) premium sponsors.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;What is &amp;#8220;traffic&amp;#8221;? I suspect Snell is talking about &lt;em&gt;page views&lt;/em&gt;. When someone loads a web page in their browser, that&amp;#8217;s a page view. Most advertising on the web (but &lt;a href="http://decknetwork.net/"&gt;not all&lt;/a&gt;) is sold using page views as the metric &amp;#8212; advertisers pay an agreed-upon amount for every thousand page views on which their ad appears.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;When I switched DF&amp;#8217;s free public RSS feed &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/2007/07/regarding_df_feed"&gt;to full-content in August 2007&lt;/a&gt;, DF&amp;#8217;s web page views had been growing steadily month-to-month. After the switch, web page views were stagnant, with no growth, for about a year. (If anything, &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/2007/10/feedery"&gt;they went down&lt;/a&gt; in the first few months.) But &lt;em&gt;readership&lt;/em&gt; clearly continued to grow: subscribers to the feed skyrocketed. And, about a year ago, even web page views started growing significantly once again &amp;#8212; going from a little over one million per month to a little over two million per month.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#8217;ve got a model where revenue is tied only to web page views, switching to full-content RSS feeds will hurt, at least in the short term. The problem, I say, isn&amp;#8217;t with full-content RSS feeds, but rather with a business model that hinges solely on web page views. The precious commodity that we, as publishers, have to offer advertisers is the &lt;em&gt;attention&lt;/em&gt; of our readers. Web page views are a terribly inaccurate, if not outright misleading, metric for attention. Subscribers to a full-content RSS feed are among the readers paying the &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; attention, but generate among the &lt;em&gt;least&lt;/em&gt; web page views.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;A reader asking for a full-content RSS feed is a reader who wants to pay &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; attention to what you publish. There have to be ways to thrive financially from that.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;(I could go on, which is good, because &lt;a href="http://my.sxsw.com/events/event/617"&gt;my friend Jim Coudal and I are speaking together on this very topic &amp;#8212; online advertising &amp;#8212; at SXSW next week&lt;/a&gt;. Our session is at 3:30pm Sunday afternoon.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href="http://jsnell.intertext.com/post/428974147/attention-and-audiences"&gt;Jason Snell&amp;#8217;s thoughtful response&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;A bunch of readers have emailed regarding &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/2010/03/this_apple_htc_patent_thing"&gt;yesterday&amp;#8217;s piece&lt;/a&gt; on the Apple-HTC patent suit to ask why I didn&amp;#8217;t compare it to Apple&amp;#8217;s ill-fated &lt;a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corporation"&gt;&amp;#8220;Look and Feel&amp;#8221; lawsuit against Microsoft&lt;/a&gt;. I don&amp;#8217;t think the comparison is all that interesting or apt, basically.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;For one thing, that suit was a copyright case, not a patent case. I think it&amp;#8217;s fair to say that&amp;#8217;s an entirely different ballgame legally. For another, the personnel are completely different. The entirety of that dispute with Microsoft took place during Steve Jobs&amp;#8217;s exile from Apple.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;But that actually led me to an interesting thought this morning. Leave aside the legal differences between copyright violations and patent disputes, and the two cases more or less boil down to the same fundamental situation: Apple brings to market a revolutionary next step in personal computers; competitors then use those same ideas in competing products. Microsoft and Windows then; Google and Android now.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I can see that what some people &amp;#8212; people who are far more sympathetic to the idea of Apple attacking Android via the courts than I am &amp;#8212; are thinking is more or less that Apple got screwed the last time when a competitor was able to shamelessly use the ideas that Apple first created, and so Apple should do whatever it can to keep that from happening again.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Apple&amp;#8217;s argument in the Microsoft case was that Windows was a copy of the Mac&amp;#8217;s copyrighted &amp;#8220;look and feel&amp;#8221;: mouse pointer, menu bar with pull-down menus, overlapping rectangular windows with a title bar at the top containing buttons for zooming and closing, scrollbars, icons representing applications and documents, click-and-drag text selection, drag-and-drop, a trash can, undo, a &amp;#8220;desktop&amp;#8221;, cross-application copy-and-paste &amp;#8212; all these aspects from the Mac were also in Windows.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;But what if Apple &lt;em&gt;had&lt;/em&gt; patented these things in 1984, and had successfully protected these patents from being used by other U.S. companies? (Or at least the features and designs which weren&amp;#8217;t derived from &lt;a href="http://toastytech.com/guis/star.html"&gt;earlier work at Xerox&lt;/a&gt;.) It&amp;#8217;s not just Microsoft that would&amp;#8217;ve been blocked from creating Windows as we know it. A company called NeXT would have been blocked from creating NeXTStep. Every single Mac feature I described above was part of the NeXT UI as well.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Good ideas are meant to spread.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;There are two aspects surrounding Apple&amp;#8217;s patent litigation against HTC that demand further consideration. First, the severe problems with the U.S. patent system as a whole, particularly with regard to software patents. Second, the strategic implications of Apple&amp;#8217;s decision to file suit.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Smart writers with first-hand experience with software patents have written much over the past few years on the system itself. Tim Bray, in particular, &lt;a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=patents+site%3Atbray.org"&gt;has written extensively&lt;/a&gt; on them, including his own experience obtaining them. I&amp;#8217;ll quote here from &lt;a href="http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/09/15/SWPatents"&gt;one of his early pieces on the subject&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are Software Patents a Broken Idea?&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;#8212; I really don’t know. One of my brothers, an Industrial Designer, has his name on a patent for a device for mixing gases that’s used in chromatographs. When he showed me the filing, with the drawings and schematics and so on, I was impressed; these guys had cooked up a new arrangement of valves and geometries that did a practical task in an elegant and new way. It felt much more rigorous than the way we go about inventing new technology in the software space; but maybe that’s just because I’m way too close to the software world and can see all the warts on its underbelly.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I’m inclined to think there’s a spectrum of reasonability in software patents. “One-click ordering” seems like a grievous error, simply because if you said those three words to any web-savvy ecommerce-savvy programmer, they’d say “OK” and build it for you and it would work; which doesn’t seem to meet a high enough bar to qualify as an invention. But consider the basic PGP setup by Phil Zimmerman, it’s just immensely clever and elegant. I have the feeling that that really does qualify as an invention in totally the same sense as my brother’s gas-mixing apparatus. Obviously I think the things I filed are closer to PGP than one-click ordering.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;In a later follow-up, &lt;a href="http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/10/12/PatentTheory"&gt;Bray wrote&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Does this mean that I’ve concluded that software patents are just fine, thank you, and the current rat’s-nest of litigation is good business practice?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;No; while I generally agree with &lt;a href="http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan/20040930#i_believe_in_ip"&gt;Jonathan&lt;/a&gt; that the software-patent idea is not inherently broken (and thus disagree with &lt;a href="http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/stallman-patents.html"&gt;Richard Stallman&lt;/a&gt;), the fact is that it’s almost impossible for rational people to have a rational discussion about software patents. The reason is the insanely-dysfunctional behavior of the US Patent and Trademark Office, whose idiotic willingness to &lt;a href="http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/08/05/LinuxPatents"&gt;grant patents on anything without regard for prior art or the obviousness test&lt;/a&gt; has totally poisoned the waters of this discussion. The result, as I’ve argued before, is that the net effect of the software-patent system is to serve as a parasitic tax by lawyers on businesspeople.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Where I disagree with Jonathan is on what’s known as “business-method” patents: one-click ordering, per-employee pricing. I’m having trouble seeing the benefit to society in granting patents on something that could never possibly be done secretly. I also think that to get a patent, an invention should include innovation &lt;em&gt;both in conception and implementation&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;The emphasis in the last sentence quoted above is mine. I&amp;#8217;ve quoted extensively here from Bray because, having re-read his patent-related essays, I find myself in nearly complete agreement with him. I&amp;#8217;m not opposed to the idea of the patent system on general principle (as Stallman and many others are). And I think in many fields, the system has worked and continues to work well.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;But for software the system, in practice, is undeniably broken. There&amp;#8217;s an argument to be made that software is inherently different than other fields of invention, different in such a way that patents should not apply &amp;#8212; or, should apply for a significantly shorter period of time before expiring. You can&amp;#8217;t (or at least shouldn&amp;#8217;t) be able to patent mathematics, and there are good arguments that programming is a branch of mathematics. But because software patents &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; granted, concede at least for the moment that certain kinds of software innovations &lt;em&gt;ought&lt;/em&gt; to be patentable. Even with that in mind, clearly the U.S. Patent Office is and has granted patents for things which ought not be patentable. Not just silly frivolous things, but patents that have been granted for &lt;em&gt;concepts&lt;/em&gt; alone, rather than specific innovative &lt;em&gt;implementations&lt;/em&gt; of said concepts. Ideas in the abstract, rather than implementations of ideas.