AllThingsD:

Apple scored another victory in its patent battle against Samsung today when a German court upheld the preliminary injunction banning sales of the company’s Galaxy 10.1 tablet computer in the country.

“The court is of the opinion that Apple’s minimalistic design isn’t the only technical solution to make a tablet computer, other designs are possible,” Presiding Judge Johanna Brueckner-Hofmann said in her verdict. “For the informed customer there remains the predominant overall impression that the device looks [like the iPad].”

Among my chums on Twitter, opinion is split on the Apple/Samsung spat. Some argue that Samsung is being bullied and that Apple’s design is ‘obvious’ and therefore suing Samsung isn’t fair. I agree with the German court: tablets didn’t look like the iPad before Apple’s device appeared, and now they all do. In the case of Samsung, a bunch of other stuff, such as icons, is almost identical too. I’m not sure Samsung has been trying to ‘trick’ people, but if I had any respect for Samsung I’d have lost it on hearing the company’s statement:

[We] believe that by imposing an injunction based on this very generic design right, this ruling restricts design innovation and progress in the industry.

Copying a successful competitor is not innovation; and if the design is ‘very generic’ why didn’t other companies do it first or simultaneously, rather than many months after Apple?

Mark Bernstein writes that there are always problems. He thinks the Mac and tech press is trying to drum up traffic by running articles critical of Lion. But he thinks the operating system isn’t to blame, and other factors cloud people’s judgment.

Whenever an operating system ships, everybody always runs around in circles to complain about it. Operating systems are big. They interact with everything. And they’re new, so they are a blame magnet. If you have an application bug, people will blame the operating system. If their disk is wearing out, odds are the operating system installation will push it over the edge and they’ll blame the operating system. If their network is wonky, what sort-of worked before might not work how – or might still sort-of work – and either way, some of them will blame the operating system.

And he also blames the press:

I blame a corrupt trade press. The way you get attention and make money – not much money – in this game is to start flame wars, and so “Apple ships lousy operating system! Scroll bars backwards! Apple doomed!” gets links and traffic and sells ads for off-brand iPad cases. And of course some of the financial press try to launch memes to manipulate stock prices – either because they play the market or simply to show what big lever-pullers they are.

I have some sympathy with that viewpoint; too many tech blogs are clamouring for hits rather than offering quality writing, and much of this comes from Apple rumours and anti-Apple sentiment. But there’s a nugget of truth in the Lion blame game. I cannot remember an Apple OS so buggy since the very early days of Mac OS X. I’ve certainly had way more problems in OS X Lion than in Snow Leopard, Leopard and Tiger. Apps crash far more regularly (mostly those that utilise the new auto-save feature), my Wi-Fi network that was fine under Snow Leopard absolutely refused to work using the same settings under Lion, and I’ve seen a ton of interface glitches, most notably with Save dialogs randomly getting really messed up and printing buttons and menus in the wrong place.

Of course, as Bernstein states, other factors could be at play here. For the first time, I installed a new OS over an old one, so perhaps there are clashes; although in my defence, this is how Apple wants people to install Lion by default. Perhaps my Wi-Fi network was screwy anyway, and Lion merely finally broke it. But I’m seeing too many issues, too many bugs, to suggest this is anything more than an OS that doesn’t have quite the same level of care that Apple usually enforces. None of the bugs have stopped me from using Lion and I certainly don’t plan to revert. But when TextEdit and Numbers crash for the nth time—despite neither app having crashed even once during my using them with Snow Leopard—that sets off alarm bells about the state of the system itself, rather than the state of tech journalism.

Hat tip: Daring Fireball.

Back in May, I wrote a quickfire review of sorts of the iCADE, a little arcade cabinet for the iPad. Around the same time, I also turned down two commissions to review the hardware for British magazines, primarily because I believed at the time that the hardware wasn’t reviewable in the traditional sense—the lack of support by third parties meant it was impossible to rate. The hardware was solid, but the only game at the time you could use with it was the mediocre Atari’s Greatest Hits; making that car crash about 20 per cent better certainly wasn’t worth a 75 quid investment, and yet it seemed wrong to massively downrate great new hardware due to poor support.

iCADE support has since grown, albeit slowly. But it was interesting that when I recently interviewed a bunch of major publishers involved in retro-gaming, they remained utterly tight-lipped about iCADE plans. To my mind, it would make perfect sense for Taito, Namco, Capcom and others to support the hardware, but what we’ve instead seen is a handful of indie developers quietly adding iCADE support to their apps. I no longer have an iCADE to hand, but I imagine that mini cabinet with Mos Speedrun or Minotron is probably a great pairing.

What’s most curious, however, is the lack of support from majors might be down to them working on their own systems. TouchArcade last week reported on Atari’s own stick, which strikes me as an odd idea—it’s portrait only (many of Atari’s games aren’t, nor are many of the apps that support iCADE), and a good chunk of the games in Atari’s compilation weren’t originally designed for joystick control, which is part of the reason they never really clicked for me with the iCADE. And earlier today, developer Stuart Carnie linked through to the iNVADERCADE, which looks like a tiny arcade cabinet for playing Taito’s rather poor iPad version of Space Invaders (which scales up the iPhone release in a lazy manner). It’s unclear from the video on the site whether other games will be supported, but even so, as developer Paul Pridham asked:

Is the iPad controller market that lucrative?

