By Graham K. Rogers

Opening Gambit:

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Apple Stuff

A little harder than a rumour is news from Sharp. Sam Oliver (again) reports that the president of the company announced that they will be shipping displays for the new iPhone this month, but that was it, so the rumours about size and shape are still in the air.

I was not happy that RSS was dumped from the latest version of Safari, to the extent that I made a Facebook page for the idea: Bring Back RSS functionality in Safari. A local user sent me a link to an item by Christopher Breen on MacWorld that offers a solution by using Automator to return some RSS functionality. It is a bit clunky and may not suit all, but it may be worth a try for some to get over the inconvenience Apple dumped on some of its users.

In the meantime, I am continuing to use Monotony which is about to be updated to Version 1.1 (currently 1.0.1). I have been running a beta version of 1.1 for the last few days and this has the extra convenience of placing feeds in the Notifications Center, so they stay there until I am ready to go through them. As it appears to be a viable solution, I am adding more and more feeds to bring me back up to speed.

One useful addition to Safari which I will be using is the new Show all Tabs icon to the right of the tabs bar, next to the + button. Topher Kessler explains what this is and how it works and it is going to save me a lot of time.

While I have had no serious problems with the new installation, a couple of local users report that they had to do it all again, with one having to restore from a Time Machine backup. At least he had a Time Machine backup.

There are also reports of owners of the Mac Pro suffering a problem in which they find themselves logged out of the system, Topher Kessler reports. This is apparently "a crash in a critical process called the Window Server" and it is connected to certain graphics functions and it seems to affect those with "multiple monitors attached to more than one GPU installed in their Mac Pro systems". He suggests a driver fault, which is what one of my local users experienced on his MacBook Pro which also had VMWare installed.

Although I like to check for updates myself, the new OS X has some automated systems that mean when an app is updated in the Mac App Store, I am sent a notification. Useful.

One of those was the useful photo-editing app, Color Splash Studio which notified me Thursday morning, but when I checked the Dock later there was a semi-transparent question mark. A look in the Applications folder showed me ColorStrokes with an identical icon and the entry in the MacApp Store confirmed that version 2.0 gets a new name as well as new tools. The name also matches the name of the iOS app.

I am rather a fan of keyboard shortcuts and have written some articles about these in the past. I also have some iOS apps that use these and link to the Mac. Mike Schramm reports on Eve which is a useful program that reminds users about available key commands when the mouse is used.

Several sources, like AppleInsider informed me that there was now a new Thunderbolt to Firewire connector for sale in the Apple online store.

I am also a fan of LaCie products and have a couple of their hard drives that I use for backups. The company is now part of Seagate, but there is still a certain French independence to the operation which Seagate would be wise to maintain. We are familiar with the rugged series of hard drives, which are not the most beautiful in the world but certainly look chunky and is "Shock-, rain- and pressure-resistant". Now, Michael Rose reports, using the same design concept (and the orange colour) they have come up with a RuggedKey flash drive which is a USB 3 flash drive of 16 GB or 32 GB which has a useful keyring incorporated.

Another Apple data center is going up soon in Reno, Nevada, and the Nevada Board of Economic Development agreed that Apple should be given $89 million in tax cuts for the project, AppleInsider reports. They are hoping for income, taxes and maybe some employment, although the North Carolina center only had a few working there.

But there is apparently more going up at the Malden NC data center and, to show how seriously some take the idea of getting the news first, Robert McMillan reports on Wired that some photographs were taken while over-flying the area and the shots reveal something new: an approximately 20,0000-square-foot structure in a wooded area just northwest of the main data center. This is apparently a "tactical data center" but no one knows what that means.

There are often personnel changes in industry with some company-hopping at regular intervals. Apple has some staff who stay for years, while others are more short term. A number of sources this week, such as Adi Robertson on The Verge had the news that Jim Keller will be going to AMD which is where he came from earlier. The Seeking Alpha note tells us that this comes just a month after Bob Mansfield announced his retirement.

Half and Half

One of those who has appeared already is Chris Stringer who showed pictures of lot of prototypes and outlined some of the thinking processes in Jony Ives' workshops. The idea of the prototype is to come up with a concept and flesh it out a bit, either in drawing, or if that looks good in a 3D form.

Most prototypes never see the light of day. While Samsung seems to be clutching at straws here, it should do the Apple case good as the jury will see how carefully (and for how long) Apple had developed the iPhone: since at least 1995, which means there was a 12 year evolution, rather than the 6 months (or less) that some companies had to produce some competition.

Indeed as the case progresses, it would appear that Samsung is skating on increasingly thinning ice with some of the genesis of the iPhone outlined in the case according to Kelly Hodgkins. The device Apple design engineers talked about was the Walkman NW-A1200 and it was the principles behind the Sony approach that were the inspiration. It would appear that from the interview this refers to, Sony were copying the iPod, not Apple copying Sony.

The first response from Samsung's legal team concerning the leaked information that we wrote about on Wednesday, is reported by Jeff Gamet on the MacObserver and there is no indication in the report that Samsung feel they did anything wrong at all. Instead, they blame Apple: it wasn't polluting the jury, it wasn't a press release, but the PowerPoint information sent out was a response to media enquiries. There was no indication in the text as to the judge's opinion on what it was or wasn't.

There is more on this and the increasingly acrimonious atitudes of the two sides and Apple has filed a motion with the judge, Joel Rosenblatt and Christopher Scinta report on Bloomberg News. Apple's counsel suggest in what seems a legal attempt to up the ante that either the judge should rule that the patent was infringed or advise the jury that Samsung engaged in serious misconduct.

A little more clear explanation of what transpired is in an item on Electronista who also mention that part of Apple's filing includes comment on previous wriggling by Samsung and the point that while their defence lawyers told the court that the information was sent only to those who requested it for clarification, other media sources also received it, unsolicited and directly from Samsung: the lawyer lied. No surprise there, I suppose.

While the Electronista item is useful in the way it summarises some of the main points here, as always I encourage those interested in full information to use Foss Patents for their prime source for the detail Florian Mueller includes and for his accurate commentary.

And yet, through it all, as many have pointed out, Apple is still perhaps Samsung's largest customer.

Not that the Apple v. Samsung case would be affected, but there are several recent attempts to claim patents from many companies, including Apple, by what have been called patent trolls. Now a Bill in Congress would seek to limit the number by forcing the losers to pay the legal costs of those they unsuccessfully sue, Timothy B. Lee reports on Ars Technica. [My original source for this was MacDaily News.]

Other Matters

While I had earlier suggested that short-term profit taking was a reason that the IPO of Facebook was not a roaring success, with the recent quarterly financial report, there may be more problems and the share price fell somewhat to its lowest ever. However, Rajiv Tarigopula on Seeking Alpha thinks this is a perfect time to buy.

One of the complications with the Facebook share-price is that we are really near the time when the locked up shares (those owned by insiders) can be released. It is expected that a lot of these will appear on the market, depressing the price further. David Alton Clark examines this great company, but terrible investment in some detail.

You will note that both of these articles are from Seeking Alpha, a source I am using more these days now that RSS has gone from Safari, but also note that one suggests buying and one selling Facebook shares.

Also in trouble is Zynga which relies so heavily on Facebook users. We reported earlier in the week that there were questions concerning the sale of some 43 million shares by those in the know, just before the announcements of poor quarterly figures: sucks doesn't it? It gets worse as the lock up restriction was apparently waived and Ben Popper reports that the first lawsuit about this apparent example of insider trading has been issued. From earlier knowledge if proved, this could cost the execs big time and in a number of cases, jail sentences may be an option.

As a note, the underwriters involved were Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs who figured prominently in the "Zuckered" IPO of Facebook.

Be careful what you click on. Users often have emails which are easily identifiable as attempts at phishing but the criminals who send these types of communications, hoping to gull users into connecting to their sites, are always trying to be more sophisticated. I have several that purport to come from services I use legitimately, like LinkedIn, PayPal (a favourite of these guys) and Facebook. I was searching through my Junk folder in Apple's Mail this week when I saw a Facebook message. I wondered why it was there.

It appeared to be a mail concerning recent activity, but I did not know the user name (I do not use the service widely and it is mainly for communicating with my students) so was wary. Running the cursor over the message gave me an indication that it clearly was not from Facebook but it was hard to track the source using the usual methods, however it does seem to originate from Peru which is not a normal operations office for Facebook.

As if by magic I also had email from a weblog community called Xanga, congratulating me on my first post. Eh? What post? The email purported to have links to graham.xanga.com with a specific page reference for the entry, but the mouseover revealed this was really http://atrans-transport.pl/mail.htm and atrans have links to Azerbaijan and some countries with less than stellar internet behaviour.

And on Friday morning something that pretended to be a Linkedin mail tried to send me to a site in Japan, using an email sent from Equador using an email account of a photo-sharing site. Lots of links there.

They are out to get us.

As if to prove the point, Dropbox is now saying that while they had not apparently been hacked before, now they are taking steps to make sure as some users have been getting extra spam mail Michael Rose reports. His article also offers some advice about the resetting of passwords.

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Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.