Glenn Fleishman (via John Gruber):
The post-RealDVD world means that unless there’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.
Lukas Mathis makes some good points:
This trade-off does not apply to many software patents. I only need to spend five minutes on Amazon’s site to figure out how one-click shopping works. There is nothing useful I can learn from reading the patent. Likewise, I only need to turn on an iPhone once to figure out how to unlock it. This means that Amazon or Apple don’t give up anything when they patent these ideas.
Jonathan Schwartz (via John Gruber):
My response was simple. “Steve, I was just watching your last presentation, and Keynote looks identical to Concurrence – do you own that IP?” Concurrence was a presentation product built by Lighthouse Design, a company I’d help to found and which Sun acquired in 1996. Lighthouse built applications for NeXTSTEP, the Unix based operating system whose core would become the foundation for all Mac products after Apple acquired NeXT in 1996.
The Elecronic Frontier Foundation has obtained and published the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement. Jonathan Rentzsch:
Diabolical. Apple’s developer tools license mandates use of their distribution channel.
Jakob Nielsen (via Adam Engst):
As an aside, why is the iTunes window so large in my screenshot, when it contains only a few icons? Because the same application manages both the phone’s apps and its music collection. When you work with several hundred sound tracks, you need a big space. It’s not always good to try to support highly distinct tasks within a single GUI.
Nielsen’s main point is about button proximity and is well taken. However, I found his example about updating iPhone applications confusing because my understanding is that the “Check for Updates” button always applies to all applications, and that nothing much happens when you select individual applications in iTunes.
