I’m not particularly a fan of software patents. Apple have just been sued by a company called IP Innovation over their use of tabbed interfaces in Mac OS X. Yes, that’s right, over tabbed interfaces.

“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.

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IMified, an instant messenging bot which allows you to easily control various different third party web services through their APIs (see explainer post) has risen to popularity over the past couple of weeks.

It’s easy to see why - with IMified you can currently post to Wordpress, Blogger, Livejournal, Moveable Type and Typepad blog, keep yourself organised with Remember the Milk, Google or 30boxes calendar and Backpack and collaborate with Basecamp. That’s on top of their own Todo, Reminder and Notes apps, all of which work very nicely.

The three services I’m making use of are IMified’s own Reminders and Todo list functions, as well as using it to post to my personal blog. At first I was a little sceptical as to whether it was a gimmick or a genuinely useful product, but I have actually found it the latter.

IMified represents one of the good things about Web 2.0 - open architecture. It would be brilliant if this could be expanded so that over my IM I can have notifications of new email, updates on selected feeds and maybe even TV listings.

I’m particularly keen to see IMified and Twitter integration. A post about Twitter, a ‘nano blogging’ service which allows you to answer the question ‘what are you doing?’ in 140 characters or less and recieve updates from your friends via IM, text message and web interface, is coming soon on Gizbuzz. Despite the fact that Twitter already uses IM, it would be nice to be able to use it from one bot which does everything.

Over time I would hope that more and more services would be added. At the moment, services must be added by the IMified team, and so perhaps they should look at developing an IMified API that would allow third party developers to integrate their systems into IMified without any help from IMified.

IMified is a service I’m really excited about, and I think it could do extremely well in time. On a sidenote, as far as I can tell, IMified is a side project for its developers and unfunded. I think it’s an excellent example of how far a good idea can come without needing to enter the private equity game.

Ars Technica is reporting that Microsoft are pushing out a new update via Windows Update to their controversial anti-piracy software, Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA).

WGA is a tool which runs on the user’s system and verifies whether Microsoft thinks the user is running and genuine, or pirated version of Windows. If it finds you’re not running what it thinks to be an illegally acquired version of Windows, it nags you via the system tray to do something about it (i.e. buy a licence). You also can’t install certain applications and updates without having successfully validated your Windows installation.

It sounds simple enough, but WGA has come under fire for privacy issues (it phones home to perform the validation) and because it kept producing a lot of false positives.

This update is supposed to reduce the number of false positives and apparently there’s a new category called ‘Not Sure’, which, as the name suggests, is the category you get put in if Microsoft have doubts about your copy’s authenticity.

While Microsoft has not responded to requests for comment, it’s quite obvious what is going on here: Microsoft has added “not sure” as a way of cutting down on the number of false positives associated with WGA. As many as one in five PCs were failing WGA checks, but this new setting should both reduce this and give Microsoft the chance to investigate further the kinds of things that are landing folks in the “not sure” category.

I think part of the problem here is that a lot of OEM copies of Windows, that is, copies bundled with and usually pre-installed on PCs, use one activation code for each batch of computers (or even a whole model). That meant that if that one key got leaked, many users would find themselves being told about their illegal copies.

Clearly, piracy is something that Microsoft have to address, but the way they are going about it in recent times has not made them many friends. This move looks to be them toning down the severity of WGA.

One thing strikes me though - how easy it would be for malware to emulate WGA’s notifications and perhaps extort sums of cash from unsuspecting users to ‘fix’ the problem. Or maybe that’s just me.

Have you been falsely marked as a pirate by WGA? What are Gizbuzz readers’ thoughts on the issue? Let us know in comments.

CES is upon us, and Microsoft have apparently been busy and Bill Gates himself demonstrated a new product - Windows Home Server.

The idea behind Home Server is to provide a central location to allow sharing between all the Windows machines in a household and also to provide bridging functionality to other Microsoft products (like the Xbox 360 and the Zune), so that all of your Microsoft-equipped devices in the house can talk to each other.

It also has additional features such as backup capabilities and there is likely to be room for Microsoft to add new features to tightly integrate with Windows Vista (which, in case you’ve forgotten has a public launch on the 30th of January).

But Microsoft won’t be selling the Windows Home Server software - they’re going about it slightly differently. Hardware vendors are invited to build machines based on Microsoft’s reference design for Home Server, and then they can resell Home Server as OEM with their machines. It’s unlikely that the Home Server OS, a cut-down version of Windows Server 2003, will be sold separately - at least not for a while.

The Home Server can be administered via a web-based interface and a ‘Windows Home Server Console’ client application for Windows.

Leaving aside my personal opinions on Microsoft pushing towards domination in yet more spaces, this is an innovative idea and will provide features that maybe even non-geeky households might consider. I think now it’s up to Microsoft to ensure the success of this product by getting third-party software and hardware vendors warmed up to the idea, so they can make their products interoperate and share seamlessly with the presence of a Home Server. If you could bring home any new gadget and instantly connect to it by Wifi from all the computers in your house, then Home Server will become a very attractive package for anyone with a home network and sufficient machines to warrant one.

