CoverFlow
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Supreme Court refuses to hear Mirror Worlds' appeal to have damages award against Apple reinstated
Back in 2008, a company called Mirror Worlds filed a patent-infringement suit against Apple alleging that a number of OS X features infringed upon one of its patents. The accused features included Cover Flow, Time Machine and OS X's Spotlight search feature. In October 2010, Mirror Worlds won a US$625.5 million judgement against Apple. At the time, the damages amount was the fourth-largest patent judgement in US history. Apple, naturally, appealed and in April 2011, a federal judge reversed the judgment. Earlier this week, the Supreme Court refused to consider Mirror Worlds' recent attempt to have $208.5 million of the damages award reinstated. Bloomberg reports: Apple Inc.'s victory in a patent-infringement case was left intact as the US Supreme Court rebuffed a Texas company's effort to revive a $208.5 million verdict against the computer maker. The high court declined to hear a case in which closely held Mirror Worlds LLC said an appeals court erred in ruling that Apple didn't infringe a software patent for a way to index and file documents. Mirror Worlds was co-founded by Yale University computer-science Professor David Gelernter.
Apple granted patents for solar-powered charging, method of video navigation
Lately, Apple's become synonymous with a flurry of hotly-contested patent disputes, but in a nice change of events, the company's actually been granted a bunch by the USPTO. The recently awarded patents range from the mundane to the utilitarian, covering designs for a customizable docking peripheral, in addition to a solar-powered solution for charging those iDevices. But the real additions to Cupertino's legal arsenal are its patents for what appears to be cover flow-like navigation for video, and display rotation for images captured via iOS cameras. Alright so none of these patents are particularly revolutionary, and they certainly aren't tipping us off to the next iteration of the iPhone, but think of the lawyers, will you? This is the stuff their litigious dreams are made of.
Apple wins appeal in Time Machine, Cover Flow patent ruling
US District Judge Leonard Davis threw out a US$625.5 million patent infringement verdict against Apple involving its Cover Flow, Time Machine and Spotlight technology for the Mac. In 2008, Mirror Worlds filed a patent infringement lawsuit accusing Apple of infringing on four of the company's patents for a "document stream operating system" and its associated information management system. The lawsuit cited Apple's Cover Flow interface, its backup application Time Machine and its search application Spotlight. Mirror Worlds received its four patents before it disbanded in 2003. In October 2010, a judge in East Texas Federal Court sided with Mirror Worlds and awarded the now defunct company $625.5 million in damages ($208.5 million per patent). Apple appealed this ruling and argued that Mirror Worlds' patents were invalid because the company failed to cite prior art and filed the patents incorrectly. The Texas judge disagreed with Apple's patent claims and upheld Mirror Worlds' patents as valid. In a decision favorable to Apple, however, he ruled that Apple was not liable for damages. Mirror Worlds apparently failed to prove Apple used the same underlying technology for its implementation of Cover Flow, Time Machine and Spotlight. Without this "requisite foundational support," the original lawsuit award was rejected and Apple no longer has to pony up the cash. [Via Ars Techinca]
Apple patents Cover Flow-like spiral interface
Patently Apple has unearthed a new patent that shows off a Cover Flow-like interface for browsing icons or album covers, only instead of Cover Flow's linear layout, this one organizes content in a spiral. We've seen rotating menus in Apple's patents before, but this looks more involved. It's described as a "receding spiral in a virtual 3D space," and you would use your finger (so probably in an iOS interface) to spin the spiral around and browse through whatever you were looking for. There's also a "V" shaped display listed, and users might even be able to reorganize icons or art in the display (while creating or sorting a playlist, for example). A finger is explicitly shown in the patent, but presumably this would work with a mouse, or even a scroll wheel, as in the case of the non-touchscreen iPods. It's definitely an intriguing idea, and it adds a little more visual variety to browsing through various media or icons. As with all of these patents, there's no guarantee that Apple will actually use this plan in a future product, but clearly someone in Cupertino is thinking about how to put a new spin on the Cover Flow interface.
Apple patent reveals scrollable menus, toolbars for OS X Lion
Apple has filed a patent featuring some concepts for scrollable menus and toolbars that could eventually be used in the next version of OS X, 10.7 Lion. The new patent covers all kinds of things, from extra UI elements in the OS X desktop to special iOS menus and features. But they all look like what you see above -- an almost Cover Flow-like scrollable interface that boils down a series of functions or menus into a set of icons. I like it -- while the drawback seems to be that you'd have to really know what's available in the menu and where to find it (because you only see one icon at a time, you'll basically have to just get used to knowing what the other options are), the menu seems like a great way to put a lot of functionality easily reachable in a very small space. There are a few different "menu shapes" to help with this, too, from just one icon rotating to the foreground, to an entire wheel of icons all with different features or choices on them. As with all Apple patents, we'll note that these are strictly concepts, and there's no guarantee that a feature like this will actually show up in OS X. But it's good to see that Apple is still playing around with even very traditional UI interfaces like menus. Always nice to see innovation even in the growing-ever-older desktop space.
Apple loses, challenges patent verdict surrounding Cover Flow and Time Machine
Remember that one random company who sued Apple back in March of 2008 for ripping off its display interface patents? Turns out it was filed in the Eastern District of Texas, a hotbed for patent trolls who know that they stand a better-than-average chance of winning simply because of where their issues are being taken up. Sure enough, Cupertino's stock of lawyers is today being forced to challenge a loss after a jury verdict led to Apple being ordered to pay "as much as $625.5 million to Mirror Worlds for infringing patents related to how documents are displayed digitally." Ouch. Naturally, Apple has asked U.S. District Judge Leonard Davis for an emergency stay, noting that there are issues on two of the three; furthermore, Apple has claimed that Mirror Worlds would be "triple dipping" if it were to collect $208.5 million on each patent. In related news, the Judge is also considering a separate Apple request (one filed prior to the verdict) to "rule the company doesn't infringe two of the patents" -- if granted, that would "strike the amount of damages attributed to those two patents." In other words, this whole ordeal is far from over. We can't say we're thrilled at the thought of following the play-by-play here, but this could definitely put a mild dent in Apple's monstrous $45.8 billion pile of cash and securities. Or as some would say, "a drop in the bucket."
Ouch! Apple dinged for $208.5 million in patent infringement case
You know that nice Cover Flow interface (above) that Apple uses on iDevices, in iTunes, and in Mac OS X? An East Texas Federal Court has ruled that Apple infringed on patents held by Mirror Worlds, a software business started by Yale University computer science professor and Unabomber victim David Gelernter. As a result, the court has ordered Apple to pay Mirror Worlds US$208.5 million in damages. The Time Machine interface, which shows a series of screen or application images "receding" back in time, was also part of the case filed by Mirror Worlds on March 14, 2008. As Mac Observer has pointed out, many of the Cover Flow and Time Machine concepts of showing files or album covers moving back and forth were in use by Apple in HyperCard stacks many years before Mirror Worlds received patents for the idea. Whether Apple will appeal the verdict or not is unknown at this time. Apple was granted a patent for Cover Flow in April, 2010, which makes this ruling even more questionable. Mirror Worlds, LLC was disbanded in 2003 due to lack of sales of its software products. Apple has not made any comments regarding the verdict or a possible appeal.
Apple granted design patent on Cover Flow
It was patent-grantin' day at the USPTO on Tuesday, and while most of the patents handed out to Apple, HP, Microsoft and others were pretty boring, it looks like Apple patent number D613,300 is going to make some waves -- it's a design patent on Apple's Cover Flow UI element. That's a design patent, not a utility patent, so it covers the look of the system and not its functionality; think of it as covering the distinctive shape of a Coke bottle and not how it works and you'll get it. That means Apple now has the ability to sue anyone using a system that looks "substantially similar" to Cover Flow, so Symbian^3 and Songbird are probably in for some changes. We'll see what happens -- it's not like anyone's called the lawyers in. Yet. P.S.- We were going to include the HP Slate here, but we went back and watched the video and ironically enough they're actually faking flick scrolling a Cover Flow view using iTunes -- an app that doesn't actually support flick scrolling. Sigh, HP.
iPhone devsugar: PLJukebox (Coverflow) license reduced to $50 for indie devs
Coverflow provides one of the most visually appealing elements in the iPhone GUI repertoire. It's the view that you see when rifling through albums in the iPod application while holding the device in landscape orientation. Although Apple has included a full working implementation of their technology in the iPhone's UIKit library, it's not part of the official SDK. (You can find sample code for using the unpublished Coverflow API over at Google Code). These unpublished APIs are not App Store friendly and they may break at any time. A number of developers have looked at Coverflow, and provided their own implementation libraries. Coverflow basically consists of some core animation for the movement between covers, geometric transforms to create the right perspectives, gesture interpretation for selecting or swiping through the covers, and a bit of finessing between artistic presentation and deceleration algorithms to make it all look and feel just right. If you're looking for an App Store friendly Coverflow implementation and don't really care for Apple's rather clunky "Covert Flow" (sic) sample code, head on over to Plausible Labs, Landon Fuller's shop. His team has dropped the indie dev licensing fee to $50 for PLJukebox licensing. PLJukebox represents one of the nicest third party Coverflow libraries out there. It's so nice that Apple rejected Fuller's Peeps app back in the days when they were a lot crankier during App review. It looked and performed like the UIKit version. As a final note, the fees for PLJukebox help underwrite other Plausible Labs projects like the open source PLBlocks project, which introduces programmatic blocks (it's a programming abstraction similar to lambda expressions) into Objective-C and PLCrashReporter, which provides enhanced crash reports from iPhone and Mac OS X apps. You might also want to investigate the open source OpenFlow project, which is hosted at github. If you have any questions about any of these projects or want to learn about corporate licensing, contact Fuller directly via his websites.
iTunes 101: Wrangle your iTunes LPs with Smart Playlists
Photo courtesy of Jay Robinson Earlier we mentioned how to explore the iTunes LP format and how easy it is to peek inside and check out all of the non-Flash, CSS-based awesomeness. But if you happen to be somewhat less geeky, it's pretty likely that your definition of "exploring" iTunes LP is much more focused on playing music, reading liner notes, and checking out custom graphics. If all you really want to do is check out your growing library of iTunes LPs then there's an easy way to bring them into one single collection. We have covered using Smart Playlists to manage your Library on several occasions. It's also possible to create a Smart Playlist that will list just your iTunes LPs. Just create a new Smart Playlist and set the filter field to "Kind," the operator to "contains" and in the text field type "iTunes LP." That's all there is to it, and I'm honestly kind of surprised Apple didn't include some form of visualization a la Cover Flow to make it easier to peruse your shiny, new digital LPs. If you've got any Smart Playlists or other iTunes 9-related tips, let us know in the comments -- we'd love to hear from you! Update: proper attribution to Jay Robinson now added to the image -- a glitch in our CMS caused the error, for which we apologize. - ed.
Apple offers Safari beta 4 for Mac and Windows
Well, it's Tuesday, and that often means a software release from Apple. Today, both Mac and Windows users can scarf up a beta copy of Safari 4, with many new and desirable features. Here's a download link for those who are ready to go.The new browser features: Cover Flow -- You can browse through your site history or bookmarks the same way you browse album covers in iTunes Top Sites -- look at renderings of your favorite sites, and open any one of them with a single click Full History Search -- A clever way to visit sites you have been to in the past. You can type a word or phrase into the history search field and you'll get a cover flow view of sites that match your criteria Nitro Engine -- Apple claims JavaScript now executes 30 times faster than IE7 and 3 times faster than Firefox Tabs on Top -- Allows Safari to have multiple pages open at the same time in a single browser window, and to switch back and forth with a click. The new Safari beta gives you more room at the top of the sceen when in tabbed mode. Windows Native Look and Feel -- The Windows Safari 4 beta more closely matches the look of other Windows applications and gives access to standard Windows fonts; Apple claims the same performance boost on Windows as in the Mac version Other features include Full Page Zoom, a 'smart' address field, a 'smart' search field, and more robust phishing and malware protection.Safari 4 beta also includes some improved developer tools. Details on those options can be found here. The TUAW team is installing the new beta now, and will have some thoughts & impressions later today. Go get it!Here's a look at Safari on Windows (from Download Squad)%Gallery-45749%
Video: Viliv's S5 gets price, March release, and iTunes
We finally have the release and pricing details for the Viliv S5. Up for pre-order on the 24th in Korea, the XP-based MID with 4.8-inch touchscreen will begin shipping locally on March 3rd. Closer to home, the $649 S5 Premium model is scheduled to ship to the US and Europe by the end of March. That configuration will include a 60GB hard disk, Intel Silverthorne-class 1.33GHz Z520 CPU (yes, the very same proc as the VAIO P), GPS, Bluetooth, WiFi, and 1GB of memory. Lesser spec'd models and a maxed-out F-LOG version with a DMB television tuner will only be available in Korea. And know what's great about a MID running XP? You can install pretty much any application you want, including iTunes as demonstrated in the video posted after the break. It's no iPod touch, but then again... it's no iPod touch.
What's in an icon?
Gedeon Maheux has an post about how an icon is designed from the aptly-named Iconfactory (specifically the Frenzic app icon), and while I don't have any design skills to speak of at all, it's an interesting look into how those little snippets of art are made. Icons are increasingly important, especially on the iPhone and OSX, as Apple leverages icons more and more in their interfaces, from the Dock to CoverFlow to the iPhone's home screen. He sounds a little sheepish that they obsess over icons, but why shouldn't they -- every time you decide whether or not to buy or use an app (some might say the most important part of an application's lifeline), you're likely looking right at the icon.There are a few things to take away here: they designed the icon not by itself, but right alongside all the other icons on an average iPhone screen -- in context, where people would see it. And they walked a thin line: while they wanted it to stand out as something you'd chose even among the apps you've already purchased, they didn't want it to be so bright or flashy that it broke the UI. Truth be told, Frenzic's icon still looks a little bright to me, but the lesson is good: the UI comes first.Ged closes with a sentiment I've agreed with for a while: while there's a disturbing trend of adding "On Sale" or "New!" to icons in the App Store (not to call anyone out, but ahem) that doesn't serve the developers or their customers. An icon, just like your app, should be subtle and simple and beautiful. After all, isn't that why we're all using Macs in the first place?
Jobs unveils new iPod nano at "Let's Rock"
The rumors were true on this one, too -- there's a new iPod nano in town, and it's sporting that long, thin, somewhat rounded design that we've seen early on. There's a new widescreen that can be turned horizontally (thanks to a new built-in accelerometer, you can also "shake to shuffle"), and in that mode, it offers a Coverflow-style interface. Features like a stopwatch and even a Voice Recorder (with mic, presumably purchased separately) are available, and the battery life has been slightly updated: you can have 24 hours of music, or four hours of video.The new models are available in blue, purple, orange, green, or pink, and the 8gb version is available right now at Apple stores for $149, with the 16gb version available for $199 as soon as next week. Headphones are sold separately for $29 next month, with an in-ear version available for $79, and both, we're told, include the clicker from the iPhone, where there's a small button you can click or double click to skip songs.Stay tuned for more on the new nano later today, and keep with the TUAW liveblog of Apple's Let's Rock event for more new products and news.
Contactizer 3.6 Gains Leopard Goodness
Objective Decision released a free update to their oddly-named flagship product Contactizer. A powerful, Sync Services-savvy personal information manager (PIM) application, Contactizer 3.6 comes in Pro and Express flavors depending on your needs.I used an earlier version of Contactizer last year and was impressed with its power, although I did run into issues with how it synced with iCal and Address Book. One of the best features from my viewpoint was the ability to track tasks throughout an entire project using the Project Manager mode (see screenshot above). Contactizer also did a great job of handling mail merges, and I found the way that it integrated email information into my contact list to be very helpful.The update includes a Leopard-only Cover Flow mode that displays contacts as business cards, an improved sync system that works with multiple calendars, a quick entry panel for tasks, and a number of other user interface improvements. Contactizer is a Universal Binary application which requires Mac OS X 10.4.8 or better. You can download a 30-day free trial, or purchase Contactizer Pro for $119 (Express is $59.90). [via Macworld]
Mac 101: see iCal events in Cover Flow
Continuing with yesterdays obsession with Cover Flow, here is something that you might not have known existed in Leopard. You can browse iCal events with Cover Flow right inside a finder window. All you have to do is open Spotlight up by clicking its icon in the top right corner of the screen (or pressing command + spacebar). Then type kind:ical into a new Spotlight search, and click "Show All." Your results will now be shown in a new Finder window. Activate cover flow by going to View > Cover Flow (or press command + 4). When you find the event you want, you can double click its icon to open it in iCal.app. [via Macworld]
Cover Flow for a more Fluid browsing experience
Fluid, the site-specific browser we've featured before, has added a sweet new feature: Cover Flow for sites like Google, Digg, Flickr and more. In case you haven't given it a shot yet, Fluid allows you to create mini-browsers that are specific to a site – such as GMail, for example – giving you an icon in the Dock and quick access to your most-used pages. Fluid's author, Todd Ditchendorf, has made a short video that – with an entertaining musical score – shows the usage of the new Cover Flow feature, as well as showing some basic tricks for making the most of Fluid. Fluid is free, so check it out and make your site-specific browsing experience that much cooler.
AppFlow for the iPhone
Some enterprising iPhone developer named Erica Sadun (we hear she blogs for a fly-by-night Mac site) has been tinkering around with CoverFlow on the iPhone for a book she's writing, and while the result of my doing the same tinkering would be nothing but a broken iPhone, she instead pulls off the opposite: an enhanced iPhone.AppFlow is a CoverFlow-style interface for launching iPhone apps and icons. You just install the app on your jailbroken iPhone, and then launching your favorite app is as simple as flipping to the icon and double-tapping. Webclips, we're told, are launched a completely different way, and thus not included in the flipping. But "maybe in a later update," our inside source told TUAW exclusively.If this is the kind of stuff we're getting from Sadun before the SDK drops, just think what we'll see after. The woman's a genius. And it's almost surprising that Apple didn't think of this in the first place -- if it works in Leopard, and it works in the iPod of the iPhone, why didn't they give us the option to flip through apps in this way?Update: AppFlow has been incorporated into XLaunch and now supports Webclips
Cover Stream brings the old CoverFlow back
I'm sure I'm not alone on this one, but I remember when CoverFlow was basically just a tech demo, and not, you know, the centerpiece of OS X's UI. But of course when Apple picked up the little app to use it for everything else, we lost it -- even if you wanted to use the old simple album-browsing app (and now I'm actually regretting deleting it off of my old PowerBook), you're out of luck.Unless you use Cover Stream, an iTunes helper app that recreates the old CoverFlow interface outside of iTunes. It's even incorporated the "flip-browsing" that you can do on the iPhone, where you just flip the art over to choose a specific track to play. As for how it actually works with iTunes, we can't say, but at least that CoverFlow interface is still available unofficially.By the way, I'm planning on doing a roundup (similar to the alarm clock one) of iTunes helper apps like this, so if there are any you want to see included, drop a note here in the comments. I have a few in mind already, but suggestions are welcome.[Via MacMinute]
Delicious Library 2 will track your media and your tools
Scott Stevenson has taken another look at a program I am pretty much drooling over at this point-- Delicious Library 2. Earlier, he walked us through the overview of all the items in your library, and this time, he goes a little more in depth on what the app can tell you about each item that you own.First off, everything is Quicklook-capable and can be viewed in CoverFlow, which is awesome. You can thumb through your books just with a few keystrokes. You can share your library via .Mac and Bonjour, which means while using Wi-Fi at Barnes and Noble, you can actually get book recommendations from anyone else on the network with you.Finally, Scott reveals a strange but interesting new feature. Apparently, in its pre-release incarnation, you can also track tools. That's right-- the screenshot above is not Photoshopped (not by us, at least). Scott even suggests there might be other possessions to track, but we'll have to wait for the official release to see just what the Delicious team have cooked up.
