By Graham K. Rogers

Opening Gambit:

Apple Stuff

There are lots of rumours and supposed leaks about the next iPhone, but Jim Tanous on The MacObserver has an interesting one -- with photos -- of what could be the micro-Sim tray that will be used. This story has some legs as Apple is known to be working on smaller specification cards, so this could be what might be appearing. AppleBitch also has some comments about this and some images as well.

Another rumour that has been around for a while concerns the dock connector which some said was 19 pins although recently an 8-pin rumour appeared. While this was supposedly for the iPhone, Katie Marsal on AppleInsider tells us that it is now expected to appear on other iOS devices which does sound sensible after all.

But there is more and AppleBitch suggests that all iOS devices are going to have updates this year: the iPhone, the iPod touch and iPod nano, the third generation Retina Display iPad and the rumored 7 inch iPad mini

As new versions of iOS 6 developer build become available, so more of what the final product will look like becomes apparent and one shock this week was that one of the staples of the iPhone -- the YouTube app -- is no longer there AppleInsider reports. The reasons are speculative right now, but there are tensions between Google and Cupertino of course and the maps app has also been banished. However, Matthew Panzarino at TNW, is taking a gentler view and wonders if there are other reasons especially as an Apple statement tells of a new Google app that is due to appear later. Matthew has a number of reasons why the change could be good for both Google and Apple.

While on such change, the new Apple iOS 6 Maps app has added more cities to its 3D view AppleInsider reports. The second page of the article has a number of cities that are now included. Bangkok is not one.

The object of the exercise, as well as designing great products, is to make money and some numbers released recently tell us that although Apple sells fewer phones than Samsung, "Apple far outshines its rivals in both revenue and operating profits," Steven Sande reports, citing figures from an IDC survey.

I have been working my way through Mountain Lion and found some interesting things as well as some not so perfect. I am looking carefully at System Preferences as much of what goes on underneath has been changed so I am rewriting all the articles I have on that and will send them out one by one. This week I looked at the new Accessibility preferences that replaces Universal Access and organises the features in different ways entirely. While looking at this, I found one feature I thought had been removed: the scrolling zoom which is so useful when teaching.

One of the features that was gone in Lion and seems to have returned in Mountain Lion is Save As, but it is not the Save as we remember from before (some 3rd party utilities like TextWrangler do have a real Save As). David Morgenstern on ZDNet is not happy about this and looks at how the new feature works which does not suit some long time Mac users.

I have been an enthusiast of how iPhone cameras have improved over the last couple of updates to the device, and I have far too many apps for the camera, but who cares? I like this stuff and I am nowadays more likely to use the iPhone for many pics than I am to get my DSLR Nikon out of my backpack. Some of the photos at the Olympic Games in London that have appeared in the Guardian are really rather good and Luke Westaway reports on the works of Dan Chung who used an iPhone for some interesting pictures, but (like me) has some attachments too which certainly help. Some of the images are online and are rather good. I love the photo of Dan setting up with an iPhone all taped to an attachment hiding between a lot of more expensive cameras. My source for both of these was MacDaily News.

Nice to have a chuckle from time to time at the expense of the "No one uses Macs" brigade, like my sister who blinks a couple of times when real users are shown to her. She might get a kick out of the shots taken at NASA this week when all the engineers in the control room (except one) were shown with Macs a-blazin' and with some interesting technical displays too as we can see in an item by Slash Lane on AppleInsider.

Half and Half

He also admits his error in not backing up data -- a year lost -- but there are also errors waiting to be exploited throughout the systems that we use and rely on. This is an interesting story -- chilling in its own way -- and the entire four pages is worth a slow read.

There was another link about this event from Mikey Campbell on AppleInsider. While there has ben no response from Apple as yet, we may expect some changes could be made internally, not least to career paths of some of those directly involved in assisting the hack, albeit unwittingly. A further item on the same subject came from Rene Ritchie on iMore, who writes, "it should embarrass and infuriate Apple and Amazon into implementing proper, modern security policies immediately if not sooner."

Late on Tuesday an article on iPodNN has a response from Apple to the hacking who point out that "the customer's data was compromised by a person who had acquired personal information about the customer" but did admit that "our own internal policies were not followed completely." The problem started with Amazon and the way they store information and the dominoes fell one by one.

And Wednesday morning, Jeff Blagdon reports on The Verge that following the problems with the security of Matt Honan's account (and the subsequent disasters) a freeze of over the phone changes is in operation, at least for 24 hours, while they figure out what to do. That is a harsh move, but will protect from copycat hacking for now and the numbers affected will be small initially.

More is appearing about the Apple v Samsung copyright case ongoing in California and AppleInsider has some court documents that I had not seen before and which show some icons that suggest quite strongly that there was an awful lof of copying going on. But who is to blame Samsung (tongue in cheek mode here)? According to Mikey Campbell the arrival of the iPhone caused a crisis of confidence: all that complacency out of the window in one go. And we have seen what has happened to Ericsson, Nokia and RIM.

The term that Campbell uses in the title is not something he made up, but it appears in an internal Samsung memo produced in court last week: ". . . compared to the unexpected competitor Apple's iPhone, the difference is truly that of Heaven and Earth. It's a crisis of design."

For the second week of the trial AppleInsider tells us that the Apple team brought an expert witness along to testify about design. Peter Bressler of Bresslergroup discussed the way he thought that Samsung had simply copied, despite attempts by Samsung to sideline him. Expected next is Susan Kare who, among other things, designed the icons for the original Macs. Electronista also report on Bressler's appearance and mention that he was a former president of the Industrial Designers Society of America

Just when Samsung doesn't need it, there is a report that one of its factories is employing child labour. Now my reaction would be to call the NYTimes out for non-reporting, but MacDaily News does it better and has a nice comment on Mike Daisey.

We also mentioned on Monday that a lot of Samsung products were returned when the buyers realised the devices were not the iPad which makes one wonder about the intelligence of shoppers. But Steven Musil suggests that (despite the documentary evidence produced by Samsung) a lot of Galaxy Tab devices were returned because of device malfunctions.

An interesting article appeared on Tuesday by Jay Yarow on Business Insider who suggests that Samsung has been copying other people's work "forever." The article has a number of interesting side by side comparisons.

While Apple counsel had accused Samsung of providing doctored evidence to make the jury think that there had been no copying, Bryan Bishop writes that the trial restarted with a bang this week when the Samsung counsel accused Apple of doing this too, but the judge is getting restless and demanded to see the devices and photo and what the Samsung lawyer claimed was clearly not so. Objection over-ruled.

While we heard last week that Apple was too late to assert ownership of some Kodak patents, it is still after them. But so is Google. However, with the rapidly falling value of what is left of Kodak, the bidding for the patents fell below what had been expected Mikey Campbell reports on AppleInsider. He adds that Apple is joining with Microsoft and others to go against the Google team that includes Samsung, HTC, LG and patent holdings company RTX. Perhaps rather than the $2.6 billion that had been hoped for, they will only end up with $600 million. A comment I saw later from Seeking Alpha suggests that the figure was considerably lower with bids opening in the range of $150-250 million which if realised would be a disaster for the remnants of Kodak.

Other Matters

Oh here's a goodie. The man who tried to bring us the Padphone is warning Microsoft to think again over its pad thing, Tom Warren reports on The Verge. Other cloners from Taiwan had already poured cold water on Ballmer's latest baby.

The phishers are out to get me. Another PayPal lookalike mail arrived this week with information that what I was trying to transfer -- several thousand dollars which I do not have -- was in excess of the "security borders of our rules." A weird way of putting it. The email of the recipient was @extensions.in.th (silly people) and the sender when I looked at the raw source was at a site called redvanilla.com which is host to some online shopping site.

Local Items

I have my iMac back with its new 500 GB hard disk and while it went away with Lion installed it came back with OS X 10.6.8, Snow Leopard. I left the machine in the office on Tuesday evening downloading a copy of Lion.

Late news

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.