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Just a few weeks ago, Bray published &amp;#8220;&lt;a href="http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/02/22/Patent-Fail"&gt;Giving Up on Patents&lt;/a&gt;&amp;#8221;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Not so many years ago, even as I was filled with &lt;a href="http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/08/05/LinuxPatents"&gt;fear and loathing&lt;/a&gt; of the hideous misconduct of the US Patent &amp;amp; Trademark Office, I retained some respect for the notion of patents. I even wrote what I think is an unusually easy-to-read introduction to &lt;a href="http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/10/12/PatentTheory"&gt;Patent Theory&lt;/a&gt;. But no more. The whole thing is too broken to be fixed. Maybe it worked once, but it doesn’t any more. The patent system needs to be torn down and thrown out.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Paul Graham, who has also been awarded software patents, &lt;a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html"&gt;has written well on the subject&lt;/a&gt;, too:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;We, as hackers, know the USPTO is letting people patent the knives and forks of our world. The problem is, the USPTO are not hackers. They&amp;#8217;re probably good at judging new inventions for casting steel or grinding lenses, but they don&amp;#8217;t understand software yet.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;And:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;There’s nothing special about physical embodiments of control systems that should make them patentable, and the software equivalent not.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, patent law is inconsistent on this point. Patent law in most countries says that algorithms aren’t patentable. This rule is left over from a time when “algorithm” meant something like the Sieve of Eratosthenes. In 1800, people could not see as readily as we can that a great many patents on mechanical objects were really patents on the algorithms they embodied.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Patent lawyers still have to pretend that’s what they’re doing when they patent algorithms. You must not use the word “algorithm” in the title of a patent application, just as you must not use the word “essays” in the title of a book. If you want to patent an algorithm, you have to frame it as a computer system executing that algorithm. Then it’s mechanical; phew. The default euphemism for algorithm is “system and method.” Try a patent search for that phrase and see how many results you get.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;These arcane rules lead to patents being described in an obfuscated manner. That they are patenting algorithms but must pretend they&amp;#8217;re patenting something else is the definition of a broken system.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;To me, &amp;#8220;user interface&amp;#8221; patents are hand-in-hand with &amp;#8220;&lt;a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_method_patent"&gt;business method patents&lt;/a&gt;&amp;#8221; as examples of things which, no matter how innovative or original, ought not be patentable. They&amp;#8217;re idea patents.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Adobe, to take one example, has a patent on &lt;a href="http://eupat.ffii.org/patents/samples/ep689133/index.en.html"&gt;tabbed palettes&lt;/a&gt;. If you&amp;#8217;ve used Adobe apps like Photoshop, InDesign, or Illustrator in the past decade, you know what they are. Design applications have been using floating on-screen palettes all the way back to the original MacPaint in 1984. Unlike dialog boxes, they weren&amp;#8217;t modal and &amp;#8220;floated&amp;#8221; over the document window. Unlike menus, they remained visible. They&amp;#8217;re ubiquitous in design apps. One shortcoming, however, was that if you opened too many of them, you cluttered your screen &amp;#8212; the more palettes you have open, the less room you have for displaying the document itself. Adobe came up with a great feature: they allowed you to dock multiple palettes together as tabs within a single palette window, and you could drag individual tabs between windows or drag them out into their own window. (Similar, at the palette level, to tabbed web browser windows.) Adobe patented the idea, and when Macromedia implemented a version of it, &lt;a href="http://news.cnet.com/2100-1040-898061.html"&gt;Adobe sued&lt;/a&gt; (and won &amp;#8212; a measly $2.8 million). To me, that&amp;#8217;s exactly the sort of patent litigation that is aimed at stifling innovation rather than rewarding it. Building on the ideas of others is fundamental to competition.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;No one company can or should be expected to change the entire U.S. patent system. Like any entrenched system with powerful entities who seek to maintain the status quo, we&amp;#8217;re likely stuck with it. And so the way the computer industry has dealt with it is detente. Companies obtain as many patents as they can, written as broadly as they can get away with. And since everyone (where by &amp;#8220;everyone&amp;#8221; I mean all large tech corporations) has a large patent portfolio, and nearly every idea under the sun has been patented by someone to some degree, most of them are inert. Company A doesn&amp;#8217;t sue Company B for infringing upon patents held by A because A&amp;#8217;s own products almost certainly infringe upon some patents held by B.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;This is why pure patent troll companies such as &lt;a href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20100217/1853298215.shtml"&gt;Nathan Myhrvold&amp;#8217;s Intellectual Ventures&lt;/a&gt; are so despised. They&amp;#8217;re immune from the threat of counter-suit because they have no products or services. Their only business is extorting patent licensing fees.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The analogy to nuclear weapons is overwrought when considered literally, but in terms of strategy it&amp;#8217;s quite apt. &lt;a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html"&gt;Paul Graham, on Amazon&amp;#8217;s notorious &amp;#8220;one-click&amp;#8221; patent&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Where Amazon went over to the dark side was not in applying for the patent, but in enforcing it. A lot of companies (Microsoft, for example) have been granted large numbers of preposterously over-broad patents, but they keep them mainly for defensive purposes. Like nuclear weapons, the main role of big companies&amp;#8217; patent portfolios is to threaten anyone who attacks them with a counter-suit. Amazon&amp;#8217;s suit against Barnes &amp;amp; Noble was thus the equivalent of a nuclear first strike.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;That suit probably hurt Amazon more than it helped them. Barnes &amp;amp; Noble was a lame site; Amazon would have crushed them anyway. To attack a rival they could have ignored, Amazon put a lasting black mark on their own reputation. Even now I think if you asked hackers to free-associate about Amazon, the one-click patent would turn up in the first ten topics.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Which brings us to Apple and HTC. Regardless of the merits of all 20 of the patents Apple accuses HTC of violating, strategy-wise the comparison to Amazon and Barnes and Noble seems apt: Apple has the clearly superior product and is winning handily in the marketplace. Whatever benefit in the market Apple hopes to achieve by this suit to me seems likely to be worth far less than the loss of good will and prestige Apple will suffer if they vigorously pursue this case (let alone if they initiate more such suits).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://wilshipley.com/blog/2010/03/open-letter-to-steve-jobs-concerning.html"&gt;Wil Shipley, in an open letter to Steve Jobs regarding the HTC litigation&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;You’ve famously taken and built on ideas from your competitors, as have I, as we should, as great artists do. Why is what HTC has done worse? Whether an idea was patented doesn’t change the morality of copying it, it only changes the ability to sue. [&amp;#8230;]&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;If Apple becomes a company that uses its might to quash competition instead of using its brains, it&amp;#8217;s going to find the brainiest people will slowly stop working there. You know this, you watched it happen at Microsoft.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Copying ideas is how progress is made. It&amp;#8217;s copying implementations that is wrong (and illegal). Admittedly there are gray areas, and reasonable people can disagree about whether some specific instances cross that line. But HTC&amp;#8217;s phones are not copies of the iPhone. The Nexus One is without question highly influenced by the iPhone, both in terms of physical form factor and the Android software from Google. But it is also without question not a clone.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;My favorite theory thus far regarding why Apple is suing HTC is expressed entirely in &lt;a href="http://twitter.com/siracusa/status/9884001169"&gt;this tweet from John Siracusa&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;To me, the Apple patent suit smells like nothing more than a manifestation of Jobs&amp;#8217;s own sense of injustice.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I.e., Jobs is &lt;em&gt;offended&lt;/em&gt; by HTC&amp;#8217;s products, not worried about them. I can understand the indignation, or at least imagine that I can.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Apple&amp;#8217;s press releases tend to be remarkably terse and plainspoken, at least by the standards of modern corporate communication. And when Jobs is quoted in them, the words are carefully chosen and meaningful, worthy of being carefully parsed&lt;sup id="fnr1-2010-03-03"&gt;&lt;a href="#fn1-2010-03-03"&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; &amp;#8212; not at all like the bromides attributed to CEOs from most companies in most PRs. &lt;a href="http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/03/02patents.html"&gt;The PR announcing these suits against HTC is no exception&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;“We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;That&amp;#8217;s not the language of a licensing dispute or the beginning of a polite negotiation. That&amp;#8217;s the language of a man aggrieved.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;During Jobs&amp;#8217;s iPhone introduction keynote address in January 2007, before showing what the iPhone looked like, Jobs put up this slide showing four of the then-leading smartphones on the market: the Motorola Q, a BlackBerry, a Palm Treo, and the Nokia E62.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="/misc/2010/03/smartphones.jpg"&gt;&lt;img src = "/misc/2010/03/smartphones-415.jpg" alt = "Steve Jobs at Macworld Expo 2007, showing the leading smartphones prior to the iPhone." /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Those pre-iPhone smartphones Jobs displayed all shared the same fundamental design: half-screen, half keyboard, and an up/down/left/right navigation controller. Now &lt;a href="http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/android-hardware-in-the-wild/google-android-prototype-in-the-wild-334909.php"&gt;look at this prototype Android phone&lt;/a&gt; Gizmodo spotted in December 2007 &amp;#8212; 11 months after the iPhone introduction. Android was conceived of that same old model &amp;#8212; the prototype Gizmodo found in December 2007 would have fit perfectly alongside the other four phones in Jobs&amp;#8217;s keynote slide.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The gaping chasm between that Treo-ish/BlackBerry-ish prototype Android device and the &lt;a href="http://www.htc.com/www/product/g1/overview.html"&gt;HTC G1&lt;/a&gt; that went on sale a year later (let alone the Nexus One today) was bridged by ideas from the iPhone.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The iPhone introduced a new model. A true great leap forward in the state of the art. Not a small screen that shows you things which you manipulate indirectly using buttons and trackballs occupying half the device&amp;#8217;s surface area, but instead a touchscreen that occupies almost the entirety of the surface area, showing things you manipulate directly.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Android is a far better platform today than it would have been if Apple had never created the iPhone. That, in some sense, is not fair.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I think Siracusa is exactly right that Jobs has a particularly acute sensitivity to this sort of unfairness. This litigation, perhaps then, isn&amp;#8217;t about particular specific patented components, but rather is about the big idea, the general gist and grand ambition of the iPhone as the basic model for how modern mobile devices should be designed and work.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;No doubt some of you are nodding your heads and see this as justification for Apple&amp;#8217;s suit. But life isn&amp;#8217;t fair. Great ideas make the world better. Apple can rightly expect to benefit greatly from the ideas embodied by the iPhone, but they can&amp;#8217;t expect to reap &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of the benefits from those ideas.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;That&amp;#8217;s the nature of implementing insanely great ideas. The bar has been raised, and, yes, Apple did most of the lifting. That&amp;#8217;s how it goes.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1161807"&gt;Paul Graham, yesterday&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;If this had happened a day earlier I don&amp;#8217;t think I would have posted that RFS. Apple is inching ever closer to evil, and I worry that there&amp;#8217;s no one within the company who can stand up to Jobs and tell him so.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;&amp;#8220;That RFS&amp;#8221; is the &lt;a href="http://ycombinator.com/rfs6.html"&gt;request for iPad software startups&lt;/a&gt; from Graham&amp;#8217;s Y Combinator, and lest you think &amp;#8220;evil&amp;#8221; is too overwrought a word, Graham clarified &lt;a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1161946"&gt;later in the same thread&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Historically the word &amp;#8220;evil&amp;#8221; has had a pretty broad meaning. Among tech companies the word has a new and fairly specific sense that follows from Paul Buchheit&amp;#8217;s slogan &amp;#8220;Don&amp;#8217;t be evil.&amp;#8221; That&amp;#8217;s the sense I was using. It has a pretty low bar. It means, roughly, winning by taking advantage of people instead of by doing good work.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I wouldn&amp;#8217;t use the word &lt;em&gt;evil&lt;/em&gt; this way, but I&amp;#8217;m right there with Graham on this sentiment. And I say this not in any sort of hippy-dippy sense of expecting or even hoping for Apple to behave selflessly, holding them to a separate idealistic standard, or expecting them to fight with one arm tied behind their corporate back. And only a fool would argue that a company should never seek redress through litigation.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;But I believe that it&amp;#8217;s good business, in the long run, for a company&amp;#8217;s acts of aggression to take place in the market, not in the courts. My concern regarding this litigation against HTC is that it looks like an act of competitive aggression, not defense.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I can think of only a few optimistic angles for this suit. One is that perhaps it&amp;#8217;s a by-product of the suit Apple is engaged in against (and initiated by) Nokia. Apple&amp;#8217;s counter-suit against Nokia involves some of the same patents at play here, and perhaps Apple&amp;#8217;s lawyers have concluded that they need to enforce them against someone like HTC in order to use them in their counter-suit against Nokia. Or, perhaps one or more of the truly technical patents Apple has cited against HTC are genuine instances of intellectual property theft, the specific nature of which is unclear from the opaque language of the patent filings, and the rest of the cited patent violations were tacked on as part of a legal strategy along the lines of &amp;#8220;&lt;em&gt;If you&amp;#8217;re going to punch them, punch them as hard as you can&lt;/em&gt;&amp;#8221;. I.e. that they&amp;#8217;ve filed suit as widely as they can, but have specific narrow violations in mind.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;What worries me is the idea that Apple, or even just Steve Jobs, believes that phones like the Nexus One have no right to exist, period, and that patent litigation to keep them off the market is in the company&amp;#8217;s interests. I say it&amp;#8217;s worrisome not because I think it&amp;#8217;s evil, or foolish, or unreasonable, but because it is unwise, shortsighted, and unnecessary. &lt;/p&gt; &lt;div class="footnotes"&gt; &lt;hr /&gt; &lt;ol&gt; &lt;li id="fn1-2010-03-03"&gt; &lt;p&gt;For example, consider the timing of &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/01/05/app-store-3b"&gt;this PR Apple released early in the morning on January 5&lt;/a&gt;, announcing the three-billionth download from the App Store. Jobs is quoted thus: “The revolutionary App Store offers iPhone and iPod touch users an experience unlike anything else available on other mobile devices, and we see no signs of the competition catching up anytime soon.”&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;January 5 was the day Google held its event to unveil the Nexus One.&amp;nbsp;&lt;a href="#fnr1-2010-03-03" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text."&gt;&amp;#8617;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ol&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;h2&gt;They Stopped Digging&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt;Good for Microsoft for starting over with a truly new UI and new &lt;a href="http://www.fiercedeveloper.com/story/windows-phone-7-offer-both-silverlight-and-xna-development/2010-02-21"&gt;developer APIs&lt;/a&gt;. There&amp;#8217;s an old saying that when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. Microsoft found themselves in a hole the day Apple unveiled the iPhone, but continued digging for three more years. Better late than never, though.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h2&gt;The Zune UI&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt;Just about any new UI would be better than the existing Windows Mobile UI. But basing the new Windows Phone 7 UI on the Zune raises the question of why they think it&amp;#8217;s going to fare any better than, well, the Zune.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h2&gt;The &amp;#8216;Phone&amp;#8217; in the Name&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt;Renaming the platform from &amp;#8220;Windows Mobile&amp;#8221; to &amp;#8220;Windows Phone 7 Series&amp;#8221; makes it even less applicable than ever to non-phone mobiles, like the iPod Touch. I think the iPod Touch is the single greatest strength of the iPhone OS platform. You can argue that phones like the Nexus One and Pre Plus are worthy rivals to the iPhone 3GS, but &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/28/demographics"&gt;there is no rival to the iPod Touch&lt;/a&gt;. Now, admittedly, Apple&amp;#8217;s mobile OS has &amp;#8220;phone&amp;#8221; in its name too, so I suppose there&amp;#8217;s no reason why someone might not make a non-phone device running the &amp;#8220;Windows Phone&amp;#8221; OS, but it seems shortsighted to me. The only logical explanation I can think of is that Microsoft only plans to license the OS for use on actual &lt;em&gt;phones&lt;/em&gt;, and they&amp;#8217;re going to pull an Apple with non-phone devices for this platform with their Zune brand.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h2&gt;The &amp;#8216;Windows&amp;#8217; in the Name&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt;The bigger naming question: Why name it “Windows” anything? If Microsoft is &lt;a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/technology/01soft.html"&gt;going for a clean break&lt;/a&gt;, why not a new non-&amp;#8220;Windows&amp;#8221; name? I think it shows just how perverse Microsoft’s obsession with &amp;#8220;Windows&amp;#8221; is. There’s no good way to leverage their Windows PC OS monopoly to extend it to mobile, other than the name, so they&amp;#8217;re sticking with it. It doesn&amp;#8217;t even make literal sense. The whole point of the &amp;#8220;Windows&amp;#8221; name is that it was for a system whose UI revolved around the concept of on-screen &lt;em&gt;windows&lt;/em&gt;. There are no windows in the Windows Phone 7 interface. (There&amp;#8217;s also no Start menu in the WP7 UI; that was the linchpin of UI similarity between Windows (for PCs) and Windows Mobile.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;A new non-Windows name would have let Microsoft use a 1.0 version number. I think the &amp;#8220;7&amp;#8221; in &amp;#8220;Windows Phone 7 Series&amp;#8221; is a detriment to their message that this is a clean break from Windows Mobile 6 and earlier. The 7 implies &amp;#8220;new version of the old thing&amp;#8221;, which isn&amp;#8217;t what they want at all because the old thing is unloved and unpopular. A new 1.0 thing would have also dampened uncomfortable questions about why phones available today &lt;a href="http://www.downloadsquad.com/2010/03/01/windows-mobile-6-x-users-wont-get-windows-phone-7-upgrade/"&gt;won&amp;#8217;t be upgradeable to the new system when it ships&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h2&gt;The Osborne Effect&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt;That (a) Windows Phone 7 units aren&amp;#8217;t expected until late this year (and think about what happens if the schedule slips); and (b) current Windows Mobile 6.5 phones will not be upgradeable suggests that Windows Mobile phones &lt;a href="http://gizmodo.com/5482641/every-windows-mobile-phone-out-now-is-officially-at-the-evolutionary-dead-end"&gt;aren&amp;#8217;t going to have a good year&lt;/a&gt;, sales-wise. Windows Mobile sales and market share were already in steep decline; the &lt;a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect"&gt;Osborne Effect&lt;/a&gt; isn&amp;#8217;t going to help.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Perhaps in the long run it doesn&amp;#8217;t matter just how badly Windows Mobile handsets sell between now and the debut of Windows Phone 7 handsets. But on the other hand, the last thing Microsoft needs in the weeks and months leading up to the new handsets debuting is bad press about tanking &amp;#8220;Windows Mobile&amp;#8221; sales. (Another reason why it would have been a good idea to use a new brand name.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h2&gt;Triumph of the iPhone Form Factor&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt;When the iPhone debuted, there were no popular phones based primarily on a large touchscreen. Now, nearly all new smartphones share the same basic form: a roughly 3.5-inch touchscreen. (Non-touchscreen BlackBerries are the biggest exception.) Many include a hardware keyboard, but the touchscreen is the starting point. The Windows Phone 7 software doesn&amp;#8217;t look like the iPhone&amp;#8217;s much at all. But the hardware is pretty much an iPhone with two extra buttons (Back and Search). One advantage Windows Phone 7 may have over Android is that WP7 was designed with this form factor &amp;#8212; the large touchscreen &amp;#8212; as a baseline assumption. All major Android phones on the market have this form factor too, but the Android OS itself was designed to be abstract enough &lt;a href="http://www.slashgear.com/android-firmware-10-apparently-running-on-qualcomm-handset-video-demos-1316112/"&gt;not to require a touchscreen at all&lt;/a&gt;. That&amp;#8217;s handicapped Android in terms of things like text editing, which requires the use of a trackball or direction pad instead of a pure touch interface.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h2&gt;Who&amp;#8217;s the Competition?&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt;The big three mobile platforms right now are iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android. (Feel free to add Nokia as a fourth.) I think Windows Phone 7 is most competitive with Android, because that&amp;#8217;s the one with the same business model: licensing the OS to OEM hardware makers. They&amp;#8217;re even competing for attention from the very same hardware makers, especially HTC. Google&amp;#8217;s been undercutting Microsoft with free (or nearly free) services for a few years now: Google Docs against Office, &lt;a href="http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/gmail.html"&gt;Gmail for Business&lt;/a&gt; against Exchange, and soon, Chrome OS against Windows. But this one, Android vs. Windows Mobile, is the first one where Google seems poised to take the lead. Windows Phone 7 doesn&amp;#8217;t just have to be better than Android, it has to be better enough to convince handset makers that it&amp;#8217;s worth the licensing fees.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Pedro Bustamante:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Interestingly enough, the Mariposa bot is not the only malware I found on the Vodafone HTC Magic phone. There’s also a Confiker and a Lineage password stealing malware. I wonder who’s doing QA at Vodafone and HTC these days?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;In the comments, Bustamante writes:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Regardless, I don’t think this has to do with factory settings, but rather with poor QA process of refurbished phones.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;One would hope this isn&amp;#8217;t widespread.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Vodafone Gives Customer Android Phone Loaded With Botnet and Password-Stealing Malware’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/09/vodafone"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Farhad Manjoo&amp;#8217;s piece for Slate on Apple&amp;#8217;s patent infringement legal action against HTC bears the headline &amp;#8220;Apple&amp;#8217;s Multitouch Lawsuit Is Both Dumb and Dangerous&amp;#8221;, which is slightly odd, insofar as that none of the patents Apple cited are related to multitouch.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Which raises the question: Why not? Multitouch is certainly the aspect of the iPhone user interface that has been most-talked about with regard to patents, ever since it debuted at Macworld Expo in 2007 and Jobs flat-out bragged about how patented it was. Maybe the aspects of multitouch that HTC has added to the Nexus One don&amp;#8217;t violate the patents?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href="http://twitter.com/reckless/status/10229467375"&gt;Nilay Patel says&lt;/a&gt; none of Apple&amp;#8217;s granted patents cover pinch-to-zoom, which, as far as I can tell, is the only &amp;#8220;multitouch&amp;#8221; supported on the Nexus One. Apple has &lt;em&gt;pending&lt;/em&gt; patents on pinch-to-zoom and other multi-finger gestures, but who knows if they&amp;#8217;ll be granted.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘What About Those Multitouch Patents?’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/09/manjoo"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Michael Calore:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href="https://sub-amazon.icims.com/jobs/110865/job?in_iframe=1"&gt;job posting for a browser engineer&lt;/a&gt; at &lt;a href="http://lab126.com/"&gt;Lab126&lt;/a&gt;, the division of Amazon that develops the Kindle, indicates the company is looking for somebody to develop “an innovative embedded web browser” for a consumer product. [&amp;#8230;]&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The Kindle’s current browsing experience is notably sub-par. It’s good enough to check your e-mail, post to Twitter or read Wikipedia, but it doesn’t handle images or more complex web apps particularly well. It certainly doesn’t live up to the same vision of the mobile web being outlined by the iPhone, or Android phones like the Droid or Nexus One.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Calore is right that the current Kindle browser is poor, but I wonder whether this job opening is for the Kindle. One problem Amazon would have with a Kindle armed with a good mobile browser is that it might encourage too much use of the browser &amp;#8212; existing Kindles don&amp;#8217;t have Wi-Fi and only access the Internet via &amp;#8220;free&amp;#8221; 3G networking. The reason Amazon can provide free 3G is that it&amp;#8217;s typically only used for buying books. Add a great browser and I don&amp;#8217;t see how they could afford free 3G. (Maybe future Kindles will be Wi-Fi only?)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Amazon Hiring Web Browser Developers’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/09/amazon-browser"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;If I didn&amp;#8217;t love these guys I would hate them.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘The Panic Status Board’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/08/panic-status"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Great photo by Zadi Diaz. (&lt;a href="http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/03/08/greatPhotoOfJobsAtOscars.html"&gt;Via Dave Winer&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Steve Jobs at the 2010 Oscars’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/08/jobs-oscars"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Jim Dalrymple:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;However, it doesn’t make sense for Apple to unify the two operating systems for 4.0 with the timeline they are working with. Rather, I expect Apple to release OS 4.1 in September or October. It will not only address issues with the 4.0 release, but also unify the operating systems.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Jim&amp;#8217;s &lt;a href="http://www.loopinsight.com/2010/01/08/prediction-apple-to-release-two-tablets-and-other-prognostications/"&gt;expectations&lt;/a&gt; tend to be pretty good, to say the least.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Jim Dalrymple: iPhone, iPad Operating System to Unify With OS 4.1’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/08/dalrymple"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Brian X. Chen at Wired, &lt;a href="http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/ipad-apps/"&gt;on the default iPhone apps that aren&amp;#8217;t present on the iPad&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;But if you recall, the iPhone ships with some apps that appear to be left out from the iPad: Stocks, Calculator, Clock, Weather and Voice Memos. What gives?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment, but I’m willing to guess Apple will just stick those apps in the App Store for a free download, and they’ll be the same apps as they were on the iPhone. After all, it’s unlikely there’s much to do with those particular apps to make them visually special for the iPad.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Actually, it&amp;#8217;s sort of the opposite problem. It&amp;#8217;s not that Apple &lt;em&gt;couldn&amp;#8217;t&lt;/em&gt; just create bigger versions of these apps and have them run on the iPad. It wasn&amp;#8217;t a technical problem, it was a design problem. There were, internally to Apple (of course), versions of these apps (or at least some of them) with upscaled iPad-sized graphics, but otherwise the same UI and layout as the iPhone versions. Ends up that just blowing up iPhone apps to fill the iPad screen looks and feels weird, even if you use higher-resolution graphics so that nothing looks pixelated. So they were scrapped by you-know-who. Perhaps they&amp;#8217;ll appear on the iPad in some re-imagined form this summer with OS 4.0, but when the iPad ships next month, there won&amp;#8217;t be versions of these apps. At least that&amp;#8217;s the story I&amp;#8217;ve heard from a few well-informed little birdies.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;(There is, alas, &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/02/fox-widgets"&gt;no secret &amp;#8220;widget&amp;#8221; mode&lt;/a&gt; for iPad in OS 3.2, either.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Some (maybe even most?) iPhone &lt;em&gt;games&lt;/em&gt; will work well as-is, on the iPad. Not just technically, but in terms of being fun and feeling right. But non-game iPhone apps that are just upscaled on the iPad are going to feel weird. And the &lt;em&gt;run the app in a little iPhone-sized rectangle in the middle of an otherwise black screen&lt;/em&gt; mode is even weirder, I think. A 3.5-inch screen is just totally different than a 10-inch screen.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;On the whole, it&amp;#8217;s actually rather un-Apple-like that they&amp;#8217;re even allowing iPhone apps to run unmodified on the iPad. It&amp;#8217;s a huge compatibility win, of course: an instant market of thousands and thousands of titles. Given the runaway success of the App Store and the fundamental technical similarities between the iPhone and iPad, it&amp;#8217;s the sort of decision that most companies wouldn&amp;#8217;t even think twice about. But it&amp;#8217;s undeniably a sub-optimal user experience. iPhone apps on the iPad are a &amp;#8220;good enough&amp;#8221; thing, not an &amp;#8220;exactly right&amp;#8221; thing. Most companies &amp;#8212; the ones that wouldn&amp;#8217;t even see it as a tough decision whether to allow iPhone apps to run on the iPad &amp;#8212; settle for &amp;#8220;good enough&amp;#8221; all the time. Apple, on the other hand, usually goes for &amp;#8220;exactly right&amp;#8221;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I&amp;#8217;ll go so far as to predict that by the time Monday April 5 rolls around, it&amp;#8217;ll already be an established meme that non-iPad-optimized iPhone apps are to the iPad what Classic apps were to Mac OS X &amp;#8212; something you&amp;#8217;ll make do with &amp;#8220;for now&amp;#8221; but can&amp;#8217;t wait to abandon for the real thing.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I&amp;#8217;m not saying it&amp;#8217;s a mistake that Apple is allowing the iPad to run iPhone apps. I&amp;#8217;m just saying that the iPad is not a big iPhone.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Oh, you thought the gaming news was all sunshine and roses for Apple today? Not so, reports Sebastian Anthony at Download Squad:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Apple, with its locked-down, isolated sandbox is in trouble. Do game developers have any reason to continue working on games for the iPhone or iPad now that Microsoft is offering so much more? [&amp;#8230;]&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Can Apple really see themselves competing, with a minuscule desktop market share and 25% of the smartphone sector? Steve Jobs has announced Apple&amp;#8217;s intent to move into mobile gaming, but can you really see developers siding with the iPhone when Windows Phone 7 is just around the corner?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Download Squad: &amp;#8216;Microsoft Set to Destroy Apple in Every Games Market&amp;#8217;’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/08/download-squad"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Answering the question, &amp;#8220;Is the iPad just a big iPhone?&amp;#8221; in the negative. Love this bit about the lack of hovering:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Here’s why this section is about Controls: every day, your cursor protects you from unclear UI. It helpfully turns into a text cursor as you hover over textboxes, or a hand as you hover over a link or action item.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;iPad has no such thing. Bad UI will stick out like a sore thumb, both in apps and on websites. Your tappable areas had better look tappable. Your controls had better look controllable.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Nice Presentation From Cameron Daigle on iPad UI Design’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/08/daigle"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;AT&amp;amp;T&amp;#8217;s first Android phone, the Motorola Backflip, ships with an outdated version of the OS (1.5; current version is 2.1) and comes with a bunch of AT&amp;amp;T-added apps that can&amp;#8217;t be deleted. They&amp;#8217;d do the same with the iPhone if it were up to them.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘AT&amp;amp;T&amp;#8217;s Crummy Android Phone’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/08/att-android"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;New from Cameron Moll: the Roman Coliseum rendered in type.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Colosseo’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/10/colosseo"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Hyper-rational take on the situation.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Marco Arment on Advertising, Entitlement, and Voting With Attention’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/10/marco-entitlement"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;David Worthington:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Technologizer asked some of the industry’s big brains about what Microsoft needs to do to keep its operating system relevant in the years to come. Their advice ranges from merely simplifying the interface to borrowing ideas from other Microsoft products such as the Xbox to giving the OS a complete reboot. Here’s what they (and we) have to say.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Some interesting (and widely varying) answers. I like Scott Rosenberg&amp;#8217;s take best:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Microsoft ought to build a new, modern, stripped-down OS and support the legacy stuff in a virtual machine. Call the new environment WIN instead of WINDOWS, suggesting a new stripped-down nimbleness. Make it clear that the old world will be supported for a long time but not forever. Dazzle people with what they can do in a new world.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Or just maintain Windows in parallel. Point is, there&amp;#8217;s no reason why Microsoft should have one and only one PC desktop operating system. Why not two: the new cool no-cruft one; and Windows, the established, familiar, chock-full-of-baggage-and-legacy-compatibility one.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Technologizer: The Future of Windows’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/09/future-of-windows"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Kevin C. Tofel:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Much of this “wait for the price drop” sentiment stems from the original iPhone 4 GB and 8GB models, which debuted in late June of 2007 for $499 and $599, respectively. By September of that same year, &lt;a href="http://theappleblog.com/2007/09/06/apple-drops-iphone-prices-users-get-ticked/"&gt;the 4 GB model was scrapped and the 8 GB unit dropped $200 to $399&lt;/a&gt;. The situation generated an early adapter uproar by many &amp;#8212; &lt;a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B05E7DB133AF934A3575AC0A9619C8B63&amp;amp;partner=rssnyt&amp;amp;emc=rss"&gt;myself included&lt;/a&gt; &amp;#8212; and Apple tried to make good with $100 Apple Store credits for those who paid the higher prices.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The entire event tarnished Apple’s luster in the eyes of consumers and this isn’t a company that repeats mistakes often.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Don&amp;#8217;t Hold Your Breath Waiting for an iPad Price Drop’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/09/tofel"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Jonathan Schwartz:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;In 2003, after I unveiled a prototype Linux desktop called &lt;a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Looking_Glass"&gt;Project Looking Glass&lt;/a&gt;, Steve called my office to let me know the graphical effects were “stepping all over Apple’s IP.” (IP = Intellectual Property = patents, trademarks and copyrights.) If we moved forward to commercialize it, “I’ll just sue you.”&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Jonathan Schwartz on Patent Threats From Steve Jobs and Bill Gates’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/09/schwartz"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Delicious collection of iPad doubters.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; Fireballed. &lt;a href="http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:_c4MhK1QsBUJ:aaplinvestors.net/stats/ipad/ipaddeathwatch/+http://aaplinvestors.net/stats/ipad/ipaddeathwatch/&amp;amp;cd=1&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;ct=clnk&amp;amp;gl=us"&gt;Google has it cached, though&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘AAPLinvestors&amp;#8217;s iPad Death Watch’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/09/ipad-doubters"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Oh, yes.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; Much better version from the official site, including downloadable 1080p QuickTime.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘&amp;#8216;Tron: Legacy&amp;#8217; Trailer’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/09/tron-legacy"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Larry Dignan:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Amazon’s response to Colorado’s state tax issue &amp;#8212; Governor Bill Ritter signed a bill that puts new restrictions and taxes on out-of-state retailers like Amazon &amp;#8212; has been consistent. When things go against Amazon the retailer cuts its affiliate programs in that state.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Amazon Drops Colorado Residents From Affiliates Program’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/09/amazon-colorado"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, after linking to &amp;#8220;&lt;a href="http://h20435.www2.hp.com/t5/Voodoo-Blog/The-HP-s-Slate-Device-Runs-The-Complete-Internet-Including-Flash/ba-p/53838"&gt;http://h20435.www2.hp.com/t5/Voodoo-Blog/The-HP-s-Slate-Device-Runs-The-Complete-Internet-Including-Flash/ba-p/53838&lt;/a&gt;&amp;#8221;, I asked what the deal was with that crazy server name. A DF reader who works at HP emailed:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Internally it&amp;#8217;s called something stupid, like a &amp;#8220;license plate name&amp;#8221; or somesuch. HP IT does that so they can physically locate a server when it goes down.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Externally, you&amp;#8217;re seeing how one department&amp;#8217;s braindead internal policy designed for their convenience reduces the convenience of the entire rest of the company (and our customers). I&amp;#8217;d blame Randy Mott (of WalMart pedigree) who has proven to be quite a Napoleon (or perhaps Brutus is a better example?) when it comes to turf battles, but I think that policy pre-dated him.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Many folks internally in HP hate those license plate external URLs but there&amp;#8217;s nothing we can do about it. The policy has been set from on-high.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;So because of a dictum from the IT department, HP &amp;#8212; one of the biggest, proudest, and most successful companies in the history of the computer business &amp;#8212; has URLs that are cryptic, long, and ugly. Whereas anyone with, say, a Tumblr account, can get far nicer URLs for free.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Follow-Up on HP&amp;#8217;s &amp;#8216;License Plate Domain&amp;#8217; URLs’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/09/hp-license-plate-domains"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Captivating little HTML5 drawing app &lt;a href="http://mrdoob.com/blog/post/689"&gt;by Ricardo Cabello&lt;/a&gt;. Works swell on the iPhone too. (&lt;a href="http://www.macstories.net/reviews/harmony-html5-procedural-drawing-tool/"&gt;Via Federico Viticci&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Harmony’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/09/harmony"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Glenn Fleishman, writing for Boing Boing:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;RealNetworks just screwed us all by settling lawsuits in which it might have lost &amp;#8212; but which might also have given some new life to fair use for digital media. The post-RealDVD world means that unless there&amp;#8217;s a major change to the law surrounding copy protection, there will never be a legal way to perform legal acts of copying or shifting protected movies, music, and games.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Glenn Fleishman on RealNetworks&amp;#8217;s DVD Copying Settlement’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/09/fleishman"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Mike Taylor:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I want to &lt;em&gt;make&lt;/em&gt; things, not just glue things together.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href="http://twitter.com/rands/status/10228030888"&gt;Via Rands&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Whatever Happened to Programming?’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/09/taylor"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Philip Elmer-DeWitt, quoting from a report from Oppenheimer analyst Yair Reiner on the behind-the-scenes aspects of Apple&amp;#8217;s patent suit against HTC:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Starting in January, Apple launched a series of C-Level discussions with tier-1 handset makers to underscore its growing displeasure at seeing its iPhone-related IP [intellectual property] infringed. The lawsuit filed against HTC thus appears to be Apple&amp;#8217;s way of putting a public, lawyered-up exclamation point on a series of blunt conversations that have been occurring behind closed doors.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Our checks also suggest that these warning shots are meaningfully disrupting the development roadmaps for would-be iPhone killers. Rival software and hardware teams are going back to the drawing board to look for work-arounds. Lawyers are redoubling efforts to gauge potential defensive and offensive responses. And strategy teams are working to chart OS strategies that are better hedged.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Reiner concludes that the effect is going to be to drive would-be Android handset makers into the arms of Microsoft and Windows Phone 7.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Yair Reiner on Apple&amp;#8217;s IP Threats to Rival Handset Makers’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/09/yair-reiner"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Four years.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Amazon&amp;#8217;s One-Click Patent Confirmed Following Re-Exam’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/10/one-click"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;&amp;#8220;What&amp;#8217;s in the David Foster Wallace Archive?&amp;#8221;, from Meredith Blake at The New Yorker:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;For Wallace scholars, the real jewel in the crown might be a battered, taped-together copy of Pam Cook’s “The Cinema Book,” used as research for “Infinite Jest.” His handwritten notes include multiple references to “IJ” and, according to a blog post by Scwartzburg, display a “particular interest in sections on the idea of the auteur, the technology of deep focus cinematography, new wave cinema, the Hollywood star system, and most film genres (with the notable exception of the ‘gangster/crime film’).”&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Great slide show at the end, too.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘&amp;#8216;If You Were to See a Viking Today, It&amp;#8217;s Best That You Go Some Other Way&amp;#8217;’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/10/dfw-library"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;First-hand report from Tandy Trower, the product manager at Microsoft who shipped Windows 1.0 and 2.0. Great stuff.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘The Secret Origin of Windows’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/10/trower"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Jeff Richardson on the story behind the photo that serves as the iPhone&amp;#8217;s default wallpaper.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Blue Marble’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/10/blue-marble"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;My pick as the greatest rock album ever made. Don&amp;#8217;t miss: &lt;a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/32635178/the_secrets_behind_the_rolling_stones_exile_on_main_street_reissue"&gt;Andy Greene interviews Mick and Keith on the new release&lt;/a&gt;. Keith:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Also, it&amp;#8217;s the first album with no particular single on it, you know? There was no &amp;#8220;Brown Sugar&amp;#8221; or whatever. We made it as an album, rather than looking for a hit single.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Unearthed Rolling Stones Tracks Set to Debut on &amp;#8216;Exile on Main Street&amp;#8217; Reissue’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/10/exile"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Wolf Rentzsch:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I hope section 7.3 comes back to bite Apple during their Department of Justice investigation.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘&amp;#8216;No Other Distribution Authorized Under This Agreement&amp;#8217;’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/10/rentzsch-section-7"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;New weblog by Theis Søndergaard, featuring scanned pages from old issues of Wired:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;This blog is not intended to be just a point-and-laugh central, picking apart the mistakes of the past and ridiculing those who got it wrong. You won’t have to look long for posts that do that, of course… but the main purpose of this blog is to put the past into perspective. In the fast paced world of tech, we often lure ourselves into believing that everything is different now, and old rules don’t apply. Well, quite often they do (if not always) and checking out our collective tech-past can help us get a perspective on the present.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;So good.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Wired Reread’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/10/wired-reread"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Andrew Wilkinson:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I don’t understand why companies think that they can get away with doing this. The internet is a surprisingly small place, and we were notified almost immediately. We’ve all had a good chuckle about this, but we’ve contacted Mozilla and demanded that they take the design down.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Really does seem bizarre that anyone thought this wouldn&amp;#8217;t be noticed.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href="http://mozillalabs.com/jetpack/2010/03/10/jetpack-mockup-clarification-apology-to-metalab/"&gt;Mozilla apologizes&lt;/a&gt;, and is &amp;#8220;actively investigating how this happened to ensure that it does not happen again.&amp;#8221;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Mozilla JetPack Rips Off Design and Graphics From MetaLab’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/10/metalab"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#8217;re not hooked by the end of the second paragraph you might as well stop there.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Chained Up in the Dungeon of Emperor Xing’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/10/xing"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Birdfeed, Buzz Andersen&amp;#8217;s outstanding iPhone Twitter client, &lt;a href="http://birdfeedapp.com/"&gt;has been purchased by Brizzly&lt;/a&gt;, updated, and rebranded as Brizzly for iPhone &amp;#8212; and is now available from the App Store as a free download. There are some nice additions (such as the addictive pull-down-to-refresh gesture introduced by Tweetie), but a few steps back as well, including the loss of Birdfeed&amp;#8217;s visual charm.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;My main gripe is that it&amp;#8217;s not a direct Twitter client any longer. Rather than sign in to Twitter, you sign in with an account at Brizzly. If you have multiple Twitter accounts, you must hook them up to your Brizzly account. I don&amp;#8217;t see any benefit to this, but I do see an extra potential point of failure. The deal breaker for me, alas, is that they seem to have eliminated Birdfeed&amp;#8217;s Instapaper support.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;On the upside: our long national nightmare of conflating Birdfeed and &lt;a href="http://birdhouseapp.com/"&gt;Birdhouse&lt;/a&gt; is now over.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Brizzly for iPhone (Née Birdfeed)’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/10/brizzly"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

