Developers pleased with Apple's Lodsys response

The in-app purchase icon.

(Credit:Apple)

Apple todayfinally responded to Lodsys, the group that's been targeting iOS developers for licensing fees on their use of in-app purchase (IAP). While Lodsys has not yet issued its own response, many developers are now breathing a sigh of relief based on Apple's stance, which states that developers are fully protected against any extra fees by the company's patent licensing terms.

"DEAR STEVE I WANT TO KISS YOU HUGS CHOCK,"tweetedCraig Hockenberry, the principal and senior software engineer at The Iconfactory, the makers of the popular Twitterific app. Hockenberry had posteda public letterto Apple CEO Steve Jobs shortly before the company began sending its letters to affected developers, wherein Hockenberry called Lodsys"greedy predators", and said that the group threatened the entire platform.

"What these predators don't realize is that for every developer who's earning millions, there are many thousands who are earning much less,"Hockenberry wrote."This backbone of the iOS ecosystem is doing well with work we love, but that is very much at risk with increased legal costs."

Hockenberry latertweeted,"I should e-mail Steve Jobs more often."

James Thomson, the maker of the PCalc app, who was one of the first to get hit with a notice from Lodsys,saidsimply that"our long international nightmare is over."In aninterviewwith Macworld, Thomson described the last ten days as"some of the most stressful"in his professional career.

Lodsys first began sending notices to developers earlier this month, alerting them to the fact that their applications were infringing on a patent the group held by using IAP. The company gave developers 21 days to respond, before threatening legal action. The group offered up a licensing deal for developers to pay 0.575 percent of U.S. revenue from their applications, in return for being able to use IAP within their apps. Apple did not weigh in on the issue until its letter this morning, where the company said it, along with its app makers are"undisputedly licensed"to use IAP.

Emanuele Vulcano, the maker of iOS app Mover never received one of these letters from Lodsys, but nonetheless removed IAP from the free version of the app out of fear of being targeted, and described Lodsys' actions as having a"chilling effect."Vulcano this morningannouncedthat he was bringing IAP back to the app immediately as a result of Apple's letter.

Daniel Jalkut, the founder ofMac-centric Red Sweater Software rounded out the other developer reactions,saying"I've never seen iOS developers so excited about the walled garden."

Julie Samuels, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation who last week wrote a post saying that Apple needed tostep up and defend developers, said Apple's response was"the right thing."

"We were really happy to see Apple take a public stand and defend the folks who come up with the apps that make us all love our iPhones. It's the right thing - both morally and from a business perspective,"Samuels wrote an e-mail to CNET."It took a little longer than we'd have liked--so many developers were really left in the lurch last week with the proverbial Sword of Damocles over their head, but better late than never. Now the developers can get back to what they do best: develop new apps."

Morgan Reed, executive director of theAssociation for Competitive Technologysaid the group, which represents around 3,000 technology firms, was similarly happy with Apple's response.

"The developer community is pleased that Apple has taken steps to reassure app makers regarding Lodsys's licensing demands,"Reed said in a statement."Lodsys in-app purchasing technology is already licensed by Apple. Developers share that company's understanding that in-app purchasing applications written for its iOS platform are covered under this license. Lodsys has created uncertainty in the apps marketplace and we hope that it will take the appropriate step to withdraw its unwarranted licensing demands."

It remains to be seen when or how Lodsys will react to Apple's letter. In it, Apple's senior vice president and general counsel, Bruce Sewell requested that the company immediately withdraw notices sent to developers requesting that they strike up licensing deals, calling such assertions"false."So far Lodsys CEO Mark Small, and any of the company's other representatives have declined to speak with press on the matter, relaying information toits bloginstead.

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How the iPad changes PC design, part 2

In case anybody had any doubts about the impact of theiPadon the PC, Intel laid those doubts to rest this week at its investor meeting.

Echoing trends touched onin an April 23 post, the company that makes the silicon core of most of the world's PCs said this week, in effect, that laptops will become a lot more liketablets, i.e., more like the iPad.

And why will this happen? The slide below--shown at the chipmaker's investor meeting--makes this clear.

Laptops will become extremely thin and be instant-on and with instant connectivity, Intel said this week. Sounds a lot like a tablet with a keyboard.

(Credit:Intel)

This time, thin is really thin:At the meeting at Intel's headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., executives were talking about a standard 0.7-inch thickness (about 18 millimeters, see slide above) for laptops, not to mention dropping hints about future 8 millimeter thick tablets and smartphones.

And thin is really in:In a discussion I had offline with a high-ranking Intel executive at the meeting, the new"extreme ultrathin"strategy was described in an interesting way. To paraphrase, the original CULV thing didn't fly, he said. (For those not familiar with Intel jargon, that means consumer ultra low voltage. Intel's attempt, a couple of years ago, to push ultrathin laptops into the mainstream.)

He went on to describe how CULV marketing dollars were cut because, among other reasons, the performance wasn't there. But this time, it's different, he said. There will be a big marketing campaign and plenty of power-efficient--but still very fast, mind you--silicon to populate those 0.7-inch-thin (and thinner) laptops that turn on and connect instantly.

How important is all of this to Intel?"This is a once in a decade kind of change,"said Dadi Perlmutter, an executive VP at Intel, when referring to this overall push into power-efficient, always-on, always-connected computing.

And in case investors needed more convincing, at one of the informal events, Intel was showing off about a dozen tablets, a few already on the market but most due to ship in the coming months.

And, at the same event, a few feet away, Intel was showing the ultrathin (0.64 inches) Samsung Series 9 13.3-inch model and demonstrating how future Intel technology will allow the PC to instantly pop out of hibernation mode--which currently is anything but instant, often taking about 20 or 30 seconds (or more). In other words, what is known currently as standby mode will become, in effect, instant-on hibernation. All in an effort to extend battery life while providing instant responsiveness and instant connectivity.

Which brings us back to the tablet...I mean...iPad. If PC vendors actually execute on Intel's vision, that could blunt the appeal of the iPad for some consumers. And even trump the iPad, dare I say, for some consumers.

Imagine in-the-not-too-distant-future, a 2-pound, 0.6-inch thick laptop packing next-generation Intel Ivy Bridge processors with integrated 4G and a 256GB solid-state drive for about $1,000. And this design could be operating system agnostic:Windows 7(or Windows 8), Google Chrome OS, or a future MacBook Air running Apple's OS.

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Keep your Angry Birds, we'll take something a bit more classy

A rendering of the inner workings of one of the rare pistols cum music boxes cum robots.

(Credit:Christie's video; screenshot by Edward Moyer/CNET)

Birds and weapons? Sounds like a certain smartphone-game-turned-cultural-touchstone, right? Well, don't worry; we know you've heard enough aboutthatparticular phenomenon to last a few lifetimes.

No, this little blog item is about something far less widespread than a populariPhoneapp. In fact, the"gadgets"in question here--if one dare call them that--are truly rare. So rare that they're expected to draw $2.5 million to $5 million dollars at a Hong Kong auction later this month.

And though they were created in the early 19th century, and are anything but digital, the technical chops required to make them still manage to impress.

We're talking about a matching pair of gold, jewel-encrusted"pistols"--manufactured as playthings for courtesans in the Chinese royal court by a Swiss studio known for its ingenious automatons.

Theonlysuch matching pair known to exist. There are four other pistols like this, all singletons, and all tucked away in museums.

One of the bejeweled handguns. Our little whistling and winged friend can be seen perched at the end of the double barrel.

(Credit:Christie's video; screenshot by Edward Moyer/CNET)

The glittering handguns don't fire bullets, rather, they fire birdsong. One winds them up with a little key (like one would a watch of the same era), pulls the trigger, and out of the barrel pops a tiny mechanical bird. Complete with real feathers and moving wings, beak, and tail, the charming little fellow sings his heart out for a full 20 seconds, never repeating himself and all the while flitting and dancing about with avian joy and excitement.

There are no batteries in the pistols or birds; the movements and melodies are generated entirely by several hundred diminutive springs, gears, levers, screws, and other such mechanical tidbits--along with a huge helping, of course, of mechanical wizardry.

Give me birdsong over a bullet any day. You can see here the bird's real feathers (and its sweet little expression).

(Credit:Christie's video; screenshot by Edward Moyer/CNET)

You can watch the glittering gizmos in action (and hear the birds' Mozartian music) ina video produced by Christie's, the auction house that'shandling their sale.

We're sure you'll agree it's all a bit more genteel than Duke Nukem.

{ViaThe Wall Street Journal}

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Lenovo: USB 3.0 mainstream in 2012

The 13.3-inch ultrathin ThinkPad X1 includes a USB 3.0 port. Many, if not most, laptops are expected to follow suit this year and next.

(Credit:Lenovo)

Lenovo's top product manager for the popular ThinkPad line says USB 3.0 will go mainstream in 2012, while Intel sees the new Thunderbolt interface gravitating to some high-end nonmainstream laptop models.

This week, Lenovo began selling itsThinkPad X1, a 0.85-inch thick (thickest point), 3.8-pound design based on Intel's"Sandy Bridge"Core i5 and i7 processors.

Beyond the obvious attractions of a svelte, high-powered laptop, the X1 also sports an increasingly popular USB port based on the"SuperSpeed"3.0 specification. USB is one of the most widely used connection technologies in the world, found on everything from PCs totabletsto printers to smartphones. Peak speeds for USB 3.0 are about 10 times that of USB 2.0, the current standard.

"In 2012 USB 3.0 will be a mainstream technology,"Jason Parrish, worldwide product manager for Lenovo ThinkPad, said in a phone interview earlier this week."And we see 2011 as the transition year for USB 3.0 as it starts to come into more and more products,"he added. Other companies seem to agree.Dell's upcoming XPS 15zwill include two USB 3.0 ports.

Intel, for its part, has saidits support chips--called chipsets--will include USB 3.0 in 2012.

And what aboutThunderbolt, Intel's new interface, now featured on Apple's MacBooks and iMacs?"It's definitely an interesting technology. It's clever to use the same connector asMini Displayport,"Parrish said.

He continued."There's certainly not a desire to add more ports to a notebook, because it takes up space...We're talking to our customers...And assessing if Thunderbolt is the technology"they need.

Beyond today's MacBooks and iMacs, Intel sees Thunderbolt beginning life in the high-end consumer space--not in mainstream systems."The ecosystem is nascent,"said an Intel representative.

One market segment, for example, that may see Thunderbolt ports is ultrathin laptops, whose minimalist designs accommodate only a few connectors, the Intel representative said, echoing Parrish's comment above. Particularly, superthin designs that have thicknesses averaging about 0.7 inches.

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Apple signs EMI, cloud-music deals nearly done

Apple is closing in on obtaining the necessary agreements with the top four record companies that will enable the company to launch a fully licensed cloud-music service, according to sources with knowledge of the talks.

Warner Music Group already had a deal in place with Apple, music insiders told CNET last month, and now music industry sources have said that Apple has a similar agreement with EMI Music, the smallest of the four record labels.

Sony Music Group and Universal Music Group are said to be close to completing their deals and they could be wrapped up as early as next week, the sources said. The source said it is highly likely the signed contracts will be in Apple's hip pocket next month at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference but whether the company will announce them there is unknown.

Apple will finish behind Amazon and Google in the race to the cloud but the company that gave the world theiPodand iTunes has the freedom to offer an array of features that rivals are prevented from rolling out because of the licensing restrictions, the sources said.

More to come

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McDonald's hires 7,000 touch-screen cashiers

McDonald's shows off a touch-screen kiosk installed in France in 2009.

(Credit:McDonald's Europe)

"Welcome toMcDonald's. My name is HAL 9000. May I take your order?"

McDonalds recently went on a hiring binge in the U.S.,adding 62,000 employeesto its roster. The hiring picture doesn't look quite so rosy for Europe, where the fast food chain is drafting 7,000 touch-screen kiosks to handle cashiering duties.

The move is designed to boost efficiency and make ordering more convenient for customers. In an interview with theFinancial Times, McDonald's Europe President Steve Easterbrook notes that the new system will also open up a goldmine of data. McDonald's could potentially track every BigMac, McNugget, and large shake you order. A calorie account tally at the end of the year could be a real shocker.

The touch screens will only accept debit or credit cards, adding to the slow death knell of cash and coins. This all goes along with an overall revamp of McDonald's restaurants worldwide aimed at projecting amodern imageas opposed to the old-fashioned golden arches with a slightly creepy (to my taste anyway) clown guy hanging around the french fries.

This puts McDonald's one step closer to opening up its firstAlphavillelocation. At least our new computer overlords will be nice enough to serve us a Filet-o-Fish. Maybe they'll even throw in aniPadwith the Happy Meal one of these days.

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Google App Engine goes for Go language

Gordon, Google's Go gopher mascot

(Credit:Google)

Go, Google's experimental programming language, is coming to the company's App Engine cloud-computing service--and a bit closer to reality in the process.

Google hopes touse Go to tackle modern programming challengessuch as getting useful work out of chips with multiple processor cores. Getting new languages to catch on is difficult, though--it took Sun Microsystems years with Java, and its Fortress never really caught on widely.

But incorporating Go into App Engine could help make it more relevant, or at least easier to test out, by reducing the hassles involved in trying it. App Engine is a service for running software on Google's infrastructure--a higher-level foundation than the nuts and bolts Amazon Web Services provides, but a lower level than full-fledged applications such as Google Docs.

The company announced the Go move last week at theGoogle I/O showand released anew Go software development kit (SDK)to let programmers try it out. So far, though, the SDK is as far as the average person can get, because Google hasn't publicly released the service.

"You don't even need to have Go installed beforehand because the SDK is fully self-contained. Just download the SDK, unzip it, and start coding,"said Go team members David Symonds, Nigel Tao, and Andrew Gerrand on theGo blog."We will soon enable deployment of Go apps into the App Engine hosting infrastructure...Once full deployment is enabled, it'll be easy to push your app to Google's cloud."

App Engine started with the ability to run software written in Python, a popular language within Google. Second came Java, which is widely used to run server software. Go, while not the fixture of mainstream computing the first two languages are, has attracted avery active programming community. The language is an open-source software project.

Go on App Engine can handle the full go language and, when programs run, they can tap into most of the standard suite of libraries of pre-built tools that come with Go. In addition, Go is adapted for several App Engine features designed to let applications run at large scale, such as theDatastore interfacefor storing information in a database.

However, some elements of Go are missing for now--including one part of the Go sales pitch, the ability to spread jobs more easily across multiple threads that run in parallel.

"Although goroutines and channels are present, when a Go app runs on App Engine only one thread is run in a given instance,"the Go team members said."That is, all goroutines run in a single operating system thread, so there is no CPU parallelism available for a given client request. We expect this restriction will be lifted at some point."

Even in its preliminary form, Go should appeal to some coders, said

"It's...an interesting new option for App Engine because Go apps will be compiled to native code, making Go a good choice for more CPU-intensive tasks,"said Google's Scott Knaster in aGoogle Code blog post."Plus, the garbage collection and concurrency features of the language, combined with excellent libraries, make it a great fit for Web apps."

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