Hat tip to Felix Metzger for pointing me at Electronista’s MacBook Air review, which contains some oddball pros and cons. First, cons:

Not as fast as costlier rivals.

Is that really a ‘con’ of any hardware? The more expensive iPhone 4 is superior to the cheaper iPhone 3GS, but is that a ‘con’ regarding the older hardware? Surely if an alternative option is cheaper and faster, that might be something you should criticise, but more expensive and faster is just par for the course.

Battery life could still be longer.

That’s a statement, rather than a criticism. If Apple had a MacBook Air battery that lasted 24 hours, there would still be people who’d moan that it could last longer. But Apple’s 13-inch notebook lasts around seven hours, which is at the forefront of this technology. Again, if Apple was falling behind its rivals, that would be a ‘con’. “MacBook Air doesn’t include technology that doesn’t yet exist” isn’t really a criticism at all.

And then there’s a lovely pair of opinions. First, the ‘con’:

Display isn’t as vivid as on a MacBook Pro or similar.

Then a ‘pro’:

Sharp, low-glare display.

The gist is that Apple’s toned down its MacBook Air display, so it’s no longer akin to a mirror! Hurrah! But then that means it’s not quite as vivid as it once was. In this case, Electronista has a valid complaint, but it strikes me that you get one or the other (with current display technology): either you have glare with vibrancy or matte with dullness. Apple’s struck a balance, and so the review has complained about something it’s earlier championed. Odd.

Note that this doesn’t showcase that Electronista is stupid or that reviewer Jon Fingas needs a slap. The review itself is imperfect but pretty good and balanced. What it does show is that if you run a publication that forces reviewers to add ratings or the inevitable and rather pointless ‘pros’ and ‘cons’ lists, you must take extreme care on those overview elements. They are the things readers are driven to first, and they can so easily mislead, unintentionally or otherwise.

Tim Langdell claims in an document sent to Eurogamer that he’s not, in fact, a trademark troll. Oh really? (Note: if you’ve missed previous episodes of Tim Langdell Is Clearly Delusional, check out ChaosEdge for the full and exciting story.)

What’s that, Tim? We’re all wrong? You want to defend yourself? OK, fair enough. Go for it!

Previously Edge Games and Tim Langdell

Oooh. Bad start, Tim, given that you are Edge Games.

have made virtually no public statements about the various Edge disputes over the past two years since it seemed clear any statement they made would not be reported fairly

Translation: because ChaosEdge and others showcased how blatantly we bullshitted the USPTO, I realised the game was up and finally learned to keep my mouth shut. But now I figure enough time has passed and I have lots of EDGEWOOL™ to pull over people’s EDGEEYES™.

However, they believe the time has come to try to set the record straight on a sizable number of misconceptions and falsehoods that have been circulating on the internet.

Sounds great.

Eurogamer then says Langdell claims it was, in fact, Edge magazine publisher Future Publishing that demanded Langdell take action to protect the Edge trademark, following agreements between the two in 1996 and 2004 to share ownership of the name. Langdell claims Future

required Edge to challenge rival attempts to register or use the Edge mark or face severe penalties from Future for failing to do so. Edge would never have taken the action [against EA] if Future had not required it under the agreement between Future and Edge

This would be the, by that point, non-existent agreement between Future and Edge, presumably. And that would also be the Edge magazine whose logo Langell duly ripped off. And the Edge magazine he kept banging on about ‘spawning’. And the Edge magazine he mocked up a non-existent US cover of, in order to fool the USPTO. OK, got it.

Eurogamer then says Langdell argues he/Edge has

never sought to extract payment from other companies for game licenses, “other than very rarely taking a token payment when the other party was happy to offer it.”

That sound you just heard was David Papazian of Mobigame quite literally exploding. We’re so sorry, David. (Apart from Langdell, who’s sorry you managed to get the press and, later, EA on your side.)

The suggestion that Edge or Tim Langdell acted as ‘trademark trolls’ by bullying people or taking legal action to force companies to pay license fees is an entirely false allegation. They have never done that.

Apart from, obviously, when they did precisely that. And, yes, I’ve seen the documentation to back this up.

Edge and Langdell have always acted ethically and with integrity.

That sound you just heard was me quite literally exploding. This blog will now be written by Zombie Craig.

Edge does not make a habit of taking legal action over the Edge mark: in the past 20 years Edge has only ever taken only two legal actions: one against Future Publishing (in 1994) and a second against EA (in 2010) – and the latter was because Future required them to do so.

Hrrrggnngnnzzzz! Whrrzz ahnn lohhhzd ovvvv blllcckkzzzz. Brrraaainnzzzzzz!

Edge has released new games on a regular basis at all times in the past 20 years, albeit at a lower rate than it did in the 1980s.

Hllrrkk! Gmmzzzz ohnnn duh-vzz-dzzz dnttz cnnnnnzzzttt. BRRRAIIIINNNZZZZ!

At this point, the blog police swoop in. This zombie joke has gone on too long and isn’t funny enough, they say. We are therefore going to turn your life into a videogame and award you an extra life, at the expense of 10,000 points. Also, as further punishment, we will double the number of people on your Twitter feed who joke each day that you look just like Seth MacFarlane. No, don’t complain, it’s your own fault.

Onwards!

Despite the false reports, Edge has released a number of games since the mid 1990s, continuously selling and releasing new games at all times from 1984 right through to Bobby Bearing 2 in 2011.

As ChaosEdge noted, Langdell’s games for the past decade have largely involved the odd Java remake or buying dead properties and ‘releasing’ them on DVDR. His beef with Mobigame was that its Edge (essentially a time-attack platform game that was like a cube-based Marble Madness) was passing off on Edge’s ‘famous’ brand. And this was because one of its games from 1986, the Q-Bert! and Knight Lore inspired Bobby Bearing, had a similar viewpoint. This, note, also being the Bobby Bearing that its creators, Robert Figgins and Trevor Figgins, are pretty sure Langdell no longer has any rights to whatsoever.

Still, Bobby Bearing 2, eh? That seems like a sensible name for a sequel to the original Edge game, so presumably it’s just an error that it’s called EDGEBobby2 on the App Store; also, I suspect that game wasn’t at all created to try and win the court case against EA, but sadly wasn’t ready in time.

Sidebar. Best review of EDGEBobby2 on the App Store:

This is a direct rip off of Edge by Mobigames and Future Publishing’s iconic logo. Don’t buy this, buy the Mobigames original!

Langdell finishes off by saying he’s appealing against Future kicking its arse and is

confident of prevailing

This being the court case where, according to a report by John Walker, Langdell had a dubious grip on truth and reality. And, to add a wee cherry on top, he’s now asserting he’s filed a counter-claim on the grounds Future

damaged the reputation of Edge and Tim Langdell by forcing Edge to take action against French developer Mobigame and EA.

Yes, you read that right. If it wasn’t for nasty old Future Publishing, none of this would have ever happened, because Tim Langdell is a gaming saint. If we ignore the threatening emails he sent developers, obviously. And his successful attempts to mislead the USPTO with doctored documentation, obviously. And I’d say just about the only way he could have damaged his reputation in this industry any worse is by somehow breaking into Nintendo’s manufacturing plant and changing all their game masters to Watch Tim Pooing, a 30-second loop of Langdell on the toilet.

Amusing update: Pocket Gamer reports that Mobigame has just slapped Langdell with a DMCA notice to his web host, along with sending a cease and desist to Apple over EDGEBobby2, which “infringes Robert Figgins’s copyright [and] also infringes Future Publishing logo, our trademark EDGE, and confuses our fans”.

Apple Q3 results:

• Record quarterly revenue of $28.57 billion, up 82%
• Record quarterly net profit of $7.31 billion, up 125%
• 20.34 million iPhones sold, up 142%

Nokia Q2 results:

• Sales of €9.275 billion, down 7%
• Operating loss of €487 million (operating profit of EUR 295 million, down 41%)
• 16.7 million smartphone sales, down 34%

I wonder how many people are still deluding themselves that Apple isn’t now a major player in the smartphone industry.

Damn You, Auto Correct (DYAC), if you’ve not seen it, is a site that showcases amusing typos in text messages. These mostly occur due to the auto-correct functionality in iOS, which aims to guess what you’re writing, replacing misspellings accordingly. It’s pretty clear that a good number of the submissions to the site are set-up, but some are unintentional errors.

With DYAC having been in my RSS feed for a while now, I’ve started to notice a number of patterns. A good number of the replacements are down to user error. There’s a trend, especially in the US, to add a bunch of letters to the end of words, for emphasis. This is illustrated in the entry Learn From Your Fail:

There are also many examples on the site of people who simply do not know how to spell certain words, and so iOS makes its best guess, often to comical effect. However, Father And Son shows another side of auto-correct:

This post’s contributor said his mother was trying to remind him to drop his dad off, not, er, something else entirely. There are quite a few posts along these lines on the site, often from older users. People claim their phone (typically their iPhone) is ‘changing’ their words. I therefore wonder if there’s a discoverability problem here, in people not noticing when iOS offers an alternate spelling; either that or there’s a usability issue in people not knowing how to pick a word when iOS isn’t sure what you meant to type.

It’s also pretty infuriating that iOS still denies you access to its custom dictionary, yet is insanely over-zealous about storing and offering back your more bizarre words. Type a long string in caps and deny iOS changing it to a string of its own devising and you’ll find it subsequently popping up time and time again. While you can nuke your entire custom dictionary in Settings, it’s absurd that Apple doesn’t enable finer control over custom words and mappings, although I suspect DYAC is pretty happy about that, as are its followers.

I just had a quick look at my stats and about 80 per cent of my search traffic is now coming in for variations of “Lion” and “A newer version of this app is already installed on this computer”. Presumably, people who’ve used beta versions of OS X Lion are now having installation problems. I had a similar experience with Reeder.

If you have the error, unmount any disks—including back-up volumes and internal partitions—that may have a copy of Lion installed. You should then be able to install the latest version. If not, hold Option (Alt) while clicking the ‘Buy app’ button and the download will begin.

Should you have this problem with another app, you may also need to trash the beta version of the app from /Applications.