Filed under: Multimedia, Software, iPhone, App Store, Music

Recently I've been preparing to move home and finally did last weekend. Naturally I had to pack up all my musical gear, equipment and of course, my Mac. In the week leading up to the move, I've had my iPhone and nothing else. With no creative outlet and the pressure of looming project deadlines, I found myself scouting the app store for a fix to help me start fleshing out a few creative ideas.

This is what I found that worked well for me.

1. TonePad and TonePad Pro

The iTunes Store describes TonePad Pro as "...the easiest way to make music. Discover the inner musician in you. Create songs by simply touching." And this is exactly what I found. With a 16 x 16 matrix, and an easy-to-use user interface (literally start tapping your fingers and music is made), I found myself coming up with little melodies and tunes immediately. Although you only have the 16 x 16 matrix, to me, what initially seemed quite limiting soon became a boundary for creative focus.

You can save an unlimited number of tunes to listen back to, and upload them to a shared server where your buddies can check out what you've been musing. With the paid version, you can save your melodies into a ringtone that will sync back to your iPhone, too.

2. Flourish

Flourish is something a bit more immersive. While having a steeper learning curve, there's loads more to explore here. The user interface is really fresh and unique (especially for the iPhone), and presents a creative challenge in focusing your composition whilst giving you the space to try different approaches to what you are creating.

Basically Flourish represents musical phrases as physical loops:

-Record loops with expressive multi-touch keyboards.
-Generate percussive and melodic sequences.
-Build arrangements by ear or by eye.
-Select from a consonant collection of instruments.
-Sequence loops by connecting them in chain.

Check out the Flourish website for a few demo clips.

Let us know in the comments below what other apps for the iPhone / iPod Touch, or the Mac, that are inspiring you to make music.

TUAWCount The Beats: Inspiration... two apps for the musician on the move originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1002/wdsml.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />Western Digital has expanded its line of storage products with the My Passport AV. The portable drive is geared for video storage and playback, with support for a variety of game consoles, TVs, Blu-ray players, or other devices that can directly connect to a USB drive....

<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1003/macbookpro15.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />Consumer Reports today gave Apple a major lead in its rankings for both desktop and notebook technical support [subscription required]. Among more than 7,000 readers, Apple's help scored 87 and 86 points in each category and was much higher-rated than any other computer manufacturer. Lenovo came closest in notebooks with just 63 points, while Dell fell far behind in desktops with a 55-point score....

Filed under: Gaming, Retail, Software, Developer, iPhone, App Store

They started by looking at the original game developed by Activision and Treyarch. Zombies is a extra mode of Call of Duty: World at War that was developed as a "lunchtime project" -- a few developers threw it together on a whim, and enjoyed it so much that they released it as DLC, outside of the original game. So Ideaworks wanted to run with that vibe -- create a game that you could play on your lunch break, or squeeze into a few minutes. They did find that the App Store tended towards more casual and family games, but they didn't feel that the mature game could be successfully translated to a family-friendly format. Instead, they decided to stick with the blood and gore: "Activision," Clarke joked, "said we would have to learn to love our 17+ rating, and live with not releasing in every country in the world."

And they also wanted to create a game with "relaunchability," a term that a developer at Treyarch coined. "What keeps you relaunching the game," said Clarke, "is that, like most zombie games, you don't really win. You're just postponing your inevitable death." He also said that learning became a big function of the gameplay -- the game allows you to defend the same environment against zombies every time, so eventually you learn the best spots to make a stand, and so on.

Before development even started, they created a set of benchmarks in terms of performance and gameplay that they wanted to hit: Twenty zombies felt right for gameplay (you'd only be fighting 10 at any given time, but 10 more would be hanging around in the background), 20 FPS seemed like a good target for speed, 2000 triangles for graphics, and of course two thumbs ("the amount that most people have") for control.

The controls were probably the most interesting part of prototyping -- Clarke says his team really tried to brainstorm an interesting way to control an FPS on the iPhone. The problem, however, was that in an FPS game, you're doing three things (running, looking, and shooting), but you only have two thumbs to do them with. One prototype they created had you tilting the accelerometer around to move (while looking and shooting with two onscreen controls), but for some reason, that made everyone who tested it rather dizzy. In the end, they went with a compromise, including a few different choices: a dual stick standard, an aiming assist system, and even a mode that only slightly uses the accelerometer to look around.

