It seems Apple has come to the aid of developers after all regarding the threats from Lodsys that Lodsys later attempted to defend (my rebuttal rapidly becoming the most-read thing Revert to Saved has ever run). A number of developers have now received documentation from Apple, including a letter to Mark Small, CEO of Lodsys. The short of it is summed up in the opening paragraph:

There is no basis for Lodsys’ infringement allegations against Apple’s App Makers. Apple intends to share this letter and the information set out herein with its App Makers and is fully prepared to defend Apple’s license rights.

Game, set and match, surely.

Actually, it’s a bit less tennis and rather more like a boxing match. The letter reads like Apple legal striding into the ring, landing hooks, uppercuts and other assorted punches squarely on Small’s face, until all that remains is a sad figure on the mat, wondering why he’d earlier tried picking on the little guys.

Apple believes Lodsys is talking crap in general, stating that it believes the Lodsys letters are

based on a fundamental misapprehension regarding Apple’s license and the way Apple’s products work

adding that the information provided should be

sufficient for [Lodsys] to withdraw [its] outstanding threats to the App Makers and cease and desist from any further threats to Apple’s customers and partners.

This information includes the key argument that under its license for the patents in the Lodsys portfolio, Apple is

entitled to offer these licensed products and services to its customers and business partners, who, in turn, have the right to use them. […]

Thus, the technology that is targeted in your notice letters is technology that Apple is expressly licensed under the Lodsys patents to offer to Apple’s App Makers. These licensed products and services enable Apple’s App Makers to communicate with end users through use of Apple’s own licensed hardware, software, APIs, memory, servers, and interfaces, including Apple’s App Store. Because Apple is licensed under Lodsys’ patents to offer such technology to its App Makers, the App Makers are entitled to use this technology free from any infringement claim by Lodsys.

So, again, as with Apple’s Q&A on location data, Apple didn’t immediately calm fears, but it’s done the right thing after properly considering its position. Apple believes the law is on its side, is now clearly defending its developers, and the curt language of its communication is very much in the ‘don’t mess with us’ space; here’s hoping this keeps other trolls from peering out from under their bridges.

Update: Macworld now has the full text of the letter up, because their staff writer can type faster than I can, and it’s earlier in the day on the west coast of the US, so they’re probably all full of coffee, sunshine and bagels.

Learning precisely nothing from RIM co-CEOs shouting their mouths off at every opportunity, The Telegraph reports HP’s European head Eric Cador in bullish mood:

In the PC world, with fewer ways of differentiating HP’s products from our competitors, we became number one; in the tablet world we’re going to become better than number one. We call it number one plus.

Ben Brooks asks:

Plus what? Plus crap? Plus B.S.? Plus stickers?

Probably plus [SUB: INSERT RANDOM NUMBER HERE], thereby making it have a bigger number than the iPad regarding its position, because PC guys know that bigger numbers are better, right?

Macworld, along with a billion other outlets, are today pointing to a Digitimes report that claims the iPhone 5 will have a curved screen.This follows rumours—neatly summed up by Nowhere Else—that the iPhone 5 will have a bigger display, a 3D display, better resolution, the same design, a different design, a physical keyboard, no storage, more storage, free unicorns, expensive unicorns, a better battery, a battery made from love and puppies, NFC, LTE, HDMI, LOL, iOS 5, iTunes cloud music, voice controls, no controls, a glass back, a metal back, a flat back, a higher price tag, a lower price tag, and an ability to usher in myriad stupid rumours about the iPhone 6.

So, the curved glass thing. Maybe. It’s all a bit Samsung, though, isn’t it, and the last time Apple did curved glass (with one of the many iPod nano iterations) everyone bloody hated it. Plus, consider this:

• iPod touch: thin, flat, metal-back, flat screen.
• iPad 2: thin, flat, metal-back, flat screen.

I’d come to some sort of conclusion about the iPhone 5’s form factor based on the above points if I wasn’t drunk on gin* to TAKE AWAY THE PAIN of all the sodding iPhone rumours.

* OK, water **.

** And I’m not drunk, but I almost wish I was, having read those rumours.

Over on .net, I offer my take on Twitter’s latest salvo against Twitter client devs. Personally, I think Twitter’s people are being total dicks in smacking third-party clients again. Short version: DMs will fail as of June 14 unless third-party clients utilise jump-through-hoops/user-unfriendly OAuth for login. Good luck to devs rewriting their apps and submitting iOS updates in that time-frame. Oh, and Twitter’s own apps aren’t affected, naturally, because they are “part of the service”.

Marco Arment provides an alternate take, the main argument of which appears to be:

These are the risks that you take when you base your personal happiness or your business on a single, irreplaceable, young, evolving third-party service.

Of course, he’s right in this. You are taking a risk when you base your income (or a chunk of it) on another company’s service. But Twitter’s also taking a risk in kicking out the ladder from underneath it. In controlling the platform and removing the apps that made it a success, it will piss of developers and millions of users. In offering regular hypocrisy (such as the bullshit about wanting third-party clients gone because a “consistent user experience is more crucial than ever”, despite its own clients being all over the place), it makes it so no-one can really trust what the company says. But, most importantly, as Matt Gemmell states in the article I wrote for .net:

Placing limitations on developers’ opportunities for innovation tends to be the death knell of a platform.

Twitter would argue that it wants innovation, just not in the client space. In other words, take Twitter data and do things with it. The thing is, Twitter’s users want and need innovation in the space Twitter is killing and yet not supporting fully on its own. But then Arment says, rightly:

The old Twitter is gone. The new Twitter is faster, bigger, much more stable, full of Javascript and dysfunctional hash-bang URLs, and much more interested in owning the clients that most people use. And next year’s Twitter might be radically different from today’s.

Or it might not exist at all, if it keeps screwing people over and everyone buggers off elsewhere.

Foss Patent reports that Lodsys isn’t the only troll out there threatening iOS devs. MacroSolve is also suing the pants off of anyone it thinks infringes on its not-at-all-vague patent:

MacroSolve’s patent-in-suit covers electronic forms distributed via the Internet or to mobile devices

In terms of lending itself to incredibly broad interpretations and infringement allegations, MacroSolve’s patent-in-suit is similarly dangerous as Lodsys’s in-app upgrade patent. MacroSolve is suing companies over U.S. Patent No. 7,822,816 on a “system and method for data management”, “including the steps of: creating a questionnaire; transmitting the questionnaire to a remote computer; executing the questionnaire in the remote computer to prompt a user for responses to questions of the questionnaire; transmitting the responses to a sever via a network; making the responses available on the Web.” In other words, anyone who distributes electronic forms via the Internet or to mobile devices and then collects and evaluates the answers could be accused of infringing the patent.

It baffles me that the USPTO granted this patent.

Not me. The way things are going I fully expect random indie devs to soon receive lawsuits from trolls claiming to own patents relating to:

• Using a computer to create a piece of software, and then selling that software WITHOUT GIVING US MONEY, YOU BASTARDS.
• Positioning pixels on a screen, to create an interface that users can control software through, WITHOUT GIVING US MONEY, YOU BASTARDS.
• Breathing air anywhere near a computer (or not near a computer) WITHOUT GIVING US MONEY, YOU BASTARDS.