Kevin's Blog

I recently got into a bit of a twitter argument with Dan Frakes of Macworld about apps that have links to web pages and open those pages in their own web viewer within the app, instead of handing the link to mobile Safari (hereafter just called Safari as this is an all iOS discussion) and letting it handle it.

Most apps do this because it became the norm when there was no multitasking on iOS. Switching away from an app meant shutting it down. Reopening it sent you back to the beginning. Apps avoided this 'return to the beginning' by opening web pages in a browser built into the app. It worked around this limitation nicely.

But under iOS 4 when an app supports multitasking it can save its state so when reopened it returns to the same exact state it was left in. This means it can send the user to Safari, and when the user returns they resume right where they left off.

When an app with an internal webview works perfectly the workflow is:

• Click link in app
• webview opens
• read web page
• close app's internal web browser
• return to what I was doing

When an app sends the link to Safari the workflow is:

• Click link in app
• Safari opens, read web page
• Double-click home button, click app icon
• return to what I was doing

That double-click home, then click the app icon is the only complaint about this process I've seen that I think holds any water. More on that later.

So why is opening in links in Safari better than opening web pages in an internal page? Because the internal web browsers randomly break on many web pages, plus many actions I typically do when reading web pages aren't available to me.

The number one broken web site on internal browsers is YouTube. I've yet to see any browser but Safari that can open a YouTube page and have the video actually work. Additionally I've seen many other pages break because the internal web browsers User Agent strings are set to something weird which websites don't identify correctly and then present really broken web pages.

The workflow for working with an app that opens links that won't work with it's internal viewer is:

• Click link in app
• webview opens
• Me: "oh it's a YouTube page" (frequently disguised behind a URL shortner)
• Click button to bring up menu of other options
• click button to send web page to Safari
• watch video
• switch back to app
• close app's internal web browser
• return to what I was doing

For an app that always hands off links to Safari the workflow:

• Click link in app
• Safari opens, watch video
• Double-click home button, click app
• return to what I was doing

One of Dan's points was that with internal webviews context sensitive options are available. In other words when you click a link in a twitter app you're most likely want to do twitter things with that link in the future. This is true occasionally, but far more often because it's a web page I'll want to do many more web things with it than twitter things.

What if I want to make a bookmark to the website so I can read more goodies in the future without waiting for someone to tweet about it? Can't do that with an internal web view, i have to send the link to Safari then bookmark. What if I want to send the link to some other web service? Apps with browsers are pretty good about supporting Instapaper these days, not so good at supporting Read It Later, and pinboard.in support is very rare. But all these are available in my Safari. Future ones not yet invented won't have to wait to get popular enough to be supported by iOS apps, they just need to support Safari and app support is there.

One final pain is when the link is to a website I frequent and when I'm finished I want to comment on the article. But since this isn't Safari I'm not logged in. Now I have either go fetch my password from 1Password in order to login via the internal web page, or send the page over to Safari where I'm already logged in.

Felix Metzger on twitter mentioned that sending links to Safari has the disadvantage that returning to the original app is 3 taps (2 on the home button, one on the app). He's correct, and you'll have to do this every time. My argument is that this is so LESS annoying than randomly having pages not working and then opening them in Safari anyway (frequently requiring 2 or more clicks), that the 3 click return for every link doesn't bother me at all. I already do it for every broken link, plus I have to then additionally close the internal web viewer in the original app -- adding one or two more clicks that wouldn't have been necessary at all.

Sending links to Safari always works (so long as the website itself is in working order). The workflow is consistent every single time, click link, go to safari, read web page, 3 taps to return. Internal web viewers frequently break, I estimate around 10% of the links I get don't work at all and another 10% end up with me opening in safari anyway so I can bookmark or comment or add to pinboard. That means the workflow is sporadic, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. The Mac way has always been to go for the method that "just works". Internal web viewers don't. They should go away.

Full disclosure: I own Apple stock and am a (paying) member of the Apple iOS developers program, although i've no apps in the app store.

Well in typical Apple vague as shit manner they've muddied up the waters of how ebook apps have to work on iOS devices. Apple rejected an app from Sony that, according to Sony was for reading ebooks on iOS devices, specifically books people bought from Sony's ebook store for their Sony ebook readers.

