Apple : Apple wins slide-to-unlock case against Motorola

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• Apple wins slide-to-unlock case against Motorola
• Updated: OS X Mountain Lion: what you need to know
• Gary Marshall: Are you experiencing Mountain excitement?
• Apple unveils Mac OS X Mountain Lion
• In Depth: 10 things we wish Apple would reinvent
• Apps collecting address book data are 'in violation,' says Apple

Apple wins slide-to-unlock case against Motorola Posted: A German court has found that Motorola has infringed on Apple's patented slide-to-unlock technology with its Android smartphones. The court victory, which is being touted as "a big win for Apple over Android," means Cupertino, in theory, has an injunction on Motorola smartphone sales in Germany. The case relates to patent EP1964022, which covers the act of unlocking a touchscreen display by swiping your finger from one area of the screen to another. Apple owns the patent, which it has used on iOS devices since the first iPhone. New design already implemented However, Motorola plans to appeal the verdict and says that it has already has an alternative phone unlock method in place, so expects no ban to ever come into effect. A Moto spokeswoman said: "Today's ruling in the patent litigation brought by Apple in Munich, Germany, concerns a software feature related to phone unlocking in select Motorola devices sold in Germany. "Motorola has implemented a new design for the feature. Therefore, we expect no impact on current supply or future sales." Yet more lawsuits However, with the appeals and counter appeals set to rumble on, the Munich victory will probably open the door for Apple to challenge more manufacturers carrying the Android operating system and using slide-to-unlock. Motorola may also become the chief target of Apple's legal wrath once it is officially acquired by Google. Patent expert Florien Mueller told the BBC: "[This is a] very significant win for Apple against Android. "After Google closes the acquisition of Motorola Mobility, the Apple-Motorola Mobility dispute will soon gain importance transcending that of the global battle with Samsung," he added.

Updated: OS X Mountain Lion: what you need to know Posted: Mac OS X Mountain Lion: what you need to know Apple has today released details of its next-gen OS. Dubbed Mountain Lion, it's the follow-up to OS X 10.7 Lion and prior to that Snow Leopard and Leopard. As such it's full name will be OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. Let's make one thing clear - this is not a meghat's striking about Mountain Lion is how much further towards iOS Apple is taking its desktop OS - Mac purists will be rightly concerned that Apple seems to be moving its operating systems together to a point where they will converge, but for the rest of us a unified OS is a tantalising prospect. "The Mac is on a roll, growing faster than the PC for 23 straight quarters, and with Mountain Lion things get even better," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing in a statement. "The developer preview of Mountain Lion comes just seven months after the incredibly successful release of Lion and sets a rapid pace of development for the world's most advanced personal computer operating system." OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: release date Mountain Lion has been released to developers today and should be available for consumers this summer - expect a further announcement at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in early June. Apple says theMac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion release date is late Summer 2012. As with Lion, Mountain Lion will be available as a download from the Mac App Store. OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: iOS integration The new OS incorporates a number of features right from iOS - we had some in Lion of course, but Mountain Lion includes reminders, notifications and Twitter integration as well as Messages, Notes (separate, