According to FOSS Patents, Apple has filed a motion to intervene in the proceedings between Lodsys and several app developers. Lodsys nine days ago filed a civil suit against several app developers including Iconfactory, Illusion Labs and Quickoffice in East Texas over patents it owns.

Whilst Lodsys can oppose Apple’s attempt to intervene in the case, FOSS Patents says that “Apple is fairly likely to be admitted as an intervenor”. In Apple’s proposed defence, it is argued that Apple’s existing license agreement with Lodsys covers the third party developers being sued – an argument Apple made with Lodsys in its letter to them. Contrary to what some might have presumed would happen, Apple does not claim any other defences such as disputing the validity of the patents – but the third party developers could still do so.

I’m reasonably optimistic that Apple will get to intervene. There appears to be precedent for that. Apple cites three interventions admitted in more or less comparable cases (Intel against Negotiated Data Solutions, Intel against U.S. Ethernet Innovations, and Microsoft against TiVo).

It isn’t clear what Apple’s relationship with the developers is (likely under a non-disclosure agreement) but more than likely is that Apple will help them with financial costs and perhaps even the potential risks. In its motion, Apple states that those developers being sued by Lodsys are “are individuals or small entities with far fewer resources than Apple and [...] lack the technical information, ability, and incentive to adequately protect Apple’s rights under its license agreement”.

In its post, FOSS Patents also shares some screenshots of the developers iTunesConnect app management service which asks developers about potential legal issues with their apps. If a developer says “yes” to legal issues, that app will become “unavailable to be restored and/or downloaded as a previous purchase by App Store customers” through the new iCloud service.

If you want a full rundown of Apple’s motion to intervene, FOSS Patents has an excellent run down, along with questions that the motion does not answer. If you feel brave enough you can also read the official motion here.

[Via FOSS Patents]

According to 9to5mac, “sources” are pointing to an upcoming refresh for the Mac mini and Mac Pro server lineup which could come in “the next month or so”. Apple will launch OS X Lion in July and, following the implementation of Sandy Bridge processors and Thunderbolt I/O technology in the latest MacBook Pro and iMac refreshes, it’s very likely the company will begin shipping new Mac minis and Mac Pros featuring the new aforementioned hardware. 9to5mac mentions, however, that the server lineup will go under a refresh, so we’re not sure how that would play out with the consumer version of the products. Still, it seems fairly obvious that all forthcoming Mac updates will carry Sandy Bridge and Thunderbolt. Apple quietly introduced its Mac Pro Server product after the Xserve’s discontinuation was announced in November.

The interesting part about both the Mac Pro and Mac mini server models become constrained simultaneously is that Apple might be looking to completely revamp their server offerings, not just update each respective product.

In past few weeks, rumors claimed Apple would soon refresh the MacBook Air family (perhaps in June or July) and the AirPort Extreme/Time Capsule lineup to bring better integration with its recently announced iCloud service. Whilst the Time Capsule announcement didn’t come true at the WWDC keynote, several sources have indicated the MacBook Air would soon receive an update to increase performances with new processors, as well as better connectivity with Thunderbolt.

While Twitter integration is engrained in iOS 5 (heck, Apple even lets you know whether you have Twitter’s official app installed or not), All Things D reports that Contacts has received a small update which includes support for adding friend’s handles on Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, and Flickr. When you add a contact to your iPhone, you can link that person to all of their social accounts. If you tap the handle in your contacts list, you’ll be take to that person’s user profile page.

The inclusion of the feature shows Apple’s acknowledgement of the importance of Web presences and contact information. But it could be much more useful if users don’t have to enter each of their friends’ handles manually, as appears to be the case at least in this release.

There’s also an inactive “add custom service” button that may allow you to add someone’s Instagram or MLKSHK account in the future – currently I found this particular feature wasn’t working. To access these additional profiles, edit a contact, and add a Profile field. If tap on the word Profile, you can select between the various social networks.

[via All Things D]

Those living in the United Kingdom will get to enjoy Spotify for a bit long as those living in the United States get to enjoy Apple’s iCloud and iTunes Match services between iOS 5 and Lion. Apple is still in the early stages of negotiations with the Performing Rights Society, who ensure composers, songwriters, and publishers all receive fair compensation for their works.

A music executive at one of the major record labels, who wished to remain unnamed, said: “Tentative talks have begun between the major labels and Apple in the UK. However, all talks are at the really early stages and no one expects to see the cloud music service live on this side of the pond until 2012.”

Even here in the United States, Apple still has yet to make deals with independent labels, and as with the initial launch of iTunes, Apple took their time as the rolled out their service to other countries. Mark Mulligan, VP and research director at Forrester Research, comments:

These types of negotiations take a long time… For one thing the UK arms of all the major record labels are biding their time and waiting to see how the service affects download sales in the US before they sign up to anything.

While the The Telegraph specifically exams licensing agreements in the UK, it’s likely that this situation holds true for the remainder of the world as well. For those in Europe, you’ll need to hang tight as Apple’s iCloud and the companion iTunes Match service go live. At the very least, iOS 5 doesn’t officially launch until this fall, so you just might not have to wait that long once iOS 5 devices start shipping.

[The Telegraph via MacRumors]

Here are today’s @MacStoriesDeals on iOS, Mac, and Mac App Store apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get them before they end!

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Tweetbot, the Twitter client from Tapbots we reviewed here, has been updated to version 1.2, adding several features requested by users in the past weeks and fixing some of the minor gripes we had with the application when it first came out. Whilst version 1.1 focused on adding CloudApp and landscape support, Tweetbot 1.2 brings a series of refinements and enhancements across all the sections of the client that should dramatically improve the experience. For example, you can now undo retweets, and retweet from another account if you hold down the retweet button. That’s quite handy: not only you can delete accidental retweets, you can also retweet quickly without constantly switching between accounts. And if you don’t like Twitter’s standard retweets, Tweetbot 1.2 has an option to send old “quote style” retweets.

Tweetbot 1.2 introduces absolute and relative timestamps, Google/Instapaper Mobilizer support for when you need to strip away all the clutter from a webpage and read it in a text-only view, as well as integration with Bitly.Pro for those who keep a custom domain on the popular link shortening service. Besides the new great user & hashtag picker from the compose view (make sure to check out the animations), short link geeks should be happy to know Tweetbot 1.2 has support for custom API endpoints. Other features in this update include:

• Pinboard support in the read later options
• Pikchur image upload support
• Tapping on a success/failure message dismisses it instantly
• Added @username/listname for followed lists

Tweetbot 1.2 is available now at $1.99 on the App Store.

It doesn’t come as a surprise when Apple’s latest and greatest software updates end up killing off compatibility with older devices, but the intrigue here is that something as recent as the original iPad may not be included in iOS 5′s full feature set. For example, developers have access to enabling special multi-touch functions for multitasking between apps, launching the multitasking bar, and closing apps with a four finger pinch in iOS 4.3. These functions, that work well on any enabled iPad or iPad 2, may not be included for use on the original iPad. According to Appadvice the iPhone 3GS doesn’t have access to many of the photo features available on the iPhone 4.

Perhaps these are temporary bugs, or Apple is really looking for reasons for people to buy an iPad 2 when iOS 5 drops over the less expensive iPad elsewhere. Bryan M. Wolfe from Appadvice writes,

We’ve received numerous reports the upcoming gesturing feature in iOS 5 will not work on the original iPad. If proven correct, this would be the first time the first-generation iPad was denied a key feature besides those that require the iPad 2′s camera.

The iPad’s touchscreen is exceptional, and there’s no reason why Apple wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) enable these features. If Apple does remove any features, I’d bet the iPhone 3GS and the 3rd generation iPod touch would be the most likely to be at risk.

[Appadvice via Cult of Mac]

In a move to protect key terms and product features related to Monday’s Keynote that kicked off WWDC 2011, Apple decided to go domain shopping. Obviously you’d want to protect product names like Lion and iOS 5 from being abused, but Apple may have overdone it with their acquisition of over fifty domain names, including goodies like “macmailconversationview.com” and “pcfreeiphone.com”. Robin Wauters from TechCrunch was quick to point out that Apple still doesn’t own ipad.com or ipods.com, but what is Apple really afraid of?

You can tell Apple is clearly trying to protect their branding, but are they going too far? Do they have anything to worry about? I guess iTunes in the cloud is pretty important. But Mac gestures? Apple should definitely put a tutorial there.

Here’s some good examples of what Apple has picked up.

• airplaymirroring.com
• itunesinthecloud.com
• macgestures.com
• osxlionairdrop.com

For the full list, be sure to hit up the source link below.

[via Techcrunch]

According to a report posted by website Apple-wd.com [Google Translation], the iOS 5 beta seeded to developers earlier this week doesn’t come with the FaceTime restrictions in Middle East countries we first covered back in October. Soon after Apple started removing graphics and mentions of FaceTime from its Saudi Arabia eight months ago, the company released an official document detailing the carriers that were not supporting FaceTime video calls on iOS — the document is still available here and shows Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates having FaceTime unavailable on certain carriers.

Other reports also confirmed FaceTime for Mac wasn’t showing Middle East countries as supported ones in the app’s preferences, which left us wondering why would the Mac version go under the same “rules” if a carrier wasn’t needed at all. Well, according to Apple-wd the iOS 5 beta has FaceTime working between iPhones in Saudi Arabia from STC and Mobily, as seen in the screenshot above.

Apple-wd speculates this might be a good indication of iOS 5 finally easing carrier restrictions on FaceTime which, as spotted at the WWDC keynote slides, is getting improvements for video call quality and may even work on 3G come the final release. However, it’s also possible that carriers will update their configuration files when iOS 5 is released publicly to block FaceTime again.

According to some code strings posted by 9to5mac and found in the first beta version of iOS 5, Apple may soon introduce a panoramic camera functionality to go alongside the photo editing enhancements announced at the WWDC keynote. As detailed by Scott Forstall on stage, iOS 5 will bring the possibility to crop, rotate and auto-enhance images from the native Photos app — these features won’t be available on the iPhone 3GS, but they represent a great addition for iPhone 4 users that won’t need to purchase additional basic photo-editing apps anymore. With red-eye reduction and Photo Stream compatibility, Apple touts the new Photos app as the best way to take photos on an iPhone, and send them to an iPad for a quick touch-up. However, as the code discovered suggests, there may be more coming in future betas.

There’s a variety of “pano” photo apps available in the App Store, some of them like Occipital’s 360 Panorama and Pano we reviewed on MacStories before. These apps allow you to take photos of what’s around you to build a panoramic, zoomable representation that “stitches” the various images you’ve taken together in a single file.

The code found in iOS 5 beta doesn’t suggest much, except that Apple has been thinking about a menu to “take” and “save” a panorama. These strings are usually a good indication of new features to come in iOS 5 — in January, iOS 4.3 beta code confirmed that Photo Booth camera effects would be implemented sooner or later, and indeed the iPad 2 (released in March) sported a native Photo Booth app on its custom 4.3 version.

Two days ago, Steve Jobs pitched Apple’s latest project to the Cupertino City Council: a massive, spaceship-like, 4-story new campus that would be located in the 98-acre ex-campus Apple acquired from HP last year. Designed with modern and green technologies in mind and entirely based on curved glass running around the whole structure, the new “mothership” would host 12,000 employees, come with a new auditorium, labs, office, and much more. When Steve Jobs presented the project, answering questions on environmental issues, energy and free Wi-Fi (the City Council asked whether Apple would provide Wi-Fi for everyone outside the campus, like Google does — Steve Jobs simply replied being Cupertino’s top taxpayer would be enough to contribute to the city), it was clear the City Council members were inclined to accept Jobs’ proposal, though no official announcement had been made there.

In a press conference responding to Steve Jobs’ campus proposal, Cupertino Mayor Gilbert Wong stated that “there’s no chance” the City Council is saying no, even if a public hearing will be necessary. However, Wong expressed his appreciation for Apple and Steve Jobs’ visionary attitude, confirming that when they have to deal with a large sales tax producer, they’re usually very accommodating to that company. Apple’s new campus should get done by 2015 if everything goes well.

Video of the press conference after the break. [via TechCrunch]
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A few days ago Apple quietly modified its ‘App Store Review Guidelines’, and it has significantly reduced the requirements that apps, which deliver content, must abide by, effectively stepping down on their previous demands. In February this year it was revealed that Apple had imposed a deadline of June 30 for all publishers of iOS Apps that delivered subscription content to implement In-App Subscriptions. The requirements were that any app that sold content outside the App Store must also offer the same content to users through In-App Purchases and at the “same price or less than it is offered outside the App”.

Yet as MacRumors has published today, Apple has amended the App Store Review Guidelines to state as follows:

11.14 Apps can read or play approved content (specifically magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, and video) that is subscribed to or purchased outside of the app, as long as there is no button or external link in the app to purchase the approved content. Apple will not receive any portion of the revenues for approved content that is subscribed to or purchased outside of the app

In plain English this means that content providers with an App Store presence are no longer forced to offer In-App purchases or subscriptions for content. But if they do choose to implement IAP or subscriptions they can offer the content at any price they wish – even if it is more than what they charge outside the App Store. The only requirement is that within an app, there cannot be an external link that redirects users to purchase content from outside the app.

It is unknown why Apple has decided to change tack on this issue, but a likely reason is that a number of publishers decided the 30% cut was too much to bear and had put pressure on Apple to redraw the guideline. Just a few days ago The Financial Times released its iPad webapp in order to sidestep the App Store and its overbearing terms. Similarly, earlier this year Time magazine had also ruled out using the subscription service because of the 30% revenue cut and customers ability to opt-out of giving them certain personal details .

Readability, which launched in February, was also set to offer iOS users an app that would tie into the Readability service, but because of the subscription rules they weren’t able to release the app. Similarly iFlowReader complained in mid-May that Apple’s subscription policy had shut them down because the 30% revenue cut would eat into their already small profit margin. The question now is whether these services and magazines will now re-embrace the App Store under these revised terms.

[Via MacRumors]