Apple never talks about apps it's rejected, and recommends dev not talk about them either. Probably good advice, it's easy to piss off Apple and hard to un-piss them off after. Sony probably figures they're big enough to get away with it, but Apple really doesn't care how big you are.

Anyway, all we know about the app is what Sony says it submitted, which according to the New York Times story is an app which works just like the Kindle application. The Kindle app has a button labeled "Kindle Store". Pressing that button opens Safari to the Kindle store at Amazon.com. That's it. You can't search for authors or titles in the app, and can't buy anything in the app.

Assuming that's true (and I wouldn't be surprised to find Sony shading the truth somewhat) then it would appear Apple has changed it's policy regarding apps in the app store.

In a clarifying statement (which you just know pissed them off having to issue,) Apple said:

We have not changed our developer terms or guidelines. We are now requiring that if an app offers customers the ability to purchase books outside of the app, that the same option is also available to customers from within the app with in-app purchase.

First they claim they aren't changing terms or guidlines, but their very next statement is "We are now requiring," (emphasis mine) which implies that they weren't previously requiring this and therefore it's a new requirment. Ugh.

"If an app offers the customers the ability to purchase books outside of the app." It doesn't say if the company offers ability to purchase books outside of the app, it says if the app offers customers the ability to purchase books outside of the app. Sounds like the Kindle button is no longer allowed. But really that's just a web link. If you offer a link in your app to someone else's store, such as a link to Baen's ebook store, which has all DRM free books in many formats, or Fictionwise, which has some DRM free books, is that no longer allowed, even if it isn't your store?

What about Amazon's store app? This is separate from the Kindle app. It allows you to search for MP3 downloads, but you can't buy them, only add them to your wishlist for purchase from your computer later. Is this allowed (Apple's statement only references books, but i imagine it applies to all digital content purchases)? If they duplicated this in the Kindle app for books -- searching and browsing but no puchases just wishlists, is that OK? If I were Apple this would irritate me more than the current link to Safari does.

So as a stock holder, what do I think? Overall I think Apple is starting to get just a bit greedy on wanting a cut of every purchase made with an iOS device (I'm sure they're doing this with the near field networking they're setting up for adding to iphones sometime in the future as well, if you want to use it Apple will need a cut.)

Am I selling my stock? Hell no. They've got a ways to go before i reach that point. Besides, I'm not sure any of the interpertations of this are correct. Two sentances from Apple and a story from Sony (I really am not fond of Sony, they are the original "lock it up" device maker, the reason they've never made it in the digital music player market is their initial insistance on using ATRAC only, no support for MP3 at all.)

When Apple can release an app for the Sony e-reader that lets me buy iBooks I'll be more concerned about Sony's welfare on iOS devices.

I've got an original Apple TV, the one that shipped with a hard drive and component TV outputs. I'll be getting the new Apple TV, supposedly on Thursday, that only streams media -- from your own computer or from the internet. I wanted to document my complaints about the existing Apple TV so I can do a comparison of the two systems.

My current Apple TV connects to a 32" HDTV (720p) via HDMI. Sound is via the digital optical cable to my receiver. It's connected to the home network via wire, however my computer is downstairs, and my Apple TV is upstairs. The two locations are joined via a powerline network. I reviewed this setup in TidBITS way back in 2007. TL;DR version is the powerline setup is faster than 802.11g wi-fi and I still don't have 802.11n wireless at home. I'm hoping to connect upstairs and downstairs via an ethernet cable (which would give me a gigabit connection between the two) before the new Apple TV arrives. My internet connection is a 6 Mbps (down) DSL connection from Speakeasy.net (one of the best damn ISPs around, even while being owned by Best Buy).

Back in December I cancelled my cable TV subscription. It cost $60 a month. The digital signals on cable TV were terrible. They had frequent drop-outs where everything would turn completely blocky and the audio would drop out. You can watch a poor analog TV station to a certain degree, espeically if the audio was decent throughout, but on digital even small dropouts are really annoying. This is a huge reason I think downloads are the better solution than streaming, especially over the internet.

Since cancelling my cable the Apple TV has become the dominant way for me to watch and listen to stuff from on my media center. What I previously watched from cable I buy from iTunes. My TiVO records over the air (at better quality than cable provided), but I typically only watch it a few times a week to catch up on shows. I listen to more podcasts than I ever listened to the radio. The Apple TV is on almost all the time that I'm at home.

Despite the continuous use the Apple TV drives me crazy. The interface is poorly thought out (the TiVO interface remains the best media center interface I've used.) Here are the top annoyances I've found with the current Apple TV.

Syncing is flaky

This is a combination of issues with iTunes and the Apple TV. There isn't a way to iniate a sync from the Apple TV side. Just the iTunes side. Even using something like Keyboard Maestro with it's iPhone interface that can be used control iTunes makes it hard to start a sync remotly.

Apple decided to fix this problem by completely doing away with syncing. I'm not convinced this is the answer, but perhaps network streaming from a local machine will be sufficent. I think it might work if the Apple TV can do a wake-on-lan and launch iTunes on the remote computer automatically so it doesn't have to be awake and online all the time.

Slow interface

Navigating menus on the Apple TV can be painful. Reponses to button presses on the remote can take forever to register. With no feedback if a button press was accepted this leads to pushing buttons over and over, and then having them execute all at once.

Opening the My Movies or TV Shows list is slow as it tries to build a screenshot of the first frame of each movie. It doesn't appear to cache any of this data so it's always rebuilding these snapshots. If you add "album art" (the same phrase is used for iTunes music, movies and TV shows) you can stop it from rebuilding these frames all the time.

The single most frustrating behavior to me is when the Apple TV can take 10-30 seconds to resume playback of a long podcast. If I pause playback of a podcast, then press play, the further I am into the podcast the longer the resume takes. Short music tracks don't seem to have this problem, neither do video (video podcasts work fine as well.)

Different remote control behaviors for audio vs. video playback

When playing audio, pressing the forward button once jumps to the next track, pressing it in video playback puts it into fast forward mode. The audio choice makes some sense for music playback, but i'd really prefer the button to do the same thing all the time. And the jump to the next track operation sucks when listening to podcasts and you want ff through a bit of it.

The reverse button changes similarly in video vs. audio playback modes.

Can't rate songs as they play

iTunes has allowed you to rate music with 1-5 stars for many years. You can't rate songs from the Apple TV interface. With the introduction of Ping I'm hoping they allow both star ratings and Ping "likes" from the Apple TV.

Today is August 6th, 2010. The 65th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. In 3 days it will be the 65th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki. Many claim these bombings should not have taken place, or been done in different locations, specifically that a demonstration on an empty island should have been done first. I disagree, I think that these bombings were necessary both to end the at-the-time current conflict, and to provide a warning to future generations exactly what it was we had developed.

I'm not unbiased in my opinion. My father and his family were held in Japanese concentration camps. My grandfather and many of my older uncles were forced into Japanese slave labor, mainly in mining. My grandfather and several uncles died in the mines. I remain convinced that greatly shortening the war saved several of the lives of other family members.

Did the bombings really shorten the war? I think the evidence is pretty clear on this. The Japanese didn’t give up anything without losing a lot of blood over it. Every island in the island hopping strategy was a fierce battle. I think how much worse the battle in the Pacific was is just coming out now, with HBO’s “The Pacific” being a good example.

Six months of continual fire-bombing of 67 Japanese cities had killed 500,000 people, with little apparent result to the Allies. The atomic bombs killed around 123,000 in the first day and 2x total. How many more months and more hundreds of thousands would’ve been necessary to bring the war to a conclusion? Would an invasion by the allies been required, how many lives would that have cost? Great Britain never surrendered to an aerial bombardment alone, would the Japanese have done so?

Would selecting a different target have had less of an impact? Would a demonstration have proved effective? We can never know for sure, but I think the indicators are pretty good that the emotional impact the bombs produced would’ve been greatly diminished.

Many say that more military targets should’ve been selected. World War I and World War II put an end to a clear delineation between military targets and civilian targets. All major cities were housing to military manufacturing centers, ports and rail hubs are vital to the logistics of war. Major military bases are located near cities. Hiroshima had a number of military bases by it, including the headquarters of the army in charge of the defense of southern Japan. Nagasaki was a major military manufacturing center and seaport. I don’t think locations of significant military importance, but not near a civilian city would have worked; they may not have even existed.

Finally, I think there is another aspect to these bombings that is important to consider – their impact on future generations. Serving as a warning to future generations is never a justification for using wepons of mass destruction. But these bombings brought the very real power of them to the forefront. If they hadn’t been used in WW 2, I’m convinced they would’ve been used in a later war – with far more powerful bombs, and with far less true military significance. Demonstrations just aren’t visceral enough for this. The first hydrogen bomb was detonated at Bikini Atoll. This bomb was orders of magnitude larger than the atomic bombs used on Japan. It pretty much wiped out an entire island and produced radioactive contamination over many more islands. Yet when speaking of the dangers of weapons of mass destruction we point to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The dead of Nagasaki and Hiroshima must be honored and remembered. The enormous power and ease of use of our greatest weapons must not be forgotten. But I remain unconvinced there was another or better way of achieving what was needed, as quickly and with a lower cost in lives (on either side).

I'm on my 5th bluetooth headset. Two Motorola something or others, an Etymotic etyBLU which I lost, a Jawbone 2, and now a Plantronics 975.

The Motorola headsets were cheap and adequate. Not spectacular looking and the audio wasn't great. I upgraded to the EtyBLU based on reviews that it was supposed to be the best. It's an in the ear canal model. It also has a removable boom mic combined with its noise supression makes it work really well in noisy conditions. The problem I had with it was its bluetooth connection to my Blackberry was terrible. I couldn't get more than 5 feet away from my phone without completely dropping the connection. Even with it right next to the phone it was fairly poor connection. Then I lost it in an airport.

After that I got a Jawbone 2 pretty cheap on Woot. Initial impressions were favorable. It certainly had a solid connection to my phone. But in actual use I wasn't quite as impressed. It has a switch on the phone called a voice activity sensor, it's supposed to help the headset with noise suppression but i don't think it sat on my jaw correctly and actually caused problems. The button for answering calls was very hard to hit as it is hidden under the surface of the headset, but has no tactile feedback for when your finger is over the button.

Both the Jawbone 2 and the EtyBLU have custom USB chargers. I find this annoying when I travel. I'm always forgetting a cable or two, and needing special cables for each device is a pain.

Now comes the Plantronics 975. I really like this headset. Like the EtyBLU it has a boom mic (permanently attached so I'm not worried about losing it) I don't feel like I have to yell to make sure the mic picks up my voice. The answer button is easily found and activated. The bluetooth connection is solid, I can walk across my living room into the kitchen and not lose signal. The recharger is a standard mini-USB connector. This is the same as my Blackberry so one cable can recharge both.

The ear connection is really nice. I thought it was an in the ear canal model, but it actually has an interesting silicon system that hooks inside the ear lobe and the speaker sits outside the ear canal. I really like this, it doesn't block outside noise nearly as much as the in the canal ones do (this may turn out to be a disadvantage in noisy environments, but my calls so far have been great). Also I seem to have a slight reaction to silicon in my ear. After an hour or so it starts to itch (foam ear tips work better for me, which I switched the EtyBLU to, the Jawbone 2 can't be changed.) The Plantronics starts having a reaction too, but it seems to take 3 or 4 hours. Washing the silicon may help with this as well.

One final thing that really put the Plantronics ahead of the other models for me is the case. It comes with a really nice faux leather case. It's like a small solid box. The box really feels like it'll protect the headset during travel. You dock the headset in the case via the mini-USB and you can charge the headset while it's in the case via a mini-USB connector on the outside of the box.

All well and good, but then reading the instructions I found out the case actually contains an additional battery. When fully charged the internal case battery can charge the headset two more times. That's 15 hours of talk time before needing to find an outlet. Perfect for those long travel days with lots of layovers. This design is really great, and makes it well worth the $100 price ($130 list, I bought mine cheaper via Amazon.)

I'll have a better feel for how the headset itself works for me over the next few calls but so far I'm very impressed with this headset.

I do like the iPad. I think its a new category of device. Fat iPod is a visual description but I think it does the device a disservice. I can't count the number of times I've talked to people that have gone to a dual monitor on their computer. It changes their workflow, they feel more productive, etc.... Technically that's just a fatter computer but it's made them use it in a different way.

I have the same feeling about the iPad. It's a dual screen iPhone and it's going to trigger different uses and workflows. Things you don't even think of until you have it in hand.

Most specifically what the iPad ISN'T is it isn't designed to replace any device you have now. It's not an iPhone replacement (or even an iPod Touch replacement). It's not a laptop replacement. I've even seen it said that it'll fail because it doesn't replace an XBox. Well duh it's not an XBox. Neither is a netbook, neither is a laptop, neither is a Mac Pro.

I think everything left out that people complain about was left out on purpose because it actually made the product worse. Given that the original iPhone was called the Safari Pad (http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2008/03/safari-pad-tech-used-to-create-iphone.ars) it's obvious Apple has been working on this for a long time. My guess is they made lots and lots of prototypes and tried them extensively and if it was awkward or not working, out it went.

The use case I see for this is when you are sitting down. Recliner, couch, airplane seat, less so an office chair (unless next to the monitor of your "real" computer). iPad will spend most of it's time in your hands. Next most common will be propped up (probably by the case), the dock less than that (I'm sure there are people that will dock it with the keyboard and leave it that 24/7 but I think this will be rare outside the blogging/writer adopters.)

I also think this device will be left at home far more than smaller devices. I'll leave it on the arm of the couch when I go to work. Unless it works alot better for taking notes from the virtual keyboard then I'm picturing, I don't think i'll take to meetings with me (I do take notes on my iPod Touch). When I travel I definitely take it. For business travel I'll take it WITH my work laptop, not instead of. For personal travel I think it will be sufficient on it's own. At the bar, restaurant, bathroom I still use my iPod Touch.

Most common complaints I see are:

• No phone - duh, it's a 10" device. You don't want to put this up to your face (by the way, I believe VOIP will work on the device.)
• No back facing camera for taking pictures. Really? You want to pull out a 10" device to take pictures. Give me a break. Your phone is faster and more portable.
• No foward facing camera. I thought about this one for awhile. On the surface it makes sense for things like iChat and Skype, but think about my use cases. If the most common use case is sitting down with the iPad in your hand, it's going to be in your lap. A camera would be angled straight up your nose. Even if you're tilting your head down the angle makes your head look huge. Next use case is propped up on a table. In landscape mode the camera would point at your chest (unless you angle it back more, then you're back to up the nose.) Portrait mode, on a dock might work, but unless you're very short I think this camera would shoot. your chin. To me a video chat works best with the camera at eye level. Which is a rare position for the iPad.
• USB/firewire/HDMI - I don't want cables dangling all around me on the couch. The camera connection adds a USB to connect a camera will be curious to see how useful this is.
• No 1080p - duh, the device is 10". 1080p at 10" is stupid waste of disk space, and you're already limited to at most 64 GB on
• Only up to 64GB memory - it's thin and cheapish device. More memory is expensive, and the device has to be thicker, and heavier. This one will change over time. I'll never argue against more space (my iTunes library is over 500 GB, so the more I can put on a portable the happier I am).
• No tethering from iPad to iPhone - this would be nice to avoid another data charge. I'm hoping for a wifi tethering mode in a future iPhone OS (similar to mifi functionality.) I'm guessing this was more a carrier decision than an Apple decision. I'd also like to tether to the iPad if it has 3G.

So what I see is Apple has come up with a nice device that supplements your other devices. It isn't designed to replace any of them, especially not combinations of them. Apple wants to sell lots of devices so their design is specifically set to be an additional device, not a replacement for existing ones. I can clearly see a use for Computer, iPhone/iPod Touch, and an iPad as a group of devices. Those whining it isn't awesome because it doesn't let them dump their existing devices don't know what they're talking about.

Got into a debate about the future of the Mac Pro on twitter. I believe this all started from an article Ted Landau wrote for Mac Observer

I haven't read the whole thing but that hasn't stopped me before. Here's what I think it would take for the iMac to be able to replace the Mac Pro. Do I think this is likely? Not really, I do think it's got an outside possibility of occuring. I'd give it about 30% chance of happening in 5 years. Also note that I do assume both lines will continue to be updated.

So, the Mac Pro has several advantages over the iMac. Most of them would have to be overcome for the iMac line to bypass the Mac Pro.

1. Multiple cores

   Currently the Mac Pro maxes out at 4 core Xeon (the Xeon means it's capable of hyper threading where each core can act as 2 cores, effectively making the current Mac Pro an 8 core system). The next update will probably double this.

   iMac matches the current Mac Pro. Top end iMac is a 4-core i7 which has hyper threading. Will the next iMac update be able to match the Mac Pro's next update again? My guess is yes, in a year. but the real question is: does continually throwing cores at your software scale linearly or is there a point where no additional processors will improve your speed. My guess is there is a maximum but it's probably more limited by drive speed than anything else. 128 core processes seeking to store their work on the same drives simultaneously will probably choke waiting for drives, while 2 64 core processor machines (with separate drive systems) complete the same task faster.

   This is going to come down to the nature of the work. Fortunately for the Mac Pro, it's primary use in video and science research are easily parallelized on to multiple processors. It may be a lot of iterations of processor upgrades before the a peak is hit on these systems.

2. Maximum RAM In 2006 the differential between max memory in the iMac line and the Mac Pro line was 16x (iMac - 2GB, Mac Pro - 32 GB). Today it stands at 2x, and after the next Mac Pro update will probably be 4x. It appears the iMac is closing in on the Mac Pro. If the next update jumps to a 128GB max instead of 64GB, then it may be able to keep it's advantage a lot longer.

3. Maximum video displays iMac is at 2, Mac Pro is at 8. Will future upgrades add more to the iMac, will users demand more than 8 on a single computer? This is will be doable in the near future and mostly comes down to: Apple will do it if they really want to replace the Mac Pro line with an iMac Pro line instead (and if Apple wants to do this is completely up to Apple, who hasn't asked me.)

4. Maximum drive space The only way the iMac can compete here is if there is some new external bus speed, faster than eSATA and Firewire 800, that enable the iMac to access an expansion system faster than an internal system. Rumors abound Apple will be going to the Light Peak interface, replacing all Firewire and USB connections, but Apple rumors gather like flies and are about as reliable. I think a new external bus sufficient to overcome current internal drive speeds is likely, but 1 year, 2 years, 10 years?

   Also this assumes there won't be some new internal bus system that is far superior than the internal. I actually think this will be true. SATA/eSATA point to systems going to the same bus technology internal/external and I think that will continue.

5. Specialty expansion cards Want fiber channel cards or speciality rendering cards? Mac Pro is your only hope. Only 2 ways an iMac could over come this: some brand new, super fast, not even rumored, external card system comes along (express card is insufficient), or the iMac gains so many processors that dedicating them to some of these speciality tasks is a no brainer.

   We'll probably see some advances to express card, but not enough to overcome internal slot advances. Only hope here is for the the need of speciality cards to be reduced via additional processors, more memory and

6. Heat dissipation

   When you have a big open volume of space and lots of fans you can run things hotter. Which means they can either run faster or you can run more of them. Rejiggering the case a bit to make it bigger (something Apple hates doing, they much prefer going smaller) might help. That might lead to a product line like the laptops, where MacBooks are the small ones and MacBook Pro are the big. iMac and iMac Pro, with the iMac Pro form factor being slightly larger.

   Better power dissipation and higher efficiencies help as well, but that just lets you pack more in the larger case too. Moving to an internal SSD hard drive,with the large capacity drives being stored external would be a benefit. Assuming the SSD drive capacities expand as expected (pretty likely.)

So after all this, the summary -- the only real hope for the iMac to overcome the Mac Pro is if there is a point where the hardware is so ahead of the software that throwing more cores at it won't help, and new technologies come out that the advantage of external vs. internal is significantly reduced.

Likely? As I said, not really. Possible? Yeah, a faint possibility.

