TechCrunch reporting:

A Japanese company called TechFirm [JP] has just a released a very special (and free) Twitter client for the iPad in the App Store [iTunes, bilingual English and Japanese]: “Breath Bird” lets people who can’t use their fingers and have problems speaking post to Twitter by breathing into the iPad’s mic.

The keyboard has a letter grid that highlights each row in turn. Mic input then confirms a row and starts the highlight moving horizontally. A second input then confirms an individual character or command (such as ‘Tweet’ and ‘Delete’). Innovative and clever use of tech.

As MacStories and others have reported, Apple last night adjusted a bunch of App Store prices. Some countries saw price-drops, but others—such as the UK—saw price-rises. Except they sort of didn’t. I’ll explain.

In the UK, the average change in prices has been, according to Tap! magazine, about 17.5%, which some people are complaining is well over the rate of inflation. The thing is, the App Store prices haven’t really changed at all, because they’re all (very lazily) pegged to the US App Store. If you go there, you’ll see that an app that cost 99 cents yesterday still costs 99 cents today. But in the UK, the lowest tier of 59p is now 69p.

So what happened? Apple simply rebalanced its currency conversion across the App Store, for the first time, and, if you check out the value of Sterling over the past five years (Yahoo! Finance), it’s easy to see why. When the App Store was launched, and during the time leading up to it, the exchange rate was almost $2 = £1. Apple therefore did its usual thing of dropping the rate a bit as a cushion and launched the store. And then Sterling tanked. By January 2009, it hit a low of $1.37, and although the currency has recovered a little since then, it’s spent most of its time hovering between $1.50 and $1.60.

This means that, while Brits won’t be happy about the ‘price rise’, we need to understand that App Store prices have been cheap, relatively speaking, since the App Store was launched. This is even more obvious when you take into account that UK prices include taxes, whereas US ones don’t. Some might call that poetic justice, given the ambitious pricing of TV shows and movies on the UK store. Regardless, the new tiers are likely here to stay for some time, unless the UK economy somehow heats up in a big way. Also, it’s worth noting, in bold, in case you otherwise wouldn’t notice, that iOS apps and games are generally insanely cheap and so a smallish price change doesn’t really matter. If you’ve spent 500 quid on a phone but now won’t buy Super-Duper New Game because it’s just ‘shot up’ in price from £1.79 to £1.99, I really don’t want to talk to you any more.

Around 28:26 in the Steve Jobs closing keynote of WWDC ’97:

A few weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal [said that] in this industry, the only companies doing really well are Intel, Microsoft and perhaps Compaq.

How things change. One thing that doesn’t was Jobs’s response to the question, highlighting how Apple has worked since his return to the company:

I think every good product that I’ve ever seen in this industry […] is because a group of people cared deeply about making something wonderful that they and their friends wanted. They want to use it themselves.

Original link via Daring Fireball.

One of the disadvantages of going on holiday, to a place without web access, is that you miss slices of pure crazy. This one involves everyone’s favourite games industry celeb Tim Langdell.

If you don’t know the story, Langdell ran a couple of software companies in the 1980s that released games for home computers. One of the most fondly remembered is Bobby Bearing, an isometric adventure game created by Robert Figgins and Trevor Figgins. Little was heard of Langdell during the 1990s and beyond, but he rose to infamy when he started suing the pants off of iOS developers (and others) who had the audacity to use the word ‘Edge’ in their videogame titles and other products. (The full story can be found at ChaosEdge.) Indie game developer Mobigame got hit particularly hard, with Langdell claiming its Edge game was somehow ripping off both his brand and Bobby Bearing, arguing that it had been named to capitalise on Langdell’s ‘famous’ trademark. This was, of course, total bollocks.

Langdell came unstuck when he decided to sue EA over Mirror’s Edge. The software giant used its powers for good, assisted indie developers being attacked by Langdell, and pretty much smashed him into the ground, culminating in his marks being removed. And with Langdell using all kinds of bizarre material in his ‘defence’, including a fake cover of a non-existent US version of Edge magazine, along with using a variant on the magazine’s logo for his company, he awoke the sleeping beast that is Future Publishing’s legal department. John Walker at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, offers a fantastic report into how Langdell fared there. (Spoiler: not well.)

Amazingly, though, on June 30, Edge did actually release a new game, which is supposedly a sequel to Bobby Bearing. Presumably, it’s called Bobby Bearing 2, you’d think, but you’d be wrong. Sort of. While the game is called Bobby Bearing 2 – “ReRolled” on its title screen, it has a subtly different name on the App Store: EDGEBobby2. Yeah, that sounds like an obvious, intuitive name for the game, and not at all some kind of attempt to ‘prove’ to courts that Langdell was making games that utilised his ‘famous’ mark (that, note, he no longer holds). I only hope he won’t use this to launch yet more crazy attacks on iOS developers.

Oh, and the game not only looks like crap but also plays poorly and isn’t a patch on its 25-year-old prequel-of-sorts.

Oldish news (since I’m catching up post-hols), but good to see common sense has prevailed regarding Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs (which is the first to get the blessing of Apple’s head honcho). CNN reported a few days back that it’s now called Steve Jobs By Walter Isaacson. Simple, straightforward and to the point, just like the best of Apple’s hardware and software.

The old title, chosen by the publisher’s publicity department, was iSteve: The Book of Jobs. That sounds, at best, like a knock-off unauthorised hack job or some kind of joke that went horribly wrong, in somehow getting voted through the marketing process, rather than immediately being shot in the head.

The book itself is due out in March 2012.