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Judge Denies Apple’s Attempt For Injunction Against Amazon Over ‘Appstore’ Name

Reuters

is reporting that a Californian judge has denied Apple’s attempt to quickly stop Amazon from using the term ‘Appstore’, which they have been using for their Android app download service. Apple had earlier this year filed a trademark lawsuit that claimed Amazon was improperly using the ‘App Store’ name in a way that will “confuse and mislead customers”. Amazon had claimed that the term was generic and therefore not protectable.

Whilst the full trial is set to take place in October of next year, this decision was in response to Apple’s request of an injunction against Amazon from using the name. In her decision, U.S. District court Judge Phyllis Hamilton said she did not agree with Amazon’s claim that it was “purely generic” but similarly found that Apple had not established “a likelihood of confusion” required to get an immediate injunction against Amazon’s service.

If the injunction had been successful, Amazon would have had to nearly immediately ceased using the name for their service. Neither Apple nor Amazon responded to Reuter’s requests for comment on the news on the injunction. This trial has attracted the attention of other players in the smartphone app market including Microsoft, Nokia and HTC, all of whom have filed complaints against Apple’s attempt to file a trademark for the term ‘App Store’.

[Via Reuters]

Growl 1.3 To Be Released on Mac App Store, Introduce Lion Support and Drop GrowlMail Support

The developers of Growl, a popular notification system for OS X that’s been around for years and it’s completely free to use, have announced that the plugin is going to become a Mac App Store application through a complete rewrite with OS X Lion in mind, dropping support for older frameworks and “hacks” like GrowlMail and GrowlSafari that wouldn’t probably make it past Apple’s approval. For those not familiar with Growl, the notification system became popular among Mac users because of its highly customizable nature that enabled almost anyone with basic coding and design knowledge to create “themes” for it that changed the appearance and animations of the notification tickets displayed on screen. Growl is supported by hundreds of different applications for the Mac, including big names like Twitter and Dropbox. We have covered a handful of beautiful themes for Growl in the past, and the success of this plugin also inspired several iOS developers to create mobile apps capable of plugging into the desktop system to fetch or send remote notifications. Growl is the undiscussed king of notifications for OS X apps.

Yet the developers are willing to change everything about Growl to get it ready for the Mac App Store and turn it into an app as requested by Apple to developers submitting software to iTunes. In a post on Growl’s official Google Group [via Steve Streza], developer Christopher Forsythe has announced that the upcoming 1.3 release will bring important changes such as the aforementioned Store availability, as well as full support for Lion and a new “app” form that has the obvious advantage of allowing users to easily upgrade to new versions by simply checking on their Mac App Store purchase page. One of the common complaints about Growl, in fact, is that the app often requires the user to download and perform an upgrade. As the existing version comes with a .DMG file that contains an installer for a System Preferences panel, the current Growl 1.2.2 forces users to manually upgrade every time a new version is out. With the Mac App Store and Growl becoming “an app”, the developers want to eliminate the convoluted process of opening and mounting a disk image file, running an installer, and manually upgrading from System Preferences. Read more

The Hit List 1.0 Now Available for iPhone

After a long wait, and a seemingly long approval process from Apple, Potion Factory’s The Hit List is now available for iPhone. It was only a little over a month ago that the Mac counterpart was released as well. The Mac version of The Hit List features Smart Folders, iCal Sync, Quick Entry, a built-in Timer, and AppleScript support among many other great features.

The app(s) features a $1.99 per month or $19.99 per year cloud sync service that syncs with all your Macs and iOS devices wherever The Hit List is installed. NOTE: MacHeist customers can receive 3 months of sync subscription by entering a license key here.

The iPhone counterpart is very much like the Mac version but made for a smaller screen. It features Lists, the Today and Upcoming List, Tags, Tasks and Subtasks, Smart Folders, Start and Due Dates and Cards. The Hit List for iPhone is available in the iTunes App Store for $9.99. We’ll have a full review in the coming weeks (now that the iPhone app is out).

Airfoil 4.5 Released: Extended AirPlay Support & Enhanced Remote Controls

Back in December we reviewed Airfoil 4, an update to Rogue Amoeba’s powerful audio tool for OS X that streamlined the process of sending audio content from various applications to external speakers, computers or Apple TVs, also using the new AirPlay technology. Airfoil 4.5, a major update released today and free for existing customers, builds upon the excellent feature set of version 4 to deliver an even easier AirPlay integration that will allow iOS users to beam any kind of audio from any iOS app to the Airfoil Speakers app running on a Mac. This new functionality may sound very similar to other desktop AirPlay receivers like AirServer, and indeed it is, with the exception that Airfoil Speakers runs in its (beautiful) standalone window that, among other things, visualizes music controls and album artworks even during a wireless AirPlay session.

Rogue Amoeba explains:

First and foremost, Airfoil Speakers for Mac can now receive audio from your iOS device! Launch Airfoil Speakers, and it will appear in the list of AirPlay devices on iOS. When you play audio in an app on your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad, you can select Airfoil Speakers from the AirPlay list, and you’ll hear the audio right on your Mac.

The new, powerful Airfoil Speakers are now compatible with iTunes on any Mac or PC and MacStories favorite Radium as well. Similarly to The Iconfactory’s latest update to Take Five for Mac, Airfoil 4.5 can now control apps like Spotify, Rdio and Radium so you’ll see control buttons alongside album artworks and track titles when grabbing audio from these sources. This change is welcome as you won’t be forced to switch to the original application to see what’s playing anymore.

Last, Rogue Amoeba says they’ve added support for AirPlay devices “from companies like iHome, JBL, and many more”, and that AirPlay-enabled hardware will work with Airfoil out of the box with no further configuration needed.

Airfoil 4.5 is a free update for licensed owners of Airfoil 4, and a license key can be purchased here at $25 to unlock the full app (free trial is available). With the much improved Airfoil Speakers utility, at this point we can’t help but recommend Airfoil if you’re looking for a simple, good-looking and powerful solution to manage audio in your house, room or office, and integrate it with Apple’s AirPlay.

3 Column Reader Safari Extension Makes Google Reader Beautiful

Based on the Pure Reader mod for Google Reader we covered back in December, 3 Column Reader is a new Safari extension released in June and updated last week that enables you to turn the Google Reader website into a beautiful, three-column reading experience for your RSS feeds. Developed by Zackary Corbett, 3 Column Reader is only compatible with Safari for now, and it’s got a minor glitch with the settings icon from Google’s new sharing toolbar launched alongside the Plus social network. However, the extension is being actively developed so we wouldn’t be surprised to see a fix for users logged into Google+ soon.

For everything else, 3 Column Reader looks great: the extension takes Pure Reader’s color scheme (which reminds us of Reeder’s sepia background and monochrome icons) to lay out a three-column setup perfect for widescreen monitors: folders and feeds are listed on the left, a mid panel visualizes the feeds’ titles and excerpts, and the full articles with images are displayed on the right. You can hide the source list by hitting an icon in the mid panel, and most of Google Reader’s web app functionalities are retained, such as popup menus to sort articles, or buttons to mark items as favorite. I didn’t encounter any other compatibility issues when using 3 Column Reader on Safari 5.1 for Lion GM. Read more

Capture: The Fastest App To Record Video On Your iPhone

Released today at $0.99 on the App Store and created by the same developers of Canned, Capture is a minimal and simple utility for the iPhone that addresses a common issue with the iPhone’s Camera app: sometimes you need to capture a moment quickly, but the app takes too long to launch or switch to video recording. Brought to my attention by Ben Brooks, Capture is simply great at what it does: the developers describe it as “a record button for your home screen” and, really, that’s not too far from the truth. Capture starts recording a video as soon as you tap on its (beautiful) icon. You launch the app, and it starts recording after one second. No need to switch to the “video” tab as in Apple’s Camera, no need to wait because, and I don’t know how exactly, Capture is immediately available after you tap on it.

I can see why Capture could become an essential tool for many: by placing the app on the iPhone’s dock, you have quick access to video recording by pressing an icon. This is certainly useful for people who want to “capture” a particular moment in their kids’ life or, overall, users frustrated by the general slowness of Apple’s Camera when it comes to recording a video quickly. For reporters and citizen journalists, Capture might be exactly what they were looking for.

Capture is fast, elegant, lets you activate the iPhone’s Flash but has no support for switching between rear and front facing cameras yet. If you need an app to record video in seconds without waiting, get Capture at $0.99 on the App Store.

The WSJ iPhone App and Negative App Store Reviews→

The WSJ iPhone App and App Store Reviews

Jakob Nielsen at UseIt.com offers an interesting breakdown of the issues behind the design of the WSJ iPhone app’s initial login screen, which is causing customers to leave negative iTunes reviews as they think the newspaper is forcing existing subscribers to pay again to read content on the iPhone. That is not true (subscribers of wsj.com can access the app for free), but according to Nielsen a poorly designed login screen that puts the focus on new subscriptions and registrations, rather than login, is tricking users to believe that existing subscriptions don’t count against iPhone access.

Wildly persistent users might notice the much smaller Log In area at the bottom of the startup screen. However, they’re unlikely to press this button because their experience with the app so far has taught them that they must register (and pay extra) before being allowed to log in.

Those few users who do press Log In will finally see that they can use their existing www.wsj.com credentials to access the app. However, as the many negative App Store reviews attest, few users ever make it this far.

The full report with screenshots of the WSJ iPhone app and proposed mockups to address the issue is available here. Subscriptions and logins for existing subscribers have always presented usability problems for developers of mobile newspapers and magazine apps, struggling to find the best way to promote both new subscriptions and free access for existing, paying customers. Apple wants to improve the process with its native subscription system based on iTunes accounts, and indeed several publications are experimenting with the new APIs provided by Apple to offer web-based login screens that allow for new registrations and iTunes subscriptions, like The New York Times did in its latest app update.

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Ahead Of “Awesome” Launch, Screenshots Show Facebook’s Project Spartan

Last week, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg revealed the company was preparing for an “awesome” launch this week. A formal announcement is expected today at a media event at Facebook HQ, but several blogs in the past few days have claimed Facebook is set unveil a partnership with communication giant Skype (recently acquired by Microsoft) to bring video chats to the social network, an interesting possibility at the light of Google’s new Plus foray into the social sphere, which among other things features a Hangout functionality to start group video chats with multiple contacts at once. TechCrunch, however, seems to believe that Project Spartan, an HTML5-based development and distribution platform that’s being built with Mobile Safari for iOS in mind, won’t be part of the announcements today, which may or may not also include the long-awaited official iPad app, supposedly nearing a public release. Read more