Boy Genius Reports claims Apple will remove home buttons from its next revisions of iOS devices. This report has suspect timing, to say the least. It comes the day after new multitouch gestures for iOS were revealed, including a four-finger pinch that returns you to your home screen.

I’m thinking this is someone putting one and one together and getting three. Apple’s guiding principle has always been usability, but removing the home button would be problematic in two important areas:

• If the OS locks up (which happens fairly regularly on iOS, especially when apps freeze), software gestures aren’t going to do anything. The home button is therefore a handy ‘quit’ override; in cases of extreme emergency, it can be used in combination with the sleep switch to force a device to reboot entirely.
• Gestures are not easily discoverable, and the more complex the gesture the less likely someone is to discover it. Users don’t sit down with manuals (or even the small leaflets Apple ships with its products)—they just start using stuff. Single taps and swipes are where most users are at. In the current iOS, relatively few users even know about the multitasking bar, and even fewer know you can swipe that bar to access further controls. Forcing users to use a four-finger gesture to return to the home screen would therefore be a dangerous move by Apple.

Journo chum Gary Marshall notes on Twitter that there is another option, since Apple has a patent for an intelligent bezel corner. However, that wouldn’t necessarily improve things. If left blank, it’s just as hard to discover as complex gestures. If labelled, the aesthetics are the same anyway, but you lack the tactile response that’s important for the functions the hardware button provides access to.

UPDATE: John Gruber makes a good point, responding to the same piece, noting that forcing a complex pinch would be problematic on the small iPhone screen and a potential accessibility disaster on the iPad—what if the user doesn’t have enough fingers, or enough dexterity to perform the gesture?

UPDATE: On Twitter, smittytone says: “Anyone who thinks the iPad 2 won’t have a home button clearly hasn’t read the iOS 4.3 developer docs”. And Matt Gemmell says: “Another point re no-Home-button/accessibility for your post; blind people use Home to know which way up the thing is.”

Oh my. iOS 4.3 just went into beta and… oh my.

I had two wishes for iOS 4.3, based on iOS 4.2 shortcomings that made me want to NOT AT ALL DO ANY VIOLENCE TO A LARGE WHITE BIRD, EVEN IN JEST, BECAUSE SOME PEOPLE DON’T REALISE THAT I’M JUST JOKING. And these things were:

• Get my orientation lock back, because having a mute switch for only some sounds on an iPad is about as useful as a chocolate teapot made with an exciting arsenic/cocoa mix (i.e. not at all).
• Get AirPlay in the hands of devs, so either the Air Video or streamtome guys can figure out how to enable me to fire videos at my Apple TV. (First one to the finish line gets my cash!)

Ars Technica reveals that iOS 4.3:

• Provides a preference within the Settings app for defining the functionality of the hardware lock switch. (YAY!)
• Provides APIs that will “extend AirPlay support to their own apps instead of just the limited few from Apple”. (YAY!)

All that remains now is for Apple to remove these features at the last minute, just to spite me, and for the phone to ring one day:

Hey, Craig, it’s Steve. MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Pocket Gamer dot BZZZZ reports that Lima Sky’s cancelled its threats to smack all other iOS doodle games with a legal shovel of doom, but also reveals why this spat happened in the first place. Apparently, another dev was trying to get Lima Sky’s Doodle Jump mark cancelled (Lima Sky’s Igor Pusenjak refers to “Bryan Duke’s big-house law firm”). Their argument: since Lima Sky didn’t prevent other devs using the word ‘doodle’, it shouldn’t have the rights to ‘Doodle Jump’, which sounds about right. IF YOU’RE A CRAZY PERSON.

The end result appears to be that Lima Sky’s still going to go for a limited number of devs, but those who are riffing off the Doodle Jump name or that have ripped off or copied characters, which is fair enough. Pusenjak seems rattled by the harsh press reaction, saying he’s saddened that “so many of you were so quick to jump to conclusions based on incomplete and incorrectly reported information, and without even hearing the other side of the story,” but on hearing the other side of the story, I’m saddened that an indie developer felt the need to threaten 700 apps rather than just the ones they needed to.

A one-all draw here, I think.

This sounds familiar:

We are required by USPTO [US Patent and Trademark Office] to monitor and police our trade marks. If we don’t, we lose them.

But, no, Tim Langdell’s not risen from the grave (he’s not dead—it’s just where EA left him after giving him a serious kicking); this time, it’s Doodle Jump creators Lima Sky who are reportedly being total dicks.

According to Pocket Gamer, the Doodle Jump devs have now decided to rampage round the App Store, yelling at devs who have the audacity to use the word ‘doodle’ in the titles of their games. (At the current count, there are over 700 such games, so the Lima Sky guys are going to get really sore throats.)

Gosh, I guess, then, that Lima Sky must own the trademark for ‘doodle’, right? Well, no, they only own ‘Doodle Jump’, and they weren’t the first doodle game on the App Store anyway. So not only are they acting like total dicks, using the same bullshit language as Tim Langdell to ‘police’ their mark, they also don’t have a fucking clue about marks, the policing of marks, or, seemingly, common sense.

The danger here is that Apple might take down loads of ‘doodle’ games, until the relevant parties come to some arrangement or other. Personally, I suggest coming to a different arrangement: stop buying and playing Lima Sky games until they stop being dicks. Their only big earner is Doodle Jump anyway, and there are plenty of alternatives, such as the free Froggy Jump and the similarly free Mega Jump.

As revealed on Ars Technica’s live blog and a billion other places, Steve Jobs’s friend and servant Tim Cook and Verizon Wireless CEO Dan Vee’s moustache have revealed that the iPhone 4 will soon be available on Verizon for money!

This is good, because it will—like in the UK for bloody ages now—enable American consumers to bitch about how rubbish iPhone carriers are, rather than just how rubbish the exclusive iPhone carrier is. This is an important distinction for reasons.

Well done, America! *sings national anthem*