This Is Sad All Right

post from Daring Fireball on 01 February 2012 11:03:15 PM. © Daring Fireball

Violet Blue, writing about last week’s Macworld/iWorld Expo:

I was, in fact, looking at The Saddest Booth Babe In TheWorld. [?]
She sat on a stool in between two large monitors across the aislefrom us. The pretty brunette was in one of those big corner boothsthat paid a few bucks for that sorta-prime real estate you know isa gamble for whoever forked over the money to sell wignuts orwidgets or iPhone cases or other sundry USB landfill.
Her shoulders were hunched and her hands sat limply in her lapbeneath breasts that were packaged air-tight in a tight, brandedt-shirt.
She stared at the floor. Unlike her counterparts, she neversmiled. Sad booth babe was sad.

But as Shawn King points out in the comments under the photo, the woman in question doesn’t look anything at all like a “booth babe” — she simply looks like a developer who happens to be a woman manning her booth. And according to subsequent comments, that’s exactly what she is:

The woman in the white top appears to be Piroska Szurmai-Palotai,the (sole?) developer for NeoPlay Entertainment. She has threeapps currently in the App Store and was a first-time exhibitor atthe Mobile Apps Showcase this year.

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Read The Full Article:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/violetblue/macworld-2012-the-island-of-misfit-toys/1011

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70 Percent of All Smartphones Sold by AT&T and
Verizon Last Quarter Were iPhones

post from Daring Fireball on 01 February 2012 11:03:15 PM. © Daring Fireball

Android’s market share victory is imminent.

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Read The Full Article:
http://thenextweb.com/apple/2012/01/26/crazy-81-of-all-smartphones-sold-by-att-in
-q4-were-iphones/

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AT&T and Samsung Finally Upgrade the Infuse 4G to
Android 4.0

post from Daring Fireball on 01 February 2012 10:04:17 PM. © Daring Fireball

Wait, did I say 4.0? I meant Android 2.3.

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Read The Full Article:
http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/1/2764128/att-samsung-infuse-4g-android-gingerbrea
d-update

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iPhone 4S Camera Made by Sony

post from Daring Fireball on 01 February 2012 08:03:22 PM. © Daring Fireball

That’s one way for camera companies to thrive in the face of declining point-and-shoot sales: to become component suppliers for smartphones and other devices.

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Read The Full Article:
http://www.ifixit.com/blog/2011/10/14/iphone-4s-camera-made-by-sony/

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Apple denied Galaxy Tab 10.1N ban in Germany

post from Apple on 01 February 2012 03:04:17 PM. © Apple

Apple has failed to secure a preliminary injunction against the Galaxy Tab 10.1N tablet and Galaxy Nexus smartphone in Germany, thanks to a ruling by the Munich Regional Court Wednesday (via Bloomberg). Apple had claimed that the Galaxy 10.1N, a version of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 redesigned to avoid a previous injunction, and the Nexus infringed upon a patent related to touchscreen technology.

In delivering the ruling, judge Andreas Mueller suggested that the court didn’t like Apple’s chances for maintaining the validity of the patent claim, saying that “Samsung has shown that it is more likely than not that the patent will be revoked because of a technology that was already on the market before the intellectual property had been filed for protection.”

It’s a win for Samsung, and one that will no doubt take the sting out of a ruling Tuesday that saw a Düsseldorf court uphold an injunction against the original Galaxy Tab 10.1. This injunction also would have applied to a technical patent, not design IP, which would’ve been much harder for Samsung to work around with simple software or hardware modifications.

Samsung’s bigger concern will still be the pending European Commission’s investigation related to its legal use of patents requiring fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) licensing terms, which the EU regulatory body formally announced on Tuesday.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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Read The Full Article:
http://gigaom.com/apple/apple-denied-galaxy-tab-10-1n-ban-in-germany/

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No Longer Loving Google

post from Daring Fireball on 01 February 2012 03:04:15 PM. © Daring Fireball

Nelson Minar:

I imagine half of my readers are smugly thinking “See, I told youGoogle was evil all along”. I don’t think that’s right. Inparticular I refuse to give in to a cynical view of Google’s“Don’t be evil” motto; that ethos was very real, a sincere andimportant guiding principle. And if a big company like Googlecan’t avoid being evil, then what world-changing enterprise can?But I think Google as an organization has moved on; they’refocussed now on market position, not making the world better.Which makes me sad.

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Read The Full Article:
http://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/no-longer-loving-google.html

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Apple Updates Final Cut Pro X With Multicam,
Broadcast Monitoring

post from Daring Fireball on 01 February 2012 03:04:15 PM. © Daring Fireball

Finally.

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Read The Full Article:
http://www.loopinsight.com/2012/01/31/apple-updates-final-cut-pro-x-with-multicam
-broadcast-monitoring/

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Making Mistakes

To top off those panel appearances, while in San Francisco I stopped by the palatial Mule Design studio to make an appearance on Let’s Make Mistakes, hosted by my friend and American McCarver co-contributor Mike Monteiro and Katie Gillum. We talked about everything from conferences to NFL team uniform design.

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Read The Full Article:
http://muleradio.net/mistakes/36/

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Less Than Perfect Apps

My second appearance was on this panel moderated by Lex Friedman, featuring Glenn Fleishman, David Wiskus, Paul Kafasis, Guy English, and yours truly, talking about the flaws that bother us in apps that we love.

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Read The Full Article:
http://www.macworld.com/article/165097/2012/01/mwpodcast284_less_than_perfect_app
s.html

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In Praise of Apples .ibook Format

Joseph Pearson, of the e-book startup Bookish:

So we were surprised and delighted by some aspects of the .ibookfile that iBooks Author spits out. Their extensions to EPUB aredone precisely the right way. They?re not done with dollops ofembedded JavaScript — a fact that Baldur Bjarnasen laments.(You can be sure EPUB?s governing body, the IDPF, is lamentingthat too.)
Instead they?ve done it with microformats. [?] They?ve said: thisstuff is up to reading software developers to implement. LikeApple. Or Amazon. Or Kobo. Or Booki.sh. What we need to do is givethe ebook authors enough opportunities to customise thefunctionality, not recreate it for every single book.
This is exactly the right stance. We?re thrilled to see this,although it means a whole lot of work for us.

Apple’s approach suggests that they think “write once, run everywhere” is no better a strategy for e-books than it has been for any other sort of software.

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Read The Full Article:
http://blog.booki.sh/blog/post/a-favour-from-goliath/

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