Mac rumor site Think Secret recently shutdown as part of an agreement with Apple. Apple sued Think Secret on January 5, 2005 after they published rumors about Apple’s plans to announce the iPod mini at the 2005 Macworld. Think Secret wasn’t the only rumor site at the time publishing rumors about Apple’s announcements, but Apple sued them to get the names of those that had leaked the information, and no one else, before actually making their announcments. This of course immediately lent credence to all of Think Secret’s claims, including claims that were wrong (such as price).

Many people have ventured opinions on the news, some claiming victory for Apple, some claiming Apple is a bully, others expressing disappointment in Nick Ciarelli (Think Secret’s publisher) for seemingly caving in to Apple and “damaging” the First Amendment.

I think both opinions are wrong. First, we don’t know the full extent of the agreement. All we know is Think Secret is shut down and Apple failed to get the names of those that disclosed information to Ciarelli. No information on if Ciarelli is prevented from stating another site, or working for another site. No information on if Apple paid Ciarelli any money.

I don’t think any damage was done to the First Amendment. This never went to court and no precendence setting decisions were rendered. You can’t cite agreements of this sort in a legal brief. So the First Amendment is where it was before the case began. The only precendence that might be claimed is that after 3 years a college student might get sick of a court case getting in the way of his studies.

Apple didn’t set any new claims for what is a trade secret. I’m not sure the information Ciarelli published could be considered a trade secret. The report simply stated: “Reliable sources inside and outside of Apple have confirmed Apple will announce the new pocket-size iPods in a number of capacities and in various colors, including stripes. Capacities will be 2 and 4GB — meaning users could store some 400 and 800 songs, respectively. Prices will start at around $100US”

David Zeiler at the Baltimore Sun believes Think Secret violated trade secret law because Ciarelli received information (citing the trade secret law) “knowing the same to have been stolen or appropriated, obtained, or converted without authorization”. The problem is that Zeiler doesn’t examine what a trade secret is. The law defines a trade secret as:

(3) the term "trade secret" means all forms and types of financial,
business, scientific, technical, economic, or engineering information,
including patterns, plans, compilations, program devices, formulas,
designs, prototypes, methods, techniques, processes, procedures,
programs, or codes, whether tangible or intangible, and whether or how
stored, compiled, or memorialized physically, electronically,
graphically, photographically, or in writing if?
    (A) the owner thereof has taken reasonable measures to keep such
information secret; and
    (B) the information derives independent economic value, actual or
potential, from not being generally known to, and not being readily
ascertainable through proper means by, the public;

So is what Think Secret published a trade secret? I don’t think so. Part of it was finanical information, but that information was WRONG? So is wrong information a trade secret? I don’t think so, it might be harmful to Apple, but not a trade secret.

Part of it could be considered technical information, it mentions 2GB and 4GB sizes, but does this information “derive independent economic value, actual or potential, from not being generally known to…the public”?

Adam Engst contends that rumor information can be harmful to Apple by causing Apple customers to delay purchasing items. The problem is that close followers of Apple already KNOW Apple announces new products at Macworld and are waiting for that anyway. Personally I doubt those that aren’t close followers of Apple would be following Apple rumor sites, so I don’t see how they would even know to delay their purchase. At least not until Apple sued a rumor site and brought it to national attention.

Basically in the end I don’t think Apple or Ciarelli think they had an open and shut case and that is why they compromised. There are probably tangential reasons for the decisions on both sides for deciding to settle. I don’t see the First Amendment as being harmed in any way, it certainly has slowed down the flow of Apple rumors. Apple does come out looking like a bit of a bully, but it would’ve been even worse if they’d continued the law suit. I actually think Apple did the most harm to itself by filing the lawsuit to begin with, and then even worse by filing before Macworld commenced making everyone believe all the rumors Think Secret posted, including the wrong $100 price point.

More updating of the site. I’m still goofing around with the RSS Feeds section. There were some things I didn’t like about the old one. I like the new one a bit better, but I think I need to tweak it a bit more.

I’ve also setup a gallery for photos I’ve taken. Currently I’ve got some images from my trip to New Orleans and pictures of my cats. Thrilling stuff.

Kevin’s Photos