Guy English writes:

At the time, around 1997, Apple had pixelated sculptures of Mac OS icons on the campus grounds. Once Steve returned they had to go — appreciating history is one thing, enshrining it is something else.

So says David Martin patent consulting firm M-Cam:

“What they bought is crap, because at the end of the day Motorola sold off its good assets,” Martin told Bloomberg. “Back in the early years, Motorola sold off some MPEG patents to GE in a securitization deal. After that, they took a bunch of the Freescale patents and sold those off.” He continued, suggesting that the patents that might be useful to Google actually have “a huge dependency on Freescale, and Freescale actually has an Apple link.” Martin believes that Google carefully considered the present when working out the Motorola deal, but it wasn’t thorough enough in its considerations of the past. For that reason, the patent expert thinks Google “painted a target” on itself with this deal, and it is now more likely than ever to face an increased number of lawsuits as a result.

http://www.loopinsight.com/

Great new re-design and advertising model for one of the best sourced Apple news sites around.

HP’s not the only one with problems.

(via Neven Mrgan)

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20098894-245/fraudulent-google-certificate-points-to-internet-attack/

The whole SSL certificate business is a racket.

David Galbraith compares Steve Jobs to Norman Foster

Jobs went further, however, he managed to create products that were designed like Porsches and made them available to everyone, via High Tech that transcended stylistic elements. An Apple product really was high technology and its form followed function, it went beyond the Porsche analogy by being truly fit for purpose in a way that a Porsche couldn’t, being a car designed for a speed that you weren’t allowed to drive. Silicon Valley capitalism had arguably delivered what the Soviets had dreamed of and failed, modernism for the masses. An iPhone really is the best phone you can buy at any price. To paraphrase Andy Warhol: Lady Gaga uses an iPhone, and just think, you can have an iPhone too. An iPhone is an iPhone and no amount of money can get you a better phone. This was what American modernism was about.

(via Kottke)

After using a MacBook Pro for a few years, I recently decided to try transitioning back to a workstation setup. I bought a gorgeous 27″ LED Cinema Display, a Rain mStand, and the Apple Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. All was fine until I ran my rsync-backup script to copy my home directory to a Linux server, when my mouse and keyboard became unresponsive to the point of uselessness. The reason is that Bluetooth uses the 2.4GHz radio spectrum and so does most 802.11g/n WiFi. No problem, I thought. I use an AirPort Express as my sole WiFi access point, so switched it to 5GHz mode and the interference stopped. Except the iPhone 4′s 802.11n is 2.4GHz only. Immediately I knew this meant I’d probably be getting a dual band router.

My setup is a bit particular, but I don’t think too geeky or difficult to maintain. I use a cheapo ADSL modem bridging to an old Linksys WRT54GL router flashed with the excellent Tomato firmware. If you’ve used alternative Linux-based firmwares like DD-WRT or OpenWRT, it’s the same sort of thing, but with a far, far simpler UI without removing any of the features. I let the Tomato router handle my PPPoE, obtain the public IP address, and act as the only true router and point of NAT traversal on my network. And for awhile now, I’ve disabled the WRT54GL’s native wireless and used a bridged AirPort Express as the access point.

I’m a big fan of not having a lot of crap. My goal was to get rid of Linksys router entirely, let the new AirPort Extreme act as the access point and the central gateway router. I want as few pieces of networking equipment as possible. If Apple made an AirPort Extreme router variant that could act as a DSL modem, I’d probably buy and use that only. So even though Tomato is wonderful, I painstakingly configured the new AirPort with my network settings.

There were a few problems.

First and least, is that the only way to configure an AirPort router is through Apple’s AirPort Utility application. I knew this going in and I really don’t mind it. You can still remotely access and configure the router provided you have the utility on that computer, and there’s something to be said for the security of that design. So I got over this quickly.

Slightly more annoying is that while the AirPort Extreme hardware is spectacular, the software makes it clear that it is most definitely intended to be a consumer, or at least, simplified needs, router. The WAN options are either “PPPoE” or “Ethernet.” NAT is enabled without any other choice, and the DHCP options are hilariously limited. Your choices are:

10.0.x.x
172.16.x.x
192.168.x.x

Ok, let’s hold up a minute. 10.0? My network is 10.1.1.x and the entire 10.x.x.x class is a valid private subnet. I really do not understand the point of limiting it to 10.0, except that it makes it fit the UI designed for the other two ranges. However, not all of 172.16.x.x is a valid private network, only 172.16.0.0-172.16.31.255. So this range is actually too loose while the 10.0 is too restrictive. Still though, pain in the ass as it is, I can change my LAN to 10.0.x.x and get over it.

