intervention
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Lodsys requests 2 months to respond to Apple (Updated)
A few weeks ago, Apple filed a motion to intervene in Lodsys' controversial lawsuit against a handful of iOS app developers. Lodsys was required to respond to Apple's request by June 27, 2011, but the company has asked for a two month extension. If a judge approves this extension, Lodsys will have until August 27 to respond to Apple's intervention request. The patent holding company affirms this extension is not a stall tactic and claims Apple agrees to this delay. If true, this motion may be approved by the judge and developers may have to sweat it out another two months. Lodsys will also be free to broaden its lawsuit by sending out letters to additional developers. This legal maneuver could put developers in a difficult position. Apple may be stalled for the next two months, while Lodsys decides what to do. Of course, Apple and Google could use this time to work out an agreement with Lodsys. In the meantime, though, Lodsys could continue to breathe down the necks of the development community. Even the most steel-nerved developers may crack under this pressure and sign a licensing agreement just to get Lodsys out of the way. Update: Lodsys refiled its request and asked for an extension of one month which the judge is likely to grant. The initial two-month extension was done by mistake. [Via The Loop]
My wife needs an intervention for her Live Cams addiction
It's a problem worthy of an episode of Intervention. Yes, I'm ashamed to admit that my wife is addicted to the Live Cams app on her iPhone. It all started when she was searching for new apps in the App Store, and she noticed a little app called Live Cams [US$0.99, iTunes Link]. It sounded innocuous enough -- the app provides a way to search, browse, view, and in some cases, control live web cams all over the planet. At a price of less than a buck, Live Cams couldn't harm anything or anybody, could it? We were both sure that the developer, Barry Egerter, couldn't have any evil intentions, so she bought Live Cams and installed it on her iPhone. That's when I noticed the changes coming over my wife. Rather than conversing over dinner, she would stare at her iPhone, occasionally touching the screen to switch to a new webcam or aim a camera at a new target. She'd interrupt my constant attempts at reaching a new high score in DoodleJump [iTunes Link] by waving her iPhone in front of my face, forcing me against my will to look at cute kittens cavorting on a cat cam in Tokyo. And when she started waking up at 3:30 AM to see what the "Really curvy road in Slovenia" looked like in daylight, I knew she had a problem.
Australian TV covers World of Warcraft
Fortunately, this "mY Generation" show from Australian TV is a little more fair with WoW than the last bit we saw. Though the stereotyping of an entire generation and the video effects grate after a while, it's a generally better look at what it's like to be a World of Warcraft player. It would be nice to see, for example, these kids going out to a movie occasionally or interacting with other people (since most of WoW's population actually does that), and it would have been good to hear from more than just that scientific woman talking about the average playtime -- why all the focus on how many hours /played these people have and not what it feels like to play during those hours? But as far as mainstream reporting goes, it starts out as a pretty good description of what it's like to be a WoW player.Part 2 and part 3 start to fall down, though, and by the time an intervention rolls around, the show gets a little more biased. I have to say, it would be fun to see a documentary done in this way for someone who watches TV 20 hours a week -- "We wanted to hang out with her, but she said the season finale of Top Model was on. She's a completely different person now!" Somehow, staring at a screen and doing nothing is still socially acceptable, but according to television itself, staring at a screen and interacting with other human beings isn't.Thanks, Luke S.
You know you work for a company destined for failure when...
In a recent blog post, Elder Game's Eric Heimburg takes a sardonic look at some of the more heavily worn bumps on the road that is MMO development. Without naming any names, Heimburg suggests developers conduct an intervention if their company meets a certain number of the criteria, lest their game join the cavalcade of mediocre to crappy MMO releases on the market.Among the more prescient of the criteria in this blogger's mind is the one where instead of having a lead designer, companies design by committee, or the one where the publisher imposes changes to the core game from outside. If only fans had a clearer picture of the way their favorite developers were structured, they could apply these criteria beforehand and weigh the odds of a stinker before sinking their hard-earned cash on it. Makes you wonder how many of these criteria Auran met before Fury fell flat on its face.
Dear Palm: It's time for an intervention
Dear Palm,Man, what a crazy year, right? We know things haven't really been going your way lately, but we want you to know that we haven't given up on you, even though it might seem like the only smartphone anyone wants to talk about these days is the iPhone. It can be hard to remember right now, but you used to be a company we looked to for innovation. You guys got handhelds right when everyone else, including Apple, was struggling to figure it out. And it was the little things that made those early Palm Pilots great -- you could tell that someone had gone to a lot of trouble to think about what made for a great mobile experience, like how many (or rather, few) steps it took to perform common tasks. The problem is that lately we haven't seen anything too impressive out of you guys. Sure, over the past few years the Treo has emerged as a cornerstone of the smartphone market, but you've let the platform stagnate while nearly everyone (especially Microsoft and HTC, Symbian and Nokia, RIM, and Apple) has steadily improved their offerings. So we've thrown together a few ideas for how Palm can get back in the game and (hopefully) come out with a phone that people can care about. (And we're not talking about the Centro / Gandolf.) Read on.
Carson Daly beats his Wii addiction
Yes, okay, it's a hokey clip from a talk show, but it's also Wii-related and the funniest thing Carson Daly has ever done. That puts it ahead of ... that one thing that Carson Daly said, and, uh ... probably something else. Oh, oh, he was on My Name is Earl! Okay, this is funnier than that one time he was on My Name is Earl. This clip parodies the A&E series Intervention with the sad, sad tale of Daly's battle with Wii addiction. We'd probably watch more Last Call and Intervention (more than none) if they featured stuff like this instead of whatever it is they actually feature. We've embedded the YouTube video after the break.[Via NeoGAF]
