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Court Denies Samsung Request To See iPhone 5 and iPad 3, Lodsys Asks For Extension To Reply To Apple’s Motion

You may recall that in the current legal battle between Apple and Samsung, Samsung had demanded Apple hand over the iPhone 5 and iPad 3 (or the newest prototypes). Samsung claimed, when it demanded these products, that it was equal to Apple’s claim to getting early access to Samsung products (although they had been previously revealed and put on pre-order). Apple amended its complaint with Samsung last Thursday and after reviewing that, Judge Lucy Koh yesterday made her decision regarding Samsung’s request for early access to the iPhone 5 and iPad 3 and denied it.

As FOSS Patents explains, the reasoning Judge Koh effectively gave was that “Apple’s request for expedited discovery was far more justified and far less prejudicial”. Going into more depth on this, Apple had required early access to Samsung products because it needed to evaluate whether or not to include them in their complaint. In addition, Samsung’s products were already circulating and details were known about them, unlike the iPhone 5 and iPad 3 which have not been revealed in any manner.

The judge made a lot of effort in her 11-page order to explain that Samsung is entitled to “parity” but its motion was overreaching in this case.

However, it wasn’t all good news for Apple, with the Judge potentially suggesting that Apple’s request for a preliminary injunction on certain Samsung products may be delayed or denied.

Instead, it may be necessary for the court to evaluate such a motion against the background of the iPhone 5 (as far as any Samsung phones are concerned) and the iPad 3 (as far as any Samsung tablet computers are concerned), whenever Apple is in a position to present those products.

In other (related) news, Lodsys has asked for a two-month extension to respond to Apple’s motion to intervene. They had been required to respond by next Monday (June 27) by they’re asking the court for a two-month extension until August 27 to respond. Although it will effectively delay proceedings, Lodsys claims that it is “not for purposes of delay” and furthermore states that they have conferred with Apple’s counsels – who apparently do not oppose the extension.

The request does have to be approved by the court, but the court can choose a length less than requested, say just one month instead of two. Despite this, Lodsys is continuing to issue patent infringements to various developers, with a large number of Android developers receiving notices yesterday.

[Via FOSS Patents (1) (2)]

Wren for Mac: Tweet Without Distraction

Many of us live in the Twitter world. We use it for breaking news, short conversations, giving input or sharing links with friends. It’s all about comradery one-hundred and forty characters at a time. Social networking is an important aspect of life these days but there are times that we need to detach our brains from the newest iPhone 5 rumors or who @CodyFink was seen with in South Beach last weekend. For those times we need only to tweet without distractions, there is Wren.

Wren is the hatchling of designer Andrew Ramos and developer Kevin Smith. This Mac app lets you tweet without losing focus on the task at hand. Like blinders for your workday and like a librarian for your Twitter experience, Wren lets you tweet without distraction. Wren isn’t a feature-filled Twitter client; it will let you tweet (of course), save drafts for later tweeting, let you use your favorite link shortening service, auto-complete usernames of people that you follow, show and hide app with customizable global keyboard shortcut, and quickly see what and when you last tweeted.

Wren has been beautifully designed with soft, subtle colors and great attention to detail; from the notebook styled composition area to the URL shortener glyph, one can tell that the team took their time to design a great app. The reason Andrew and Kevin made Wren was to avoid distraction and not lose productivity. Turning off Twitter for a few days is great for productivity, but there’s no way to tweet what’s being worked on or funny overheards (OH:) without opening a full-featured Twitter app. Wren is a great way to tweet without seeing your timeline, especially those of us who follow over 500 accounts (like me).

The app is available now in the Mac App Store for $4.99, and the guys even created a really nice video explaining why they created Wren, which you can check out after the break.
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The MacStories Productivity Giveaway

The great thing about working at MacStories is we get exposed to a ton of brilliant applications that solidify our workflows and give us different perspectives on how to get things done. All of us have various tools that work for us, and just as we like to share our findings we occasionally tussle over our tools of choice. Any of us could get by with just the basics, but the Mac is made so much better when you come to appreciate and enjoy all the great software that’s available to us. The four of us working at MacStories put our heads together and picked out five of our favorite applications to share with you guys in hopes of loading up your summer Macs with a great selection of productive software. As you can see in the banner, we have a great lineup we’d love to share with you.

Reeder for the Mac (Up to 5 winners): Certainly we have the occasional NNW vs. Reeder clash behind the scenes, but all of us agree that Reeder is something really special for the Mac. It takes your RSS feeds and puts them in a beautiful interface that can be as minimal or expanded as you need it to be, and it works fluidly with gestures on newer Macs. My favorite feature: Readability works extremely well with linked posts, formatting the original article for Reeder without distracting web nonsense. If you love it for the iPad and iPhone, Reeder for Mac is a must have.

Notefile for iOS (Up to 3 winners): When it comes down to it, we just want an easy way to sync notes, reminders, and to-do lists between our Macs and iOS devices. Dropbox is nice, but it’s not as automatic as Junecloud’s Notefile. You’d think it already had iCloud support, pulling down your most recent notes from the Dashboard widget or onto your iPhone. We think this is a great replacement for Apple’s Notes, and we absolutely love how simple Notefile is in its entirety.

Alfred Powerpack for Mac (Up to 3 winners): Alfred is really fantastic for Mac users who want to take it to the next level. If you’re looking for an edge in productivity, Alfred is a swiss-army knife that’ll launch documents, recall snippets from the clipboard, and call on apps with a few simple keystrokes. Search Amazon, Google, Wikipedia, and the IMDb right from your desktop. Alfred is free to download, but the Powerpack adds file system navigation, clipboard history, terminal control, an iTunes remote, and email integration to the already powerful launcher.

Fantastical for Mac (Up to 5 winners): Fantastical is the iCal companion that makes it easy to manage your schedule of meetings, client reviews, and other events through plain english. If you wanted to meet me at Brian’s Bar and Grill at four o’clock on Saturday, you could totally just type that in… and it’d just work. Fantastical is amazing.

Courier for Mac (Up to 5 winners): Productivity doesn’t always have to extend into the workplace. We’re always looking for better ways to get files online, and Courier for the Mac allows us to do just that. Simply drag and drop pictures and movies to upload them to your personal accounts such as Facebook and Flickr — web interfaces are a thing of the past.

We’re giving out a total of twenty one apps to twenty one lucky winners, and we want to thank all of the developers for hooking us up and helping us give you guys some great software. For your chance to win one of these great apps, you’ll need to check out the giveaway rules past the break!

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Rovio Teases “Summer Pignic” Angry Birds Seasons Update

With a new video posted on their official YouTube channel, Rovio has announced an upcoming update for Angry Birds Seasons for iOS, Android, Mac and PC dubbed “Summer Pignic”. In what it appears to be an update that will add new levels to the existing game, Rovio says the new version will be released “soon”, this Summer. Which means any day from now until September – following Rovio’s tradition of teasing updates with a few days in advance, we wouldn’t be surprised to see Summer Pignic dropping as early as next week.

You can find Angry Birds Seasons with free versions on the App Store [iPhone, iPad] or paid apps for both iOS devices [iPhone, HD version]. As far as summer releases go, Rovio had already announced it would finally flip the switch on the Angry Birds Sync platform to keep game data and progress synchronized between devices and platforms (though it’s likely they’re now considering iCloud for that) and “new Angry Birds games”. Check out the video below.

Update 06/22: The “Summer Pignic” update for Angry Birds Seasons is now available on the App Store. Download the new version here: iPhone, iPad
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DaisyDisk Update Brings Gestures, Faster Volume Scans

DaisyDisk, the beautiful disk analyzer tool for Mac we’ve reviewed a couple of times here on MacStories, received a minor version number update today (2.0.7) that, however, brings some welcome new functionalities to the app, making it an even better solution for those users in need of a simple yet powerful way to see what’s eating space on a Mac. For those who missed our previous DaisyDisk coverage, this app allows you to generate a visual map for your Mac’s drives and partitions, enabling you to explore the contents of your filesystem with ease to see what folders and files are consuming space. The bigger the section, the bigger the file. DaisyDisk lets you collect items to delete, open enclosing folders in the Finder for a manual deletion process, or simply browse around to get some knowledge on, say, those iTunes backup files that are wasting 10 GBs.

Among the new features in today’s update, the possibility of starring folders (marking them as favorites) should ease the process of navigating to a recurring location. But what I’ve noticed on my iMac with multiple volumes and partitions is another feature: DaisyDisk now comes with improved support for multiple scans at once, reducing hardware load and improving scan speeds. It’s really, really fast even on a non-SSD machine. When you’re done scanning and you want to open a map, but then you want to go back to the volume list, a new 3-finger swipe gesture lets you do just that in seconds. Other new features include:

  • Hidden disk space detector
  • Volumes of the same disk are now visually grouped together
  • Improved disk/volume descriptions
  • Eject volumes, not disks
  • Fixed UI lag on directories with tens of thousand files
  • For terabyte disks, free and used space is displayed in GB

Daisy Disk 2.0.7 is available now on the developers’ website, and the new version has been submitted ti Apple for App Store approval. You can download the app here and receive the update for free once it comes out.

Apple Set To Renovate Retail Stores In Hawaii And Miami

Over the past few months a couple of Apple retail stores have begun to go under renovation, including the flagship Fifth Avenue Store in New York. Two reports today are saying that the Hawaii Ala Moana store and the Miami Lincoln Road store are set to undergo renovations sometime in the near future.

ifoAppleStore is reporting that the Hawaii store, whilst it is being renovated, will be moved to a temporary location just a few doors down. That temporary store will open sometime this week but will be much smaller than the current store – which is already quite busy. It isn’t known what the exact renovation plans are but the expected cost is $250,000.

Meanwhile MacNN notes that Apple recently had to retract a proposal to demolish their Lincoln Road Apple Store and move into another nearby building after the Historic Preservation Board rejected Apple’s plans. The Historic Preservation board had wanted the new building to match more closely to the architecture of the surrounding region as well as being smaller. It’s unlikely that this means Apple will give up on Miami renovation plans, instead they will probably rethink their design plans or find a more appropriate location.

[ifoAppleStore and MacNN via TUAW]

Final Cut Pro X Hands-On Video and Software Updates

Following this morning’s release of Final Cut Pro X, Motion 5 and Compressor 4 in the Mac App Store,  YouTube user Matt’s Macintosh has posted a first 10-minute video hands-on with FCP X, available at $299 as digital-only download. The video, which we’re embedding after the break, highlights some of Final Cut Pro’s new functionalities such as the revamped iMovie-like UI, magnetic timeline, new effects, as well as the additional content Apple has already made available for FCP X users via Software Update. Furthermore, the author of the video notes how real-time rendering allows to import, edit and play clips in seconds without any waiting as in the previous versions, and how text effects look like a combination of iMovie (undoubtedly a source of inspiration for the FCP X team) and Motion.

Check out the video below.

Update: direct links to the additional content download mentioned in the video:

Final Cut Pro X Content

  • Sound Effects: Over 1300 rights-free sound effects installed into the Audio Browser of Final Cut Pro X.
  • Audio Effect Presets: Additional preset effects for the Space Designer plug-in.

Motion 5 Content

  • Motion Templates: A variety of professionally-designed, customizable templates.
  • Motion Library Content: Animated vector graphics, backgrounds, template media, sample Motion projects, and royalty-free still images.
  • Motion Sample Media: Clips and images for use with Motion Help examples and tutorials.

ProApps QuickTime Codecs

  • Apple Intermediate Codec
  • Apple ProRes
  • AVC-Intra
  • DVCPRO HD
  • HDV
  • XDCAM HD / EX / HD422
  • MPEG IMX
  • Uncompressed 4:2:2

Apple has also published a database of cameras compatible with Final Cut Pro X here with the following notes:

  • Final Cut Pro X is compatible with iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad 2, and iPod touch (4th generation).
  • Final Cut Pro X is compatible with most MiniDV tape-based camcorders using DV and HDV formats, which use a FireWire (also known as IEEE 1394 or i.LINK) cable to transfer video.
  • If you have imported video into iPhoto or Aperture from a digital still camera, you can drag compatible video clips from iPhoto or Aperture directly to an Event in the Final Cut Pro X Event Library or a project in the Timeline.

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Terminology 2.0 Released, Improves UI and App Integration

Terminology, the dictionary & thesaurus app for iPhone and iPad that was recently integrated with Mr. Reader and Instapaper, got a major update on both platforms earlier today, reaching version 2.0 and adding a number of features aimed at enhancing and better integrating the Terminology experience with third-party apps, and online services. First off, Terminology 2.0 comes with a rewritten user interface that doesn’t look different from the previous version, but brings performance improvements and faster response times that should make browsing through words and definitions even faster than before. Terminology has always been a lightweight app with an elegant UI and very little clutter, yet this new update wants to make things more stable and streamlined.

For example, the rewritten user interface allows you to pick different font and choose different font sizes. The selection includes Baskerville, Cochin, Georgia, Palatino and Helvetica Neue fonts, and can be made from a little popover menu in the bottom left corner. Alongside other minor improvements and the possibility of automatically getting results for clipboard contents, Terminology 2.0 shines when it comes to integration with apps and web services: for instance, you can activate links that will bring you to Twitterrific or Wikipedia client Articles (if installed), or open the selected word in Terminology’s companion website term.ly, which, by the way, looks really neat.

Articles support is very useful as well in the way it looks up the closest word to Terminology’s definition – example: “inherently” looked up as “inherence” on Wikipedia.

Terminology 2.0 is a free update for existing customers and can be downloaded at $2.99 here in its iPad version, or here if you prefer the smaller iPhone counterpart. Highly recommended – read our original Terminology review here.