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All Your Patents Are Belong to Us Remember Lodsys and its plan to squeeze patent licensing fees out of iThings app developers? Fortune ran a piece last week that said Apple was looking to intervene on behalf of iOS and Mac developers. The filing has Apple moving “to intervene as a defendant and counterclaim plaintiff”…

Dave Hamilton: We’re here at WWDC with Marco Arment. As I recall, you’ve had a very interesting history of developing for Apple. Is Instapaper your first real project? Marco Arment: Yeah, it really is. After playing with it one night at a time for a few years, it’s my first Apple environment product. DH: Of…

The Journal spoke to current and past employees, industry experts, and it got a look of some of Apple’s own training manuals in putting together its story. In addition to the control and focus on the details, Apple also spends a lot of time and resources on actually training its retail employees, something almost unheard…

The patents cover a wide range of technologies, including Wi-Fi, some social networking patents, and patents related to the LTE, the misnamed 4G wireless network that is being deployed in the U.S. by most of the major wireless carriers. Microsoft, AT&T, Verizon, and HP had all filed objections to the very sale of the portfolio…

Dave Hamilton: I’m here at WWDC with Ben Satterfield from 23Divide Software. Let’s start with the most recent thing and go backwards. You’ve been a kind of a serial entrepreneur — if the term applies. TestFlight. A very cool platform for both developers and anyone who is working with a developer testing an app. Ben…

Office updates address Excel security issuesOffice 2004 11.6.4 and Office 2008 12.3.0 address the security related issues, and Office 2011 14.1.2 also includes additional fixes for Word and Outlook.The Office 2011 Word update improves stability when using the Template Gallery or using Advanced Find and Replace, and improves stability when using Hiragana typing mode.The Office…

The 32-page comic book, titled “Steve Jobs: Co-founder of Apple,” was written by CW Cooke and penciled by Chris Schmidt with cover art by DC artist Joe Phillips. Bluewater Productions has already published similar comic books for celebrities such as Howard Stern, Lada Gaga, Hillary Clinton and Lucille Ball.“His innovations command front page news, speculation…

Apple’s Ron Johnson is heading to J.C. PennyMr. Johnson will take the helm from Mike Ullman, J.C. Penney’s current chairman and CEO on November 1, 2011. He will also join the company’s Board of Directors on August 1.“I am delighted that Ron is joining our Board and the Company, and look forward to working with…

Dave Hamilton: So. Interesting times! Andrew Stone: My god. This is probably the most excitement we’ve had since Apple rolled out the iPhone in 2007. DH: Why do you think that? AS: It’s a bitter-sweet time because Bertrand [Serlet], VP of Software Engineering, left this year. And so I’m all of a sudden looking around…

Then, as now, Mr. Jobs had lined up a world-class architect to head the project. In 1983 it was I.M. Pei, who designed such buildings as the John F. Kennedy Library (see photo below), the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell, the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong, and several other iconic buildings. Mr.…

The Apple Barometer is the name of Ticonderoga’s look at a basket of companies in Apple’s supply chain with “a high concentration of sales generated” from the Mac, iPad, and iPhone maker. The financial services firm believes it that this provides a more accurate indicator of Apple’s own performance than the more common method of…

iWeb is Apple’s web site design application for the Mac. It’s part of the iLife creativity suite that also includes iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand and iDVD.“Will I need to find an alternative website builder and someone to host my sites,” Mr. Jobs was asked. “I have invested a lot of time and effort and the thought…

iCloud Communications filed its lawsuit against Apple on June 9 in U.S. District Court in Arizona, according to CNET. The filing claimed that Apple’s use of the iCloud name will cause customer confusion over products, and that Apple is copying its name.Apple faces lawsuit over iCloud name“The goods and services with which Apple intends to…

Dave Hamilton: You had kind of an interesting path in the Apple market. In essence you started making tools for übergeeks. James Wilson: Exactly right. I mean, we started as a band of übergeeks that had no intention at all of ever making a product in the Mac space. In 2003, we actually started as…

Ten years before the World’s Fair opened in New York City, the major economic powers imploded. The 1929 Stock Market Crash was a major event, but was just one of many events that lead to and caused a persistent economic upheaval that was felt for decades afterwards. New York City, at that time, had a…

Apple introduced iCloud earlier this week during a keynote address at the company’s annual World Wide Developer Conference. iCloud offers a host of document hosting and syncing services, including the ability to have most of your iTunes purchases (music, apps, and iBooks) synced to any and every Mac and iOS device you have. While iCloud…

Continued from Part I. Dave Hamilton: Tell us about the early days of the Macintosh. Dan Bricklin: We were there when the Mac came out and we released, under Software Arts, TK Solver — which we ported to the Mac. That’s because we used a “write once, run everywhere” language. So we put that on…

If you want to disable Facebook’s automatic facial recognition feature, do this: Log into your Facebook account in a Web browser Click Account (It’s in the upper right corner of the Facebook page) Choose Privacy Settings Click Customize settings (It’s at the bottom of the Sharing on Facebook section) Click Edit Settings next to Suggest…

Dave Hamilton: So what are you thinking about these days? Dan Bricklin: The iPad. DH: Of course! Tell me more. DB: The magic of the iPad is not that Apple magically writes code. There are other things that make it magical. I believe it’s magical, but I believe the magic is in the control it…

ForeSee Results filed a proactive declaratory judgement action on Tuesday  against all four of the patents Lodsys holds after the the patent holder threatened legal action against its clients, according to Foss Patents. Clients ForeSee Results claimed were threatened included Adidas, Bust Buy and WE Energies.Lodsys is also facing patent invalidation filings from Brother, Canon,…

Apple purchased the land in two transactions. In 2006, the company bought 50 acres off Wolfe Road, and in 2010, the company bought 98 adjacent acres from HP, giving Apple not quite 150 acres. Mr. Jobs told the Cupertino city council that his company wanted to take that space, increase the number of trees on…

In 1998, Steve Jobs stood up and abruptly, boldly cancelled OpenDoc right before the bewildered eyes of several thousand developers. Previously, they had been told that OpenDoc was Apple’s salvation and answer to Windows. But that was the previous regime. Mr. Jobs had different, bold plans for the resurrection of Apple, namely simplifying the product…

If you’re using MobileMe, there are a couple of things to consider before you start trying to clean things up yourself. First, make sure that you’re not syncing with iTunes in addition to MobileMe (which is one of the most common causes of duplicated data). To check this, plug in your iOS device, open iTunes,…

Safe Download Version shows when your Mac’s malware definitions were updatedSafe Download Version is a Mac OS X application that shows which safe downloads definition list version is installed, along with the date and time the definition list was last updated on your computer. The brand new version 0.2 update changed the time shown from…