I doubt it is, and I very much agree with Carnie’s reply:

I would think one general purpose controller would be ideal. There is no standard SDK by Apple = fragmentation

I’m not really convinced at all by the need for physical controls for iOS games, because the best developers have gotten past that limitation, but I can see there’s a certain niche appeal regarding a ‘traditional’ controller, especially one as cute as the iCADE. What I don’t understand is individual developers releasing ones for their own games, fragmenting an already tiny market, rather than seeking to support a product that already exists and is already generally liked by those who’ve used it. I’d quite like an iCADE, especially if more games supported it; but the last thing I need on my desk is a little row of iPad games controllers, each one only working with a tiny number of titles.

Cult of Mac today moans about iCal. I wonder if this comes from author Giles Turnbull using the application or just the oddly negative responses he and others have seen online. Nipping through the article:

Yesterday, the guys at Macworld published a useful article about making Lion’s iCal less annoying, but just as useful and entertaining were the comments beneath it.

The simple fact that Macworld felt the need to write an annoyances-fixing article speaks volumes.

Not really. People hate change. It doesn’t really matter what you do to an application: when you change some of it, people will get pissed off and want to change it back.

One good suggestion was to avoid iCal altogether, and buy another calendar app. Apple’s iCal is designed in such a way that it stores its event data in a database, which other apps can access. If you’re already an iCal user, it’s easy to try out alternative calendar apps without having to export and import your data, as long as they support use of iCal events. Most of them do, these days. One of my favorites is QuickCal.

I admit that I was initially tempted to try an alternative to iCal, but I decided to stick with it. For a little context, it’s worth explaining how I use iCal. I block in events across four calendars: work, home, and two ‘urgent’ versions of each. For magazine articles and other work, I create an event that approximates how long I think a piece of work will take, and I block recurring commissions as far into the future as possible. This enables me to see if, say, October is full and that I really shouldn’t be taking on extra cover features unless I somehow figure out how to clone myself. I then use iCal to manage my daily work, deleting events as I complete the relevant task, or, for personal/home things, as the event passes.

For me, there are only three things I really dislike about the new iCal:

• The visual design is hideous. I suspect this is Apple very intentionally starting the transition to iOS-like apps in OS X and that we’re going to see more skeuomorphic user interface design in forthcoming revisions to the system. It’s a pity, because the ‘leather’ toolbar is distracting and the text on it isn’t as readable as it is in other apps. Next to the smart, sleek new Mail, iCal just looks like a kiddie app; it’s even at odds with its own smart preferences pane. But this isn’t a deal-breaker, even if I did hack out the ‘torn paper’ graphic under the toolbar.
• Apple removed the mini-calendar sidebar, which I used daily to rapidly navigate my events. Navigation is now a little slower, but this also isn’t a deal-breaker.
• It’s mildly more awkward to create an event in a specific calendar, although you can click-hold the ‘add event’ button to select a calendar or very easily switch calendar once an event is created. This is very much not a deal-breaker.

The BBC reports that the EU has decided to extend music copyright to 70 years. However, I feel the article needs some helpful translation work.

Musicians are set [to] receive royalties for their songs well into their old age under a new EU ruling.

“Record labels are set to make even more money from dead and very aged popular musicians, under a new EU ruling, which doesn’t actually help most musicians.”

Regulations approved on Monday extended copyright on sound recordings from 50 to 70 years.

“Cliff Richard’s earliest songs had started to enter the public domain, which would have reduced his royalty cheques by a little bit, and this would have been a disaster for the 250-million-records-sold musician.”

According to those backing the law, the copyright extension is all about creating an ‘incentive for authors’, and I’m sure Cliff and others in their 70s will now feel a huge incentive to make more music and be more creative. We’ll for a moment ignore all the people who could have done something truly creative with popular songs entering the public domain.

The move has been welcomed by the music industry. Presenter Jools Holland called the ruling “fantastic news”. “Artists put their hearts and souls into creating music and it is only fair that they are recompensed in line with the rest of Europe,” said Holland who also performs and records his own music.

“And who is also getting on a bit, which has nothing to do with his stance on this subject.”

I agree with copyright and patenting in principle. There should certainly be a period during which a creator and their backers reap the rewards of creativity. But there must be balance. In extending copyright beyond the point most creators will live, we’re not encouraging creativity; instead, we’re helping a few very old musicians not lose some royalties from their earliest recordings, but mostly filling the pockets of record labels petrified of losing their investment that’s already been paid for myriad times.

Still, I can’t imagine anyone expected a different outcome, and copyright for popular media will continue to be extended periodically. If you ever think the likes of Mickey Mouse will enter the public domain, I’ve a mouse-shaped bridge to sell you.