I can't has cheezburger

There have been a lot of mixed opinions on the interwebs about the outcome of the Apple/Samsung trial. While many see it as a great win for originality and inventing your own stuff, others see it instead as an affirmation of a broken patent system. 

Looking at the facts and with my understanding of patent law (which is probably about as extensive as that of the jurors in this case), it’s clear that Apple should have been victorious here and rightfully won. That being said, I don’t think such patent laws should exist, and I don’t think this case is really going to benefit anyone except maybe Apple shareholders.

If you look at some of the things Samsung was doing that copied Apple, you see at first glance some egregious copying of designs. Sure, Samsung’s butthurt response made a smart ass remark about rounded rectangles. Perhaps they are referring to the rounded rectangle shape of these? 

Or maybe these were the rounded rectangles you were referring to?

I mean, come on, Samsung. Yes, it’s possible the jury took liberties with its verdict and found Samsung to be guilty of infringing more than it really did. But there are many examples of some very egregious ripoffs of Apple’s design, and such flagrant ripoffs should probably be punished in some way.

However, I still believe the patent system is broken and it fails to take into account that even if you have an idea and maybe you stole it, implementation is hard and that is just as true in technology as it is in other places. Maybe copying a book is an easy implementation, or perhaps seeing a new brake design on a car is easy to implement a copy of once you’ve seen it, and the patent system is meant to protect things that took perhaps a lot of effort to design, but once done are very easy to copy. 

But electronics hardware and software just aren’t like that. Although it is possible to make a device that looks uncannily like an iPhone at first glance (regardless of whether your goal was to trick the customer into thinking they were buying an iPhone), it surely won’t take long for you to start using it and realize that it’s no Apple device, unless maybe you’ve never used an Apple device before. Maybe that’s Samsung’s target market?

But implementing something is hard work. Even if Samsung managed to design a product that looked pixel-for-pixel like iOS and had all the same little effects and behaviors that make up iOS’s iconic design, I still think Samsung would deserve any success they got from it. Long term, the people making the best products will be the most successful. 

Yes, Apple will say that once you see a great design, it will always seem obvious in hindsight. That’s why before iPhone was created, smartphones all looked like crap, and after iPhone, they all started looking more like the iPhone.  And Apple lawyers will say “See? See?” But Apple themselves are notorious for stealing great ideas and incorporating them into their own products. Was the GUI invented by Apple? Nope. Was high speed networking invented by Apple? Nope. Was the concept of having workgroups of interconnected computers and shared resources invented by them? Nope. Was the concept of keeping your data in a cloud invented by them? Also nope. Those ideas all can be credited to Xerox PARC. Xerox’s prototypes of these were probably a lot worse than what Apple landed on, but Apple wouldn’t have been able to even land on them had Xerox patented this stuff and been more litigious. 

When ideas can freely compete with each other on their own merit, everybody wins, and especially consumers win. So what if Samsung wants to make things that superficially look like iPhone? Their customers will largely either end up using iOS in their next contract because they had a bad experience with Android or they’ll just stick with it because it’s not Apple and they’d rather have a bad experience than use something that came from Apple. And so what if Samsung copied an idea of Apple’s? Apple still came up with it first and while Samsung is playing catch-up, Apple will always be on their next great thing.

What’s going to happen here is Samsung’s going to continue to talk to the public like the entire debate was on rounded rectangles (give me a break) and now they’re going to start to get lawyers involved in the product design process. Is that going to make their product better in any way? Nope, it’s just going to help their product not get them sued. What Samsung should be focusing on is making a user experience that is innovative in ways totally different from what iOS is doing (Windows phone comes to mind but there are other great ideas too). Samsung doesn’t respect their users enough to actually do it the hard way, so they’ll just look at key offending components that are infringing sand them down and make them worse just enough to make the product follow the letter of the law. 

Apple’s going to take the $1 billion (or probably less after Samsung appeals and pisses and moans about how it’s unfair) and throw it into their giant vat of money and feel vindicated from that time when they unsuccessfully sued Microsoft in the 90s for stealing a lot of Mac OS’s design language. Was Apple ever really damaged by what Samsung did? I doubt it. They’re already more profitable than Samsung. For many quarters the thing holding Apple back from selling more iDevices has been their own production capacity. 

Could there be a happy medium some day? I hope so. I’d love to see a situation where Apple openly licenses use of some patents or technologies to Samsung for a price on the condition that the user experience on those parts of the phone are as great as can be, and I’d like to see Samsung in turn try more new things and take mobile UIs in different directions that in retrospect might seem obvious. 

Peace out. Namaste.

The term “hacking” is for sure one of the more misunderstood terms in internet parlance. It seems as of late a lot of people think of it as someone breaking into a system or someone’s account in a system, regardless of whether it was a password guess or if it actually involved breaking the system’s own security.

There’s a far more obnoxious misuse of the term that’s been making its way into startup and internet culture. Have a look at this made up but inspired by real life exchange:

BOSS: Hey, what’s going on, bro?

BROGRAMMER: Not much, man, just hacking away.

BOSS: Oh, yeah? What are you hacking right now?

BROGRAMMER: I just added Twitter OAuth support to our web app.

No, brah, the truth is, you’re not hacking shit. You are using public APIs in exactly the way they were intended to be used to add functionality to your application. That isn’t hacking, that’s developing software. This, however, IS hacking:

BOSS: Yo, man, how’s that little plugin for Mail.app coming along?

ACTUAL HACKER: Well, it’s coming along a bit. Mail.app actually doesn’t expose a plugin architecture or API so I had to get a dump of its header files and take guesses at class and method names to reverse engineer its implementation. Then, once i found the method whose behavior I want to modify, I use an officially unsupported construct of the language to swap its implementation with my own so that I can inject in the functionality we need.

BOSS: Sounds like some intense shit, but why’s it taking so long? Brogrammer just hacked OAuth onto our web application in under a day.

ACTUAL HACKER: …

So please, do us all a favor and STFU about your hacking. Just because your code is shit because you’re glazing over details and writing it all in a day doesn’t mean you hacked anything. Just because your app is a mashup of two different apps that have public APIs doesn’t mean your app is a hack. 

When you call it hacking, you make people who know business but don’t know much about technology start to think that Twitter could be built in a weekend. You make it sound like a reliable, solid application can be thrown together by some kid who skimmed through a Ruby on Rails tutorial online. Proliferating that mentality benefits no one. You’re cheapening what it means to develop great software.

When you call it hacking, things that actually involve hacks fail to get recognized as the technical feat they are. 

Developing software requires discipline. It requires an incredible amount of patience and skill. It can be a lot of fun, and it certainly has fewer barriers to entry than other things (like prototyping physical goods) but it’s not something you can just jump into and come out of it briefly later with a meaningful product.

Side note: if you’re a company with an API, don’t call them hackathons. Believe me when I tell you that although useful things could come out of hacks of your API, you wouldn’t appreciate them.

Wayne Self, on his blog:

If we agree to disagree on this issue, you walk away a full member of this society and I don’t.

When I see you eating at Chick-Fil-A when you know that CFA gives money to organizations trying to subvert gay rights, it’s disappointing. It means that at some point in that decision you weighed whether enjoying their chicken sandwich was worth helping people harm your gay friends, and you decided it was worth it.

Scott Forstall testified in court recently.

Asked if he told anyone at Apple to copy Samsung’s designs, Forstall replied, “I never directed anyone to go and copy something from Samsung. We wanted to build something great. There was no reason to look at anything they had done.”

Ouch.

Users of the iPad generally are in love with their devices but for many there has always remained the annoyance of difficulty inputting text on the keyboard. I have managed to do pretty well with the landscape orientation keyboard but I do often find my fingers drifting off away from where they should be. Sure, I could use an external keyboard with it, but that adds a good deal of bulk and the setup takes time too. Plus for me the on screen keyboard is great, but it could just be a little better.

This is where TouchFire comes in. The TouchFire is a silicone overlay that magnetically attaches itself to the iPad, leaving you with a keyboard-like surface that can be used for touch typing. Having the ability to feel keys makes an incredible difference in your ability to type on iPad. People raved about it in the videos and after seeing how thoughtful the design was, I decided I needed to support this project so I preordered.

My biggest concern having not seen the TouchFire in person before was that it wouldn’t provide a satisfying tactile feel when I pressed the keys. I mean, yes, the product is meant to give tactile feedback where there is none, but I’m the first to admit I’m a little pickier about it, what with my affinity for fine clicky keyboards and my being known to complain about iPhones whose home buttons feel squishy. I was hoping it would end up feeling similar to what Apple keyboards feel like when you press on them.

After months of waiting, I was initially disappointed to find that there really isn’t much feedback at all when you press on a key. The experience is reminiscent of typing on a waterproof membrane keyboard and that was disappointing. But I’ll be damned if I am not typing far more proficiently on this than I would be with just the screen alone. The ridges separating the keys give my fingers the gentle reminders they need of where the home row is and it is just enough to keep my fingers from deviating onto other keys.

When your fingers start to feel a little bit like you are on a standard keyboard it becomes really easy to forget that isn’t the case. That is no problem if you are just typing sentences and such, but as soon as you need to start doing some other things you have to remind yourself that you are still typing on an iOS keyboard and you still have to do the same things to type stuff like punctuation. So far I am finding the hardest keys to hit right are the left shift key, the backspace key and the swipe up gesture on the comma key to get an apostrophe. I’m already improving a bit. Practice makes perfect, I suppose.

The TouchFire was also made with a variety of use cases in mind. It is easy to roll away from the screen if you need to use the whole screen at once. Need to type an accent? The silicone is designed to be stretched so that you can type those (I am struggling a bit with that as my TouchFire is very clean and thus still sticky; I am certain that after breaking it in a bit that will improve). And it was designed to be used in conjunction with the Smart Cover. It magnetically attaches to it. I was concerned it would interfere with the Smart Cover’s functionality but I haven’t seen much interference, save for when you have the TouchFire on the Smart Cover and you roll the Smart Cover up as a stand. It still works but it’s a bit of a stretch. The TouchFire is one of the more well done uses of magnets I have seen, especially in terms of integrating with an Apple device’s own integrated magnets.

If it is any indication of how much I recommend the TouchFire, I wrote this entire review using one.

Now, I wouldn’t say it helps enable the iPad to be a creation device, because to me creation involves more than just things that are typed on a keyboard. However, there are a lot of writing related tasks that are more long form that I would previously have loved to do on an iPad and can now consider doing more seriously now that I have a device that helps me get some serious typing done. Now i’m not going to be doing software development on it or anything, but expect more of my icanthascheezburger posts to be written exclusively on an iPad.

Want some pictures? Of course you do.

And a video of me typing on it: