Wednesday
Samsung denied seeing the next iPhone and iPad, Apple denied banning Samsung's new gear
In a Solomon decision that restores our trust in the justice system, some of Apple's and Samsung's more outrageous requests in their ongoing legal battle were denied.
Samsung was said to "overreach" in its request to see the next iPhone and the next iPad for possible patent infringements. That must have come as an answer to the Samsung "harassing" Apple comment. The court said that while the idea of "parity" is understandable, given that Apple was granted the permission to see the Samsung Galaxy S II and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 last week, these are now on sale nationwide anyway, whereas the next iPhone and iPad have not been even announced yet. And the above sentence in legalese:
"It is true that if Apple eventually introduces an iPhone 5 or an iPad 3 that diverges from the overall consistent look of the existing iPhone or iPad products, Apple might not be able to claim trade dress protection as to its entire line of products. As discussed above, however, Apple’s decision to limit its claims to its trademarks and trade dress as embodied in products currently in the market is not unreasonable, and Samsung points to no authority suggesting that the Court must look ahead to unreleased, and possibly not-yet-developed, products in order to evaluate the overall look of an existing product line.Finally, the Court notes that the relative burden of producing unreleased products may be somewhat greater for Apple than for Samsung. When the Court considered the potential prejudice to Samsung of producing unreleased product samples, the Court emphasized that Samsung had already released significant information about its forthcoming products into the public domain.Indeed, in addition to the images and information released to the media, Samsung had recently released 5,000 samples of its Galaxy Tab 10.1 to members of the public.Considering that images, descriptions, and actual samples of Samsung’s forthcoming products were already publicly available, the Court found that the burden to Samsung of producing the latest iterations of those products, along with their packaging, was minimal. In contrast, Apple maintains a strict policy of not commenting on future products and takes extensive measures to protect information about its unreleased products. Unlike Samsung,Apple has not publicly announced or described the products Samsung seeks to obtain. Instead,Apple closely guards this information as a trade secret. However, while this difference carries some weight, the Court agrees with Samsung that the strict protective order required by the Court and stipulated to by the parties would provide adequate protection to both parties. Apple’s contention that this protective order is sufficient for Samsung, but not for Apple, is not well-taken.The Court will not assume that outside counsel and experts who agree to strict confidentiality will nevertheless leak information about Apple’s products, nor will the Court assume that Apple would face greater harm from the release of confidential information than would Samsung."
The court, on the other hand, denied Apple's request for the allegedly-infringing Samsung gear to be banned from selling nationwide, thus evening things out, and wiping everybody's tears.
iPhone 4 becomes the most popular camera on Flickr
The iPhone 4 has just become the most popular camera on Flickr beating the Nikon D90 who long held the crown and made us wonder about all the possible reasons behind it. A look at Flickr's stats shows that its professional and semi-professional DSLRs that occupy the rankings as the Canon EOS 5D Mark II comes third, followed by the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSi and the Canon EOS Rebel T1i. One thing is evident – the iPhone 4 has a far inferior camera than all of them.
But strangely even with its comparatively humble 5 megapixel snapper, it has managed to outpace the rest with a whopping 4844 average daily users and over 9 million uploaded photos. The reason? The most obvious one is sharing – publishing a picture from the iPhone is a breeze as it only takes a couple of taps, while the rest of the cameras - despite their much better sensors – lack the opportunity to instantly post images to the web.
The second reason is of course availability as a phone is always around allowing for spontaneous shots, while you don't always have your camera around. Looking at the general picture, you'd notice that it's actually the iPhone 3G which has recorded the biggest total in terms of pictures taken among iDevices with over 35 million for its couple of years of existence.
The browser wars have a new winner after major updates to platforms
Just a couple of months ago, Microsoft bragged with the performance of its IE9 browser after it blew competition out of the water in a browser benchmark fight plotted by Redmond itself. But two months later, iOS 5 is official, and we have a whole new ball game. Running Mobile Safari on an iPhone 4 updated to a beta of iOS 5 shows that there's a new winner in the browser battle.
Safari scored a whopping 31fps despite the fact that it runs on a handset with a higher resolution, dwarfing the 26fps result on the WP7 handset and the 15fps on Android. The iPhone 4 sports a screen rendering 640x960 pixels in comparison to the respective Windows Phone device which only had to support 480x800 pixels. Initially, Microsoft's browser claimed to succeed due to its hardware accelerated HTML5, but while Redmond's new platform is about to use new hardware, the iPhone 4 manages to outscore with its year-old silicon.
Tuesday
Apple Revolutionizes Video Editing With Final Cut Pro X
CUPERTINO, California-June 21, 2011-Apple® today announced Final Cut Pro® X, a revolutionary new version of the world's most popular Pro video editing software which completely reinvents video editing with a Magnetic Timeline that lets you edit on a flexible, trackless canvas; Content Auto-Analysis that categorizes your content upon import by shot type, media and people; and background rendering that allows you to work without interruption. Built on a modern 64-bit architecture, Final Cut Pro X is available from the Mac® App Store™ for $299.99.
"Final Cut Pro X is the biggest advance in Pro video editing since the original Final Cut Pro," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "We have shown it to many of the world's best Pro editors, and their jaws have dropped."
"I'm blown away by what Apple has done with Final Cut Pro," said Angus Wall, Academy Award-winning film editor. "Final Cut Pro X is incredibly modern and fast, but most importantly it lets you focus on telling your story in the most creative way, while it actively manages all of the technical details."
At the heart of Final Cut Pro X is the Magnetic Timeline, a trackless approach to editing your footage that lets you add and arrange clips wherever you want them, while other clips instantly slide out of the way. You can use Clip Connections to link primary story clips to other elements like titles and sound effects, so they stay in perfect sync when you move them. You can even combine related story elements into a Compound Clip that can be edited as a single clip. The groundbreaking new Auditions feature lets you swap between a collection of clips to instantly compare alternate takes.
Content Auto-Analysis scans your media on import and tags your content with useful information. Final Cut Pro X then uses that information to dynamically organize your clips into Smart Collections, so you can easily find the clips you want by close up, medium and wide shots as well as media type and the number of people in the shot. You can also tag parts of clips with Range-based keywords to add custom search criteria to your media.
Completely rebuilt from the ground up, Final Cut Pro X is a 64-bit app that takes full advantage of the latest Mac hardware and software so you never have to wait for the next edit, even if you're working with 4K video. Final Cut Pro X uses multi-threaded processing and the GPU on your graphics card for blazing fast background rendering and superb real-time playback performance. Additionally, a ColorSync-managed color pipeline ensures color consistency from import to output.
Final Cut Pro X also includes powerful tools for audio editing and color correction, and is complemented by two companion apps, Motion 5 for professional motion graphics and Compressor 4 for advanced media encoding, available from the Mac App Store for $49.99 each.
Pricing & Availability
Final Cut Pro X is available today for $299.99 from the Mac App Store. Motion 5 and Compressor 4 are available today for $49.99 each from the Mac App Store. Full system requirements and more information on Final Cut Pro X can be found at www.apple.com/finalcutpro.
Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and has recently introduced iPad 2 which is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices.