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.

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.

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″.

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.

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.

Today, there is a new video replete with cognoscenti extolling the virtues of Birdhouse.

No matter what you feel about the app itself, you have to hand it to these guys when it comes to their marketing.

NetNewsWire is the best way I’ve seen to get your feeds on your Mac, online, and your iPhone. 

Quick tip for new users: plug ins are disabled by default so if you want to view that YouTube video you’ll need to enable them in preferences.

He’d already tried everything I could think of off the top of my head so it remained a mystery.

A few days later he told me that he’d figured it out. Turns out you are only allowed nine pages of apps on your iPhone, and he’d filled it up. Nine pages with sixteen apps apiece makes 144 total. No wonder I couldn’t help.

Specifying criteria in the Spotlight search field

When you enter the text you want to search for in a Spotlight search field, you can also include criteria to refine the results as Spotlight searches. You can search by phrase or by metadata (data that describes other data) attribute, and perform Boolean queries. You can specify absolute dates and a range of values.

Here are ways to specify search criteria:

■ Phrase

Use quotation marks around text to search for exact phrases — the same way you do with most Internet searches. For example, enter “trip to France” in the search field to find items on your computer that contain that exact phrase. If you didn’t use quotes, the search results would include items that contain any of those words.

■ Attribute

Most items contain metadata that describes the item contents, how it was created, and other attributes. For example, when you take a digital photo, information such as the camera model, the aperture, and the focal length are among the many attributes automatically stored in the file as metadata. Here are examples of what you might type in the search field when you search using metadata attributes:

trip kind:document searches for the word “trip” in documents only

author:tom searches for all items written by Tom

meeting date:tomorrow searches for meetings you have planned for tomorrow

kind:images created:5/16/07 searches for images created on a specific date

kind:music by:”glenn miller” searches for music by Glenn Miller

modified:<=6/29/07 searches for items modified on or before a specific date

■ Boolean query

A Boolean query is a search that uses AND, OR, and NOT (known as Boolean operators) to narrow results. You can also use a dash (-), meaning AND NOT, to exclude items when you search. Here are examples of what you might type in the search field when you search using Boolean operators:

author:tom OR author:thom searches for items authored by Tom or Thom, in case you don’t know the exact spelling of his name

trip -france searches for items that contain the word “trip” but not “france,” so results might include photos from a trip to Spain but not to France

kind:message date:6/29/07-7/25/07 NOT date:7/14/07 searches for email messages dated from 6/29/07 through 7/25/07, but excludes those dated 7/14/07

To view metadata for a file, Control-click the file in the Finder and choose Get Info from the pop-up menu.

Personally I find the kind attribute indispensable for quickly cutting down the results when I know I’m looking for a folder, video, or what have you. Enjoy!