Authenticity was another question -- obviously the iPhone doesn't have the processing power of the latest and greatest consoles, so Ideaworks had to work hard to walk the line between keeping the game running smoothly and keeping it detailed enough to compare to the bigger title. They did a lot of pruning on the original model work, turning geometry into straight textures, and cutting off 3D modeling that couldn't actually be seen by the player (the original team had even modeled tree roots underground, rendered on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, but never actually seen). They did things like not animating enemies when they weren't in the player's line of sight, and just using a sphere for the grenade hit model rather than actually modeling the shape, since it worked just as well. In the end, the iPhone had only about 1/7th of the geometry of the original game, but Ideaworks tried to make it at least look as similar as they could.

Multiplayer was a challenge, but fortunately, Activision had already created an online backend, so when Ideaworks hooked into that system, they were able to put together all of the multiplayer ideas they had (2-player, 4-player, and even a full online system) and then some (host migration was a project one of their engineers threw together in his spare time, and Bluetooth multiplayer was also added in on a whim).

Finally, Clarke shared a few lessons from the game's development. In terms of the controls, they learned that offering a choice to the player is sometimes the right move, and when there is a choice, you usually need to force it at some point (if you hide a different control scheme in the options, most players will never find it). Piracy was something else they learned -- while Clarke was hesitant to speak much about his opinions on piracy, he did say that it was easier to pirate the game than anyone on his team believed, and that in the first days of the release, they saw a significant number of extra users playing than had actually bought the game.

Still, Clarke said that the game had done very well -- they've been high on the App Store's Top Paid list ever since release, and while he didn't mention sales for the main game, he said that the lite version has seen over three million downloads. Clarke's panel offered up an interesting look behind one of the App Store's big name hits.

TUAWGDC 2010: Call of Duty: World at War Zombies postmortem originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Filed under: Apple

Unit testing refers to a software validation methodology that allows programmers to test individual program units for correctness. It's been an ongoing question in the iPhone developer community as to whether the iPhone's view controller class is testable or not.

In response to these discussions, iPhone developer Jonah Williams has written up a view controller unit testing how-to over at the Carbon Five web blog. His write-up offers examples that show how to incorporate some best practices into your code.

Williams points out how broken NIB bindings are a common problem for iPhone OS applications. To address these issues, he regularly adds simple assertions that test that each IB outlet and action are set properly from inside his view controller class implementations. These assertions check that IBOutlet instance variables are not set to nil and that IBAction targets have been assigned, adding a layer of protection against broken bindings.

Another typical view controller issue involves responding to application memory warnings. To respond, he adds tests that ensure that each view-dependent property gets correctly released and re-created as views unload and then later reload. By building these into test methods, he can execute this behavior on demand, and ensure that the sequence will execute flawlessly in real world conditions.

Finally, Williams discusses view controller interdependencies. Often instances are tightly intertwined, with objects acting as clients for each other. For example, a simple table view controller, living within a navigation controller, might present a detail view via yet another view controller when a row is selected. That's three separate controllers to account for, when you really only want to test one at a time. Williams suggests isolating these view controllers away from their interdependencies to test each component separately and provides examples of how you can do so.

What made Williams' approach pop for me is how he carefully exposes and isolates dependencies for testing. These are features that can otherwise be hard to inspect and validate in the normal course of programming. His write-up is well worth reading through, and provides an excellent jumping off point for investigating view controller unit testing.

TUAWiPhone devsugar: Unit testing for iPhone view controllers originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

<img align='left' src='http://photos_macnn@photos.macnn.com/news/1003/folx1.0-story-10.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />Eltima has posted a new download manager for the Mac, Folx 1.0. The program differs from some by handling both direct downloads and BitTorrent files. Downloads can by default be split into two threads, and can assigned tags for easier tracking. Priority is assigned by dragging important files towards the top of the queue. The app can also resume downloads, and limit bandwidth consumption by throttling speed. Growl notifications and Spotlight searches are supported....

<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1002/foursml.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />Foursquare has released a major update to its self-titled iPhone app. The latest version is claimed to offer faster, more efficient check-in and shout flow. The user interface has been overhauled with a new design, with the places now sorted by categories. Users can also easily view a history of visited places, or take advantage of a new pull-to-refresh control....

<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1003/amazon1clickin.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />Amazon's controversial 1-click patent has been approved, after nearly four years of re-examination. The USPTO approved the online retailer's patent but added a limitation that requires the one-click system to operate in conjunction with a shopping cart model. Other e-commerce retailers would need to use both a shopping cart model, likely to be of the non-1-click variety, as well as a 1-click version. Because most online retailers use shopping carts, the limitation should have little impact on the patent's power....

<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1003/chromepar.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />Parallels has released a new version of Parallels Desktop 5 for the Mac, build 9344. The program is able to run several operating systems virtualized within Mac OS X. The latest build is the first support Google's Chrome OS, which is primarily based on web technologies....

Filed under: Gaming, Developer, iPhone, App Store, iPad

Thank you for speaking with us, I appreciate it. So, a fighting game on the iPhone -- how did you approach that?

I used to create arcade games, and the equipment is kind of similar to the iPhone.

It's similar? But there's no buttons on it.

It is different. The device is completely different. But the behavior for game users is very similar. When you go to game centers, you want to jump in and play a game spontaneously. And the iPhone is the same thing -- it's like an arcade experience.

What did you think of developing games on the iPhone as a platform? Was it easy, hard?

It's really interesting as a platform because people that play games on the iPhone usually don't have a game console at home. I am interested to see how people react to playing video games on their handheld, not on a full console. It's very interesting. Music fans, and other application fans, they play video games on the iPhone. It's very interesting to see those people playing the games on the iPhone.

Are there other iPhone games that you like?

[Laughs] Except Capcom games?

Right, besides Capcom games of course.

I really like Homerun Battle 3D, it's by this company called Com2us. [Pulls out his iPhone and shows us the Japanese version.]

Have you looked at the iPad at all? Are you interested in developing a game like Street Fighter for the iPad?

I'm very interested.

What would be different than the iPhone game?

The iPad is obviously heavier, so the user experience would be very different. [Motions with thumbs, has trouble holding a bigger device the same way.] Different than using iPhone.

On this game, how did you work on developing the interface to make it easier to use?

There's actually a mode called dojo mode, it's a tutorial or training mode, where you can learn how to improve your technique, brush up your technique, and learn to fight against really hardcore players as well. It doesn't only teach you how to play, it teaches you how to do super combos, hadoken, and how Ryu fights against Ryu, how Guile fights against Ryu. It's learning, dojo style. With this game, the major segment that we're targeting is late 30s. Those people who used to play Street Fighter II big time. So that's why it's a little easier for those people to pick up and play.

Was there anything that you wanted to do that you couldn't do because of the smaller platform?

Because of the memory capacity, we couldn't implement any more than eight characters total. We would have liked to put more characters in there, but the memory is limited.

A lot of people wouldn't have expected Street Fighter to become an iPhone game. Are there any other Capcom games that you'd like to put on the iPhone that people might not expect?

We have a lot of plans. But we can't tell you anything right now. We will try our best to do more than you expect.

Great, we're excited. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

TUAWGDC 2010: Interview with Street Fighter IV producer Takeshi Tazuka originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1003/macpro-sm.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />A very tentative rumor today claims that Apple will launch a new Mac Pro next week using Intel's new Core i7-980X. The chip would be the first six-core model in a Mac and would give the same 3.33GHz clock speed as the custom-order Xeon but at a lower price. The system would be available Tuesday the 16th, but pricing and other details weren't mentioned in the ZDNet slip....

Filed under: Deals

The ever-popular MacHeist bundle, offering eight Mac apps for $20 total, closes out at midnight Pacific Time tonight. If you've been on the fence so far about whether or not to buy in this year, two bits of news may push you over the brink.

First, all the initial applications have been unlocked; both Tales of Monkey Island and RapidWeaver are fully present and accounted for. Second, there's been a last-minute addition to the roster; Tweetie for Mac (normally $20 on its own) is now part of the bundle.

If you're Macheisting this year, let us know what you think of the app selection; if not, share your reasons why. (We will accept "I'm saving up for tickets to Tron Legacy" as a valid reason.)

TUAWMacHeist nano bundle adds Tweetie for final day originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments