This week…
Andrew: “The latest chapter in Apple’s ludicrous legal action against all and sundry has emerged this week, culminating in perhaps the stupidest of their legal challenges yet- asserting that certain aspects of their iphone designs should be protected under intellectual property law and that Samsung, whom they had taken legal action against, should have avoided Apple’s unique design traits, which they described as follows:
Front surface that isn’t black.
Overall shape that isn’t rectangular, or doesn’t have rounded corners.
Display screens that aren’t centered on the front face and have substantial lateral borders.
Front surfaces with substantial adornment.
So there you have it, only Apple are henceforth allowed to produce rectangular mobile phones, sorry other mobile tech companies, back to the drawing board with you. I hear triangles are pretty cool”
Kat: “I liked this, and can think of a few people it would make a good Christmas present for…”
Adam: “So, last week GCHQ posted the Can You Crack It challenge to find potential candidates for new cyber spys. It didn’t take too long for Dr Gareth Owen of the University of Greenwich to solve the tasks and post a full explanation. Some of the details are quite fascinating.
However, rumours are now circulating that there may be a hidden 4th task within the puzzle – perhaps even the ‘real’ challenge. GCHQ have strongly denied this is the case, but I’m not convinced. After all, they wouldn’t be very good at spying if they handed over all their secrets, would they!? And only the very best are likely to find this hidden task.”
Liam: “Following on from our recent love on Twitter Bootstrap, a new tool has emerged for base frame working, called Foundation. It gives you a bunch of prewritten code that makes building prototypes and foundation styles, effects and animations easy”
Paul: “As a Ruby dev, MacRuby is awesome: it lets you write native apps for OS X in Ruby. Here’s a campaign to encourage Apple to let us all use Ruby to develop iOS. Internally Apple seem to quite like Ruby as it shares a lot of concepts (but thankfully not syntax) with Objective-C, so there is some hope that this might just happen”
Mike: “Music + hacking, probably them bestest combination of stuff in the world. Techno Is The Word.”
Dave: “This week, I bookmarked a prototype screen that creates the feeling of texture. Thats all there is to say really..”
