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Jury Finds Mostly Against Samsung, Apple Entitled To Damages Of $1.049 Billion

The jury sitting on the Apple and Samsung trial in California has largely found Samsung guilty of infringing on Apple’s intellectual property. The nine jurors unanimously came to agreement, largely finding in Apple’s favour and thus awarding Apple $1.049 billion in damages.

Apple was succesful on a number of claims it put to the jury, but not necessarily against all the phones and tablets that Apple claimed to infringe. One such claim that Apple was particularly succesful in claiming ingringement was the notorious ‘bounce-back’ patent in which the jury found every one of the accused devices infringed on - similarly with Apple’s scrolling and two finger gestures, the jury agreed that nearly all the devices did infringe the patent.

But Apple certainly wasn’t succesful on every front, and one notable area in which the jury did not agree with Apple was in regards to the claim that Samsung’s patents were invalid. In fact the jury didn’t find a single patent, on either side, was invalid.

When the verdict was read, there was minor mistake in the damages calculation that lead the jury to go back and reconsider the decision. It had arisen when Samsung pointed out that the jury had awarded damages for some devices that the jury had said didn’t infringe.

[via AllThingsD, The Verge]

Next: Injunction Hearings

Now that the jury’s verdict has been handed down, the next step will be a preliminary hearing on injunctions. Apple will have to file its requests by August 27th (this coming Monday), at which point Samsung will have two weeks to respond. The actual hearing will be held on September 20th.

[via The Verge]

Samsung Responds To Verdict

Today’s verdict should not be viewed as a win for Apple, but as a loss for the American consumer. It will lead to fewer choices, less innovation, and potentially higher prices. It is unfortunate that patent law can be manipulated to give one company a monopoly over rectangles with rounded corners, or technology that is being improved every day by Samsung and other companies. Consumers have the right to choices, and they know what they are buying when they purchase Samsung products. This is not the final word in this case or in battles being waged in courts and tribunals around the world, some of which have already rejected many of Apple’s claims. Samsung will continue to innovate and offer choices for the consumer.

[via The Verge]

Apple Responds To Verdict

We are grateful to the jury for their service and for investing the time to listen to our story and we were thrilled to be able to finally tell it. The mountain of evidence presented during the trial showed that Samsung’s copying went far deeper than even we knew. The lawsuits between Apple and Samsung were about much more than patents or money. They were about values. At Apple, we value originality and innovation and pour our lives into making the best products on earth. We make these products to delight our customers, not for our competitors to flagrantly copy. We applaud the court for finding Samsung’s behavior willful and for sending a loud and clear message that stealing isn’t right.

[via AllThingsD]

Tim Cook Emails Apple Employees

Today was an important day for Apple and for innovators everywhere.
Many of you have been closely following the trial against Samsung in San Jose for the past few weeks. We chose legal action very reluctantly and only after repeatedly asking Samsung to stop copying our work. For us this lawsuit has always been about something much more important than patents or money. It’s about values. We value originality and innovation and pour our lives into making the best products on earth. And we do this to delight our customers, not for competitors to flagrantly copy.
We owe a debt of gratitude to the jury who invested their time in listening to our story. We were thrilled to finally have the opportunity to tell it. The mountain of evidence presented during the trial showed that Samsung’s copying went far deeper than we knew.
The jury has now spoken. We applaud them for finding Samsung’s behavior willful and for sending a loud and clear message that stealing isn’t right.
I am very proud of the work that each of you do.
Today, values have won and I hope the whole world listens.
Tim

[via 9to5 Mac]

Microsoft Responds To Verdict?

 


[via The Verge]

Flip’s Escape Offers Tons Of Pixel Fun For iOS

Last week, Shaun Inman (creator of the popular statistics and RSS server software Mint and Fever)’s newest game, Flip’s Escape, got approved by Apple. It ties in with the loose storyline of The Last Rocket after escaping from the collapsing factory. Flip, the rocket you play the game as, needs to flee from the shockwave which resulted from a large explosion. At the same time Flip has to avoid colliding with asteroids during his epic escape. Read more

Review: Things 2 With Cloud Sync

Things by Cultured Code, a developer company based in Stuttgart, Germany, has been around since the day the App Store and iOS 2.0 were unveiled. The app is famous for its minimalist, iconic interface and features which are a perfect mix of simplicity and serious business from the very first version on. It’s the perfect example for the ethos of “If 1.0 sucks, all other versions will suck as well”, it was done right the day it came out.

Yet, the first Things just didn’t work for me — I don’t know why, but it didn’t stick. I’ve never tried out other solutions, neither complex workhorse that is OmniFocus, nor have I tried a basic to-do app like Remember The Milk. The last three years, I was a Simplenote guy. I’m really into minimalism; in fact, that’s the reason why I initially desperately wanted to try out Things. But Simplenote worked better than Things for me. You could paste anything into it and the new content would be immediately available across all your devices, and on the web. My notes were always with me. And after I found Notational Velocity for Mac, a Simplenote desktop client, I completely stopped searching for other solutions.

But now, Things have changed. After over a year of beta testing, Things 2 with Cloud sync has finally arrived, and besides its big syncing feature, it’s got a bunch of other cool refinements and new possibilities along the way. Read more

Drafts 2.0: New Fonts, New Look, A Brand New Kind of Sync, And Now On iPad

"Drafts are made for a writer who does. Who writes with pen or just two thumbs. When the ink runs dry and the lock screen glows. Swipe right, tap Drafts, and then compose."

“Drafts are made for a writer who does. Who writes with pen or just two thumbs. When the ink runs dry and the lock screen glows. Swipe right, tap Drafts, and then compose.”

I like to think of Drafts as the Field Notes of iOS. It’s inexpensive yet of high quality, unassuming but sharp, highly portable and convenient. While the icon, a simple white chiclet key, doesn’t emphasize Draft’s suave user interface, it is symbolic of the keyboard shortcut for Safari and other browsers, where ‘command + D’ adds the open webpage as a bookmark. The name Drafts itself may curtail ideas of long-form note-taking, although it’s not antagonistic towards writers feeling inspired to write more than a few sentences. Drafts is considerably the everyman’s notebook, unfraught with bindings and covers, instead fitted between two panes of glass in Apple’s iPhones.

Drafts, for those whom haven’t read the original review, is simply a digital notebook for capturing thoughts, lists, and ideas in plain text or Markdown. Those ideas can then be shared with social networks like Twitter or Facebook, your email or calendar, with friends on Messages, to a capturing tool like Evernote, or into a folder on Dropbox. If you’d like, you can use it like Birdhouse for drafting Tweets, or you can use it like Notes for grocery lists and reminders. No matter how you use it, your journal is held together in a simple list, organized by date last accessed, and is quickly searchable.

Read more

OS X Mountain Lion Updated to 10.8.1

Apple just released OS X 10.8.1, maybe your Mac already told you via Notification Center, but Mountain Lion’s first public update is out. The update includes general operating system fixes that improve the stability and compatibility of your Mac. The delta update appears to be less than 8MB is size.

• Resolve an issue that may cause Migration Assistant to unexpectedly quit
• Improve compatibility when connecting to a Microsoft Exchange server in Mail
• Address an issue playing audio through a Thunderbolt display
• Resolve an issue that prevents iMessages from being sent
• Resolve an issue when connecting to SMB servers with long names
• Address an issue that may cause the system to become unresponsive when using Pinyin input

If you still haven’t updated to OS X Mountain Lion, now would be an excellent time since the first ‘bug fix’ update is out. You can download it here via the Mac App Store.

UPDATE: Apple has released the support document for the update with more details.You can find it here.

Shuffler.fm Is The Perfect Tool For Genre-Specific Music Discovery

About a month and a half ago, I published a post about the current state of music making and discovery on the iPad. In the first part of that post I listed, described, and analyzed some prominent apps for discovering new music on the iPad. I concluded that these apps are state of the art when it comes to discovering music. Last week, while searching for music integration features for a music blog I run as a side project, I stumbled upon shuffler.fm. And after using it for some days now, I wish I could rewind time and add this service to the list in my music editorial, because it does something the other apps like Aweditorium or even radio apps like Tuner do not offer: it combines genre-specific music discovery with reviews and critical opinion. Read more

Sprinkle a Dash of Cocoa in Your AppleScripts

The framework AppleScriptObjC allows users to write scripts with an interesting fusion of the AppleScript and Objective-C languages. Specifically, Apple describes the framework as:

AppleScriptObjC lets AppleScript objects serve as Objective-C objects in the Cocoa runtime

Basically this means that you can use simplistic Objective-C code in an AppleScript with the seemingly easier to grasp syntax of AppleScript. If none of this makes any sense yet then just hang in there and I will explain in a very visual tutorial in which I will build a sample Cocoa-AppleScript app that simply sends a notification to the Notification Center and quits.

Read more