“AppleInsider is reporting that an Illinois-based company and its Nevada partner have filed a lawsuit against Apple Inc., alleging that Mac OS X 10.4 ‘Tiger’ infringes an interface patent relating to the OS’s nearly universal use of tabs. The suit was filed in the patent troll’s and forum shopper’s favorite venue: Marshall, TX. The patent in question is 5072412, which was originally issued to Xerox in 1987, but is now owned or licensed to IP Innovation LLC and its parent Technology Licensing Corporation. ‘Category dividers triggered by Spotlight searches, as well as page tabs in the Safari web browser, bear the closest similarity to the now 20-year-old description’ of the patent, according to the article. IP Innovation is requesting damages in excess of $20 million and an injunction against future sales and distribution of Mac OS X 10.4. Software patent reform can’t come soon enough!”

The patent filing dates back from 1987 and if you take a look at it, clearly describes something which isn’t exactly considered amazingly innovative nowadays. I’m struggling to think of a single graphical application that doesn’t make use of some form of multiple ‘workspaces’ as they are referred to in the filing. IP Innovation simply bought the intellectual property rights from Xerox, who pretty much invented most of the concepts of the graphical user interface as we know it today.

AppleInsider has a nice description of exactly where the ‘infringement’ is happening:

The disputed section refers to the technique of creating a window on a computer’s screen with controls that switch between views of multiple associated display objects within the window, erasing one view as the user selects another while still giving a spatial frame of reference and the same general interface during the switch.

The point is, software patents desperately need reforming. The amount of time they are valid for is far longer than necessary. Within the fast-changing world of technology, this type of patent needs to have a much shorter validity period.

The whole point of the patenting system was to help promote innovation by offering a limited monopoly on novel ideas for a reasonable amount of time. Instead, all we’ve got is patent hoarding companies like ‘IP Innovation’ that make all their money by acquiring patents and then suing and/or settling disputes.

Which, in my eyes, is abuse of the system.

Not only that, but instead of promoting innovation, abuse like this stifles it, because it means people aren’t free to use even the most basic and obvious concepts and ideas in their programs without risking litigation.

So this is my official recommendation – we either need to seriously reform the whole patent scheme with regards to technology, or scrap software patents entirely. And we need to do it soon.

In case you’ve been living in a cave for several months, you will have heard about the Apple TV, Apple’s new device which connects your iTunes library to your TV and allows you to play your iTunes content in your living room.

It turns out that the Apple TV box is actually a low-powered computer in a small box. Powered by an Intel Pentium M processor, the unit actually runs Mac OS X (albeit a version with some components removed).

Because of the fact that the Apple TV is just a computer, it has proved quite easy to hack new features into it. We’ve seen people getting SSH remote login to their Apple TV and subsequently launching proper OS X applications on the machine, including VLC to play extra media formats and even run the online game World of Warcraft.

The point I’m getting to is, there is a thriving hacker community around the new device.

Obviously, Apple can’t publicly condone people hacking additional functionality into their Apple TV, but the question I want to know is, do Apple mind people doing this? I can’t believe they wouldn’t have realised people would try, but it does seem surprisingly easy to do.

They could have taken a heavy-handed approach, and implemented a solution to lock the hardware so it would only execute Apple-approved code. It’s something that Microsoft tried unsuccessfully to do in the Xbox, and have largely succeeded with in the Xbox 360. Microsoft’s strategy here though is different. Microsoft make a loss on the hardware and have to make their profit on the games. If people started using Xboxes as cheap hardware and using them, for example, as Linux-based servers, Microsoft could be losing a lot of money.

Apple don’t have that same issue. At the present, the business model with the Apple TV is iTunes and getting people to purchase content from the iTS specifically for their television. They probably don’t have the same kind of issue with making a loss on the hardware either, as I imagine they can at least break even on the Apple TV hardware cost bearing in mind the low cost of components of a similar spec.

Still, it’s perfectly possible with a bit of effort to use the Apple TV as a dirt cheap Mac (even the Mac mini isn’t in the same price range as some of the cheapest PCs).