But in 48 hours of use, my PPPoE has dropped 5 times. I can power cycle equipment, reload the AirPort configuration, change Ethernet cables, nothing works until I change my PPPoE auth information to that of another valid RADIUS account on the ISP network, connect successfully, disconnect, and then switch it back to my own account. What the hell? Fortunately I am an employee of my ISP, so this is possible. But if I wasn’t, and I didn’t have another valid account to try, I’d be up shit creek.

Even knowing how to temporarily fix the problem, this is unacceptable. I’m totally willing to admit the fault lies anywhere other than the AirPort, except I’ve had this DSL account for several years and never otherwise had an issue with my DSL modem or the Tomato router, or the alternate firmwares I’ve tried on my routers.

So for now, the new AirPort Extreme is back to acting the way the Express did, as a non-routing, bridging, access point to my network. The dual band WiFi, MIMO, and Gbit switch ports on it are still great, but I just cannot rely on it as my router.

Sucks though, I really like that Guest Networking feature.

Stunningly designed Safari extension to make Google Reader not look like ass.

(via One Thing Well)

Marco Arment on Amazon’s treatment of Android third-party app developers as recently evidenced by their decision to give away over 100,000 copies of an app and pay the developer nothing.

Amazon Appstore: Rotten to the Core

These three points from the article stood out the most to me:

Amazon gets to set the price of your app to whatever they want, without any input from you, or even the chance to reject their price.

Amazon re-writes your description, and in ours they even made up things like ‘add up to 100 podcasts’. No idea where on earth they got that number from.

You can’t remove apps from their store! You have to ask them for permission via an email.

I can’t imagine giving up that much control. Whoever’s running Amazon’s Appstore either doesn’t understand developers or has no respect for them.

This is a signficantly different approach than Apple’s. Despite the approval process (which I like overall), Apple respects developers’ pride in their work and their desire for control over it.

One of the biggest changes in the Mac’s user interface, indeed one of the biggest changes in any mouse driven interface, is Lion’s new “reversed” scrolling. The fact that it is even an option reveals how much debate there must have been inside Apple on this issue. I’ve had some time to think it over, and I think it is the right way to go, but the reason why isn’t immediately obvious.

It would seem that the change is simply an unthoughtful kludge to bring it in line with iOS, but that’s not the whole story. First, let’s look at the history of the mouse pointer and scrolling. On the original MacOS. Before the GUI, text displayed on a screen had no visual indicator of anything that overflowed the screen. The metaphor was that your screen was a view port into a larger amount of information, and pressing up or down (or PageUp and PageDown) moved the view port around the virtual document. Pressing up meant the view port would go up, so you would see the top part of the document, and down would take you to the bottom. In those days, all input was driven with the keyboard, and sometimes until you pressed Up or Down, you wouldn’t even know if there was more information to see.

When the GUI and the mouse came along mid 80′s, it mostly aped the keyboard driven interface. The mouse was a huge leap in simplifying user input, but it still behaved like a keyboard in the sense that there is a device between you and the computer. Today’s multi-touch screens with their direct manipulation metaphors are also “devices between you and the computer” but they don’t feel like it. Tell me, when have you ever been using an iPhone and thought “I am sending input signals to a touch screen, which is translating them through a series of programmed heuristics into intentions on how to change the output”? The very idea is laughable. You can’t escape the idea when typing on a keyboard or when moving a mouse pointer around, but with good enough capacitive multi-touch, the whole idea of input hardware and drivers disappears.

Reinforcing the old metaphors, scroll bars were introduced as a map of the view port. You were supposed to envision the scroll alley as a tiny abstraction of your document, with the scroll thumb as the view port moving along it. Since view port effectively means screen, and your screen size can’t change, and since it doesn’t make sense to change the size of the scroll alley, the scroll thumb would change size to reflect the relative size of the view port to the entire document. Thus a small scroll thumb means a large document, and a large scroll thumb means a small document. It seems second nature to us today, but it really is a complex set of metaphors, ratios, and analogues all based on the old problem of input and output devices feeling like devices instead of becoming transparent to the experience.

Many people argue that while the direct manipulation present on iOS makes complete sense, and is actually better for that type of device, the transparent metaphor falls apart on a full blown computer where a mouse or trackpad is conspicuously, almost obnoxiously, present all the time. I thought so too for awhile. Trust me, Apple is well aware of this. I believe the answer to this problem is to look back on scrollbars themselves as an inelegant hack that was the best we could do at the time. The key to understanding Lion’s “reversed” scrolling is to note that scrollbars are de-emphasized the same way as in iOS. Natural scrolling is not so much about feature parity with iOS, as it is about the elimination of the scrollbar-as-view-port metaphor. Once you stop thinking about input on a mouse or trackpad as manipulation of scrollbars, and start thinking about it as manipulation of documents, it makes tons of sense.

Special thanks to John Siracusa’s Hypercritical and John Gruber’s The Talk Show podcasts on Dan Benjamin’s excellent 5By5 podcast network for so much enlightenment on this topic.

I’ve been collecting some of the best under the hood changes in Lion, particularly some useful command line tools.

nettop: “top” like program that uses the new NetworkStatistics framework, with network activity separated by process. Really fun to watch on bittorrent programs.

iotop, iosnoop,opensnoop: Some new tools from the DTrace project that’s now part of OS X.

tmutil: Command line interface to Time Machine and backupd.

mtmd: Mobile Time Machine Daemon. Not something you strictly run yourself, but a new process that keeps your Time Machine snapshots going when the disk is unavailable by caching them to a locally mounted NFS share. It’s mostly intended for notebooks and it works great.

smbutil: Apple has a new SMB server to replace Samba since the GPLv3 is incompatible with OS X’s licensing. Here’s hoping that the source to it is also public when they get around to listing the open source components to 10.7 on opensource.apple.com.

git: Git is now included out of the box.

Security.framework: OpenSSL has been deprecated. Run otool -L /usr/bin/ssh on 10.6 and 10.7 and you’ll it no longer links against libssl, but against the new framework. The only Unix I know of to bundle OpenSSH but not build it against OpenSSL. Amazing.

CoreStorage: You’ll need to read Siracusa’s outstanding Lion review at Ars Technica to get a good grasp on it. Or better yet, just read the new man page for diskutil. Basically CoreStorage is a new layer in the filesystem cake that almost, but not quite, appears to offer what ZFS promises.

And in Lion Server:
PostgreSQL has replaced MySQL
Dovecot has replaced Cyrus for IMAP
CUPS has replaced Print Services
And not only has Tomcat gotten the axe, but so has Apple’s own WebObjects.

Back when I wrote my original guide to using CalDAV with an iPhone, I had just realized the important distinction between Events and To-dos. An Event is something that goes on your calendar, associated with a date at minimum. An Event is something that happens, usually whether you participate or not. An Event is a concert, a meeting, or a lecture. The fundamental unit of an event is a date/time stamp. A To-do is something you do when you choose to do it. It may be associated with a date, time, or place, but the fundamental unit of a To-do is a task that only happens when you make it happen. This important distinction is why iCal puts To-dos on their own list and doesn’t include them on the calendar as if they were events. This is also the same data that Mail.app shows for To-dos.

Until Monday, there was no way for iOS to access these To-dos. This changes with the new Reminders app in iOS 5. Reminders is strictly a frontend to that data store. Whether you sync over USB or use an online service like iCloud or your own CalDAV server, it all goes into the same place as your calendar events. I’ve been a fan of Things.app on my Mac for awhile, which can optionally sync with the local calendar store. If that happens to be a CalDAV-backed store, then effectively Things will be syncing To-dos with your calendar server. In turn, those To-dos will show up on iOS in Reminders. Wheras today, Things can only sync with its iOS counterpart over a LAN. Cultured Code is still working on cloud sync, but their plans may change due to the new iCloud APIs for developers announced Monday.

So if Reminders can effectively replace Things, why have Things at all? Because even though Reminders can be based on dates and times and even the holy-shit-we-are-living-the-future CoreLocation data, there’s no way to automate recurring To-dos or make them part of a broader scope in a project. Things does both of those. You can effectively use Things as a repeating-task engine to populate Reminders and then never directly launch Things on your iOS device at all.

During the keynote Steve Jobs said that iCloud completes the iOS Document Storage Story. I feel like Reminders completes the Calendar Task Story.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/11/google-teases-samsung-built-chromebox-desktop-version-of-chrome/

Should fit right in at Microsoft. (PDF)

(via John Siracusa.)

http://kara.allthingsd.com/20110509/microsoft-will-announce-acquistion-of-skype-tomorrow-morning/

Let’s hope this time they get the actual underlying technology.

I don’t even care what app this is for, I want to buy it now.

http://dribbble.com/shots/165689-Whiskey-iPhone-Icon?list=popular&offset=1

http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Tracking-Device-Teardown/5250/1

Tracking device Repairability Score: -10 out of 10 (10 is easiest to repair)

Best teardown ever.

http://vimeo.com/23066787

(via Kottke)

It’s always a good day when there’s a new episode of Jesse Thorn and Adam Lisagor’s Put This On, a podcast about dressing like a grown-up. In this episode Jesse speaks with Jay Walter, head of J. Press and designer Thom Browne.

Jillian Rayfield at TPM:

Ahmadinejad’s chief of staff Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei and at least two dozen others have been arrested in the past few days and charged with sorcery and “invoking djinns (spirits),” The Guardian reports. Another man arrested, Abbas Ghaffari, was described by a news site in Iran as “a man with special skills in metaphysics and connections with the unknown worlds.”