Google’s Reader team have rolled out a great new feature that allows you to take a peak at your “trends”. The feature, which is labeled as being new, allows you to track your RSS reading history.

Among the features are neat charts displaying how many items you read on a daily basis, monthly basis, or weekly basis. In addition, there is a chart showing how many items from specific blogs you have read (determining the most read blog in your feed readers) as well as a chart describing subscription trends.

This is a great way of unlocking all the great information that’s available in Google’s vast archive of data. Of course, it begs the question as to whether we’re secure with Google knowing this much about us. The issue has been debated mercilessly, and I’m one who tends to give my undying support to Google (they do host my email, calendar, RSS feeds, and provide my search), however as they slowly offer more ways for users to see their data I’m sure they’ll also need to ensure that this data is as secure as ever.

Interestingly, according to the blog post they got help from the people behind MeasureMap to make Trends. Google acquired the blog analytics service from Adaptive Path last year, and since then it MeasureMap has been closed (apparently to be improved and then re-opened, though my guess is that it will be rolled into the more used Google Analytics, a.k.a. Urchin). Adaptive Path are well known for their ability to design nice web user interfaces (and coincidentally are the folks who coined the term AJAX, really starting Web 2.0), and whilst the help of their former employees have ensured that Reader Trends works well and looks good, I would really like to have a look round MeasureMap.

It’s a nice feature - I didn’t know before, for example, that over the past month I have read 1,250 items from my 27 subscriptions, or that Scoble posted, on average, 6 items per day. By no means will this prove a killer feature for Reader, but it is something that other feed readers don’t have. To differentiate itself, a feed reader must have innovative features to add to the central functionality which it shares with all of the competition. This is such an innovative feature.

A screenshot of the new trends interface is after the jump.

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Recently, Google unveiled (and in two cases, formally announced) new features for their online email service, Gmail.

The features include easier replying, new message notification, chatting online, forward-to-all, and a native Mobile Gmail. Several of these features are features that are “why didn’t I think of that” type features. They’re all deceptively simple, yet effective and incredibly useful additions to Gmail. Hopefully other webmail providers will follow suit.

After the jump: summaries and screenshots of the new features.

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OSNews is reporting that Microsoft have apparently finished finalising the code for Office 2007 and are now at the stage of release to manufacturing (RTM), where the code gets shipped out to be pressed onto nice, new, shiny discs.

Unlike Windows Vista, the development cycle of Office 2007 has been fairly away from the public eye, considering how important a release it will be for Microsoft, and how popular a software product Microsoft Office is.

Office 2007 is apparently going to be released to businesses on the 30th of November, that’s the same date that Vista will be available.

Now, a lot has changed in Office 2007 since we last looked at it here on Gizbuzz, and unfortunately we can’t get our hands on the RTM, but Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows has screenshots of the RTM build that you can take a look at.

As yet, Windows Vista has not been RTM’ed, so presumably they are still fixing the final reported bugs and optimising everything before they ship.

Redmond-based Microsoft and Utah’s Novell are entering a new partnership based around Novell’s SuSE Linux.

As part of the deal, all future litigation against Novell will be halted, including patent infringement disputes. Microsoft will begin offering sales support and technical support for Novell SuSE Linux, an open source operating system available in several versions, including OpenSuSE (community developed) and SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (Novell developed, includes proprietary applications).

The deal is not final, and may be changed at any time. This appears, however, to dent the plans that business software giant Oracle has had to begin support for Novell competitor Red Hat. Both Oracle and Red Hat stock was down at the time of this writing.

A press conference is slated for 5:00pm EST (now) and more details may be announced. As always, GizBuzz will keep you updated.

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The press conference has begun. Updates follow:

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Ken Fisher has posted an article at Ars Technica which is quite a backlash at a previous blog post by James Gaskin of ITworld.com.

The original post made some quite strong claims that Vista would “cost between $3,250 and $5,000″ for each user that upgraded. These numbers do seem quite abnormally high and the Ars Technica article called the ITworld post “so deeply flawed and sensationalistic that I’m reticent to even address it”.

What this throws up is that while the figures in the ITworld article are quite high, I thought it was still worth pointing out that the Vista upgrade will cost businesses quite a lot. But it will probably take quite a while for businesses to actually make the move.

Businesses don’t like upgrading, because, as I mentioned, it’s expensive, it’s a long process and they don’t like upgrading to new software before it’s been fully tested. Certainly over here in the UK, most businesses and organisations have only quite recently made the move to Windows XP.

My point here is that it’s going to be very difficult to make accurate estimates about the cost of moving, because by the time most businesses consider doing it, hardware will likely have been replaced and we can’t really guess about the costs yet.

We won’t really know the impact of Vista in the enterprise sector for a few years yet, so there’s not much point in guessing at it.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 is Novell’s second crack at trying to convince businesses to buck the trend of using Windows desktop machines in favour of a Linux solution. As the name suggests, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) is based on the openSUSE distribution (née SUSE Linux, which was acquired by Novell some time ago).

In this review, I’m going to take a brief look at SLED and what it brings to the table, what it does for Linux and the Linux desktop and how viable it is as a desktop solution within a business environment.
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