I’d be absolutely fascinated to know what Apple’s real views on people hacking the Apple TV are. If any of our readers have interesting theories about Apple’s thoughts on this issue, why not share them in the comments?

Secret Notes is reporting that big record label EMI is planning to release tracks to the iTunes Store without DRM protection on them.

EMI is scheduled to make the announcement in London at a news conference that will feature Apple CEO Steve Jobs, The Wall Street Journal reports. Jobs created a stir earlier this year when he published an open letter to the music industry calling on it to abandon DRM.

We know that EMI have been eyeing up this move for quite some time and with Steve Jobs support for ditching DRM in his open letter, it appears that EMI want to try the non-DRM route.

EMI, the world’s third largest music label, has seen only mediocre success with its digital strategy, a result that some analysts believe compelled the label to take the bold move of dropping DRM. The firm had reportedly attempted to sell DRM-free music in the past but met resistance from online music stores who demanded “insurance” payments to guard against potential lost sales from the possible increase in digital piracy that DRM-free music might yield.

This is a pretty big story and a very bold move by EMI. They are the first major label to even get this far and if this does come to fruition, it has the potential to cause a chain reaction.

At very least, consumers will become aware of the fact that they will be able to buy tracks from the iTunes Store and play them on non-Apple approved devices. Once they realise this, consumers might start to demand more and more tracks without DRM, recognising the benefits of interoperability.

I’m a opposer of DRM in any shape or form, so I’m quite pleased by this development. Whether or not it will have repurcussions beyond EMI or if it will just be a small ripple we have yet to see.

UPDATE: you can listen to the audio of the announcement here.

I just became the owner of a brand new 13″ white MacBook and for the first time, I’ve been able to experience for myself many of the delights of Mac OS X.

Safari is Mac OS X’s default browser and it is a fine browser at that. According to Wikipedia, it has a market share now of around 4.7% in Q1 2007, and the general trend is increasing.

In this special Gizbuzz post, I thought I would take a look at Safari – where it is now and where it might go in the future.

A very brief history lesson

Safari is, as I said, OS X’s default browser, although that wasn’t always the case. Back when Apple looked like they were in real trouble, they struck a deal with Microsoft. Microsoft pledged to building Office 98 for the Mac, and Internet Explorer would become the default browser for Mac OS 9. It stayed that way right up until OS X Panther (10.3) in 2003.

At that point, Microsoft decided that they would discontinue IE for Mac and that prompted Apple to start development on their own browser, Safari, which would be released with the Panther OS release.

Safari wasn’t actually written from scratch. The KHTML rendering engine was being developed for KDE and Apple saw the opportunity to use the KHTML project to use as a base for Safari’s underlying code. With cooperation with the KDE developers, WebKit became the name for Safari’s HTML, CSS and JavaScript system. The core components of WebKit are still open source (as is KHTML), but the Safari GUI is proprietary.

Unfortunately, the code from Apple’s WebKit project and KHTML are not synchronised, such that a KHTML browser does not behave exactly the same as a WebKit browser (although there are efforts to try and ‘unfork’ the code and in the process make KDE’s Konqueror browser better).

Safari in the news

Recently, Safari has been in the news quite a bit and I want to focus on a couple of stories here.

Safari on the iPhone

First of all, back in January we had the iPhone announcement at Macworld. One of the things Steve Jobs said the iPhone ran (apart from OS X, of which there has been a lot of debate) was Safari.

Clearly it’s not the same as Safari on OS X as far as the frontend is concerned, but I’m pretty sure it is WebKit running at the backend. Certainly it’s one of the most advanced browsers on a mobile device the world has ever seen and it looks like we could see an interesting battle for the title of ‘Most Advanced Portable Web Browser’, with Opera doing similar good work on platforms like the Wii.

Safari on Windows

I think for the most part, this story was Digg hyperbole and I personally don’t think it’s likely to happen, but there were rumours that Apple were going to port Safari to Windows.

Apart from this fake screenshot, which to me looks like an elegant Photoshop of bits of the iTunes interface and some clever trickery, we haven’t seen any substantial evidence to support this claim.

Plus I don’t think Apple would do it – what is in it for them?

While Safari isn’t on Windows, there is a project to get the WebKit rendering engine on Windows, which should make it easier for web developers that don’t have a Mac to test on WebKit browsers. Swift is one such project. It’s currently pre-release, but it worked reasonably well on my Windows setup.

The future

On the WebKit project website, one of the things you can do is download a nightly build of Safari using the latest version of the WebKit engine. It hopefully gives you a taste of what Safari will be like in the future, and perhaps looking towards what will be on the final iPhone and in Mac OS X Leopard.

At the moment, the only differences I can find between stock Safari and the nightly WebKit are subtle – things like rendering button styles on HTML buttons instead of ignoring them for Mac styles (one of Safari’s favourite things to do).

Safari’s market share is still apparently increasing. Whether that’s due to more Mac switchers, or people already using OS X who are switching browsers, it’s quite significant. With the iPhone, we might see the number of Safari users increase still. Unless Safari/Win does arrive, or a large percentage of the world goes Mac tomorrow, it’s unlikely to make a huge amount of difference, however, apart from perhaps getting more developers to test for Safari and other WebKit browsers.

In the unlikely event that Apple do release an official Safari for Windows, Firefox may have a serious contender on its hands. Safari is much speedier than Firefox in a number of respects, including startup time and rendering speed, but the lack of extensibility and plugins might hamper Safari quite a lot if it were to take Firefox head-on.

Safari is a good browser, and if it was opened up to more people, then I think it would be a serious contender for browser market share. Apparently, though, Firefox extensions and a consistent interface across Windows, Linux and OS X have got me to tap out this article in Firefox for Mac OS X, instead of Apple’s offering.

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Apple are apparently feeling the heat from judgements in places like Norway, where the iTunes + iPod lock-in has been declared illegal by the Norwegian government. I think Apple see the threat here, that if one country takes out iTunes, other markets could follow suit and that could be disastrous for Apple. Therefore, if Apple manage to get rid of the DRM, then iTunes can no longer be a problem, as it won’t lock you into an iPod anymore (assuming they offer downloads in a standard format, like MP3).

Much of the concern over DRM systems has arisen in European countries. Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free. For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard. The largest, Universal, is 100% owned by Vivendi, a French company. EMI is a British company, and Sony BMG is 50% owned by Bertelsmann, a German company. Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.

This sounds like very promsing news for anyone in the anti-DRM camp (like me), and it sounds quite convincing. Clearly, from some of the statistics Mr Jobs made clear in this letter, iTunes could be selling a lot more songs than it is at the moment (only 3% of all music on iPods is bought from iTS) and I guess this is where Apple’s real motive is.

Still, it’s very good news for anti-DRM folks, and it almost looks possible that in time and with some persuasion from other big players in this business, the recording industry will realise that the downfall of DRM is inevitable.

Huw and I got together for a short podcast that gives our thoughts on today’s two major announcements: the iPhone and the Apple TV.

The podcast runs 23 minutes and 34 seconds, and is a 16.2mb download.

• Download the podcast
• Subscribe via a feed reader
• Subscribe via iTunes

When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone today, it sounded at first like he was talking about three products. He said that it was a widescreen iPod, a mobile phone and an internet communicator. The widescreen iPod and mobile phone aspects of it were largely expected, but when he said ‘internet communicator’ he was talking about far more than an internet browser and possibly a java feed reader.

Apple announced two major partnerships to support this goal. Jobs was joined on stage by Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) and Jerry Yang (a founder of Yahoo!). Both are providing different areas of functionality to the iPhone, both potentially impressive.

On a side note, it must have hurt Eric and Jerry that they had to share a partnership with Apple, and didn’t manage to grab all of the business for themselves. It’s a mark of the power of Apple’s brand that Yahoo! and Google were prepared to work with each other just to be a part of the product.

The Google end of the deal involves Google Maps. On the iPhone, when you open Google Maps it will instantly know where you are (presumably from transmitter data). It will then allow you to move around and use a search feature to find local businesses, much like the computer-based product. A nice UI touch is the zooming in, which you do by placing your two fingers together like a pinch over the map, and then pulling them apart. Once you’ve found a local business, you will be able to call them from within the Maps interface. Satellite aerial photography is also available.

Yahoo! is also contributing fairly heavily. The new Yahoo! Go product, announced just yesterday at CES. According to the press release, the key features of this are a local maps widget (which is probably not included in the iPhone product given the partnership with Google), personalised news and stocks etc, photo sharing and email.

They also have a new kind of search built in, called ‘oneSearch’, which is supposed to give answers more useful for mobile users. As I understand it, if I search for ‘pizza’ on Yahoo Go it will return the locations and contact details of local pizza restaurants, whereas if I search for it on the main version of Yahoo, it will provide me with information about Pizza. All fairly sensible.

So those are the two partnerships summed up. We have more posts about the Apple announcements earlier today coming, as well as a podcast, and you can find all of our posts in the Apple category.

iPhone announced

Check out more in-depth details from TUAW, but for now, here’s the most important stuff. Yes, despite the recent Linksys iPhone, it really is called the iPhone.

• Touch-screen interface, only one button on the front to go back to ‘home’.
• 3.5″ widescreen display
• 2 Mpixel camera
• Available on US mobile operator Cingular only
• iTunes synchronisation
• Apparently runs OS X (but it’s probably cut-down) and features mobile-enhanced versions of the Safari web browser and Mail email clients.

The iPhone will be available from July in the US.

Apple TV (formerly iTV) announced

Apple’s new linking device which allows you to play all your purchased media from iTunes (for Windows and OS X) on your TV. We first heard about the Apple TV at the WWDC late last year, then called the iTV. It has all the features you’d expect, including 720p HD support, 802.11a, b, g and n wifi support and a 40 GB internal hard drive.

More info is also available at TUAW.

The Apple TV is apparently shipping in February.

No Mac announcements!

Absolutely nothing on Mac OS X Leopard, Apple’s next operating system release and no word on updates to their flagship iLife and iWork software suites (traditionally they’ve released new versions of the suites at MacWorld). In fact, from what I can tell, nothing Mac at all!

As I’ve said, we’ll have a bit more in-depth post here on Gizbuzz fairly soon, so stay tuned.

UPDATE: Apple’s site has been updated with some new product pages for the iPhone and Apple TV.

The Macworld San Francisco 2007 Expo is drawing close. The bit of it everyone is waiting for – Steve Jobs’ Keynote – is on Tuesday 9th January at 9 am (or 5 pm in London – find for your timezone). The rumours are running wild as to just what will be announced. But a few things seem quite definite. It is expected that more details will be provided about the upcoming OS X 10.5 Leopard release and more on Apple’s “iTV” device that pulls music, photos and movies from your PC or Mac and puts them on your TV. Also quite firm predictions are the release of iLife 07, and an upgrade to the iWork software package (including a Spreadsheets program). Maybe there will be the true video iPod, and maybe there will be an iPhone. But probably in all honesty not.

So where can you find out exactly what is going on? Well all the Apple rumour sites are offering full coverage of the event. Here is just a pick of three ways to get the news.

World of Apple Live hope to offer a full audio stream live from the keynote. If this works and is not overloaded, then it will almost certainly be the best way to hear what happens.

MacRumors are offering two different ways to get the updates. Either you can watch their live site where there will be a constantly updated text commentary of events, or you can just bookmark this one post which will be updated with a link to the QuickTime video of the event which Apple post a few hours after the keynote has finished. The latter page promises not to have any spoilers on it – so you can watch the presentation (albeit a few hours late) still unaware of what has been announced.

Gizbuzz is not doing live commentary – however there will be summary posts of all the announcements as well as more in depth analysis about what they mean for the future. So watch out this Tuesday – whatever happens there will be plenty of news.

Update: Gizbuzz is building a series of posts on the announcement, and has also just recorded a podcast with some more in depth discussion. You can see all of these posts in our Apple category.