Tune Hunter Sues Everyone

Apple Insider reports:

The 8-page complaint, filed Tuesday by Tune Hunter, Inc. in the patent litigation-friendly Marshall Division of Texas, broadly alleges that nearly a dozen tech companies are contributing to infringement of is US patent No. 6,941,275 for a “Music identification system” granted in September of 2005.

Companies named in the suit: Apple, AT&T, Amazon, Samsung, Napster, Motorola, Gracenote, LG Electronics, Pantech Wireless, and Cellco Partnership (doing business as Verizon Wireless).

I’m sorry, but suing Amazon because Shazam links to it seriously damages your credibility.

Tweetie: One week later. Almost.

One week (er, four days) ago myself and pretty much everyone else on the internet were all talking about the just released Tweetie for Mac. I’ve been using it for Twitter all week (aside from using TwitterFon on my iPhone), and I have to say . . . it’s pretty awesome. It’s not perfect, but I think creator Loren Brichter is more concerned with “the perfect balance between power and simplicity“.

That being said, there are a few adjustments that I’d love to see that I feel fall in line with that goal:

1. The mechanism for adding tweets seems like an afterthought – it’s a tiny button in the bottom left corner of the window. I agree with LessEverything’s Allan Branch that it would be better pegged to the top like it is on Twitter’s web interface. I’d be fine with it being minimized by default, but either way would be an upgrade for me.
2. I also agree with Jeffrey Zeldman that the default setting for Retweeting “(via @user)” (or reposting as Tweetie refers to it) is not as ideal as “RT” (in fairness Allan also had the same complaint). Using six characters when you could use two seems like a bad idea when every character counts. Allan also complains about the fact that it comes at the end of the post, and I concur. My preferred syntax goes comment, RT, @user, retweeted content. I think it might be nice, though probably not ideal from an interface perspective, if we could specify our preferred syntax.
3. I find it annoying that mentions that I have already viewed in my main timeline still show as unviewed in my main timeline. I also wouldn’t mind if I didn’t have to view duplicate tweets across multiple accounts to have them marked as viewed, but that is a tiny, niggling concern.
4. Lastly, more of an observation, the ads by Fusion are so attractive and well-targeted that I feel disincentivized to actually register Tweetie for Mac. Loren actually said, “Many people mentioned that they registered Tweetie but then opted to keep the ads on anyway”.  I don’t mind this a bit, and I think it makes me far more likely to pick up Tweetie for my iPhone in the near future.

Tweetie for Mac is great, and you’re a chump if you’re using anything else. I’m sure that Loren is completely inundated with many similar requests, and I look forward to every future update of this stellar app. For everything that I’d like to see improved there are several features that I just love, and that is a very promising start.

Q1 2009: Apple vs. Microsoft

Just over one month ago, Steve Baller famously said:

Apple gained about one point, but now I think the tide has really turned back the other direction. The economy is helpful. Paying an extra $500 for a computer in this environment — same piece of hardware — paying $500 more to get a logo on it? I think that’s a more challenging proposition for the average person than it used to be.

I wonder what he has to say now that Apple has reported the “Best March Quarter Revenue and Earnings in Apple History” while Microsoft reported their “first revenue drop since going public in 1986″.

OPTi wins $19 million from Apple in patent lawsuit

Apple Insider reports on a rare patent infringement defeat for Apple.

Begun in January 2007, the lawsuit is a classic example of a firm suing based on very broadly worded patents designed to catch out and collect royalties from as many firms as possible, regardless of whether they were actually aware of the patent. OPTi had filed a similar suit against AMD despite its making processors Apple and other companies don’t use; it also dropped all of its original manufacturing and sales businesses in 2003 to concentrate on its lawsuits as a primary source of income.

Safari to add a mute button?

Apple Insider reports on an Apple patent filing that details methods and controls for muting websites that “thrust undesired audio playback into the browsing experience”.

When a user browses [a website], various audio signals may be presented in the browser application. These audio signals can be music, advertising jingles, noises, sound effects, speech, etc,” Apple explains. “Concurrently, the user may be listening to music from the user’s personal music library. In some cases, audio signals from audio sources may interfere with the listening enjoyment of the user.

Sign me up.