crunchgear.com — At first I figured it was for accessories to use the “Made for iPhone” tag, like many iPod accessory makers, but something was odd, so I probed with, “For accessories?” He or she said, “Naw, we don’t do hardware anymore. It’s a meeting about multitouch and the OS and stuff.” Wait a minute.
Mar 13, 2007 View in Crawl 4
garthsMar 14, 2007
Multitouch has been around for decades. Multitouch as they demonstrated it has been done for many years (before their patent was filed). If I were a company thinking of licensing their technology I would consider this as relevant.For references, look up Bill Buxton, early Xerox PARC work, Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab (MERL), the University of Calgary, etc. etc.
cleverboyMar 14, 2007
Addendum: Apple licensed aspects of the Mac OS to Microsoft for Windows 1.0 before Microsoft bent them over. It's the same thing, happening all over again. Only this time, Apple's not going to make claims on the GUI, it'll be a bunch of other stuff. Apple and Microsoft's patent-cross-licensing agreement from yay-many years ago should pretty much be useless for any of this new stuff.
andocomMar 14, 2007
This is something I have never understood, what makes you think that using a desktop OS is a good idea for a phone? The linux kernal is run on a couple phones, but you don't see Ubuntu phones to my knowledge. How does OSX run with under 512Mb memory, not that well from all reports, how much memory will be available for the OS in the iPhone? All the major phone OSs are specifically designed for the purpose of low hardware requirements, thats why you see smartphones with MS mobile 5 not Vista phone edition.Apple own OSX so they can call whatever they want OSX theorecially, but I keep thinking that the iPhone OS will either be a version of OSX so stripped down its misleading to refer to it as OSX as we know it, or the iPhone will struggle to run.Lastly to say that no one will be able to touch the software, (software that isn't released) because no one will have the budget for their own OS is crazy, MS obviously have the budget to do pretty much whatever the f**k they like, and its not as if Nokia is cash strapped either.
inkswampMar 14, 2007
You're right, but that doesn't contradict the point I'm making. At one point, IIRC, they had between 10-12% of the market. That was the most Apple ever had. But when someone uses phrases about how the "big boys ate Apple's lunch", it implies that at one time Apple had much more than that. They were significant in desktop computing, but they were never the dominant player. Not even close.
inkswampMar 14, 2007
Pre-iPod, if you had asked 100,000 music lovers if they really wanted a little hard-drive device for listening to music, how many do you think would have said yes? Not very many, I bet. The iPhone's success will depend on whether or not the features are so compelling that people use them once and realize that they need them, even if they never conceived of the idea themselves.
mikecermMar 14, 2007
Apple doesn't license their IP, ever. They haven't even licensed FairPlay, despite being legally compelled in various European and Scandinavian countries to do so. They're not going to license multitouch, which doesn't really matter, because their patent will be invalidated whenever anyone musters up the balls to challenge it.
geminitojanusMar 14, 2007
"Apple doesn't license their IP, ever."Except for TrueType, parts of ARM, huge parts of PPC (Altivec exists partly because of Apple), and any one of a hundred licenses covered in Apple and Microsoft's cross-licencing deal from the late 90s."They haven't even licensed FairPlay,"Except to Motorola."They're not going to license multitouch, which doesn't really matter, because their patent will be invalidated whenever anyone musters up the balls to challenge it."Having read over the four patents Apple now controls in consideration to Multitouch in Fingerwork's design, I have to say they're quite solid and could withstand the test of time quite easily. Those patents are 7030861, 6888536, 6570557, 6323946. Feel free to go read them yourself and come to a conclusion as to whether they actually invented something, or if they're just blowing smoke. [Here's a hint, 6888536 goes a _long_ way towards describing how the technology works and the insane number of manhours put behind it, from the algorithms used to generate the touch, touch chords (more than one finger down), detecting which finger is which, calculating angular momentum based on capacitance changes, etc.] Hell, even some of Microsoft's patents on multi-touch interfacing reference 6323946 "Method and Apparatus for integrating manual input".
lemmingjesusMar 16, 2007
"...the market share that Apple has captured is a s**t-ton more valuable than other low-end pc vendors have."The snobs?
futuredreamzMar 17, 2007
Uh, the Mac OS X kernel isn't micro. it is a hybrid.
popapiskaMay 2, 2007
Dugg. My dog loves it :)
divaboxMay 16, 2007
This post rocks! Are you people blind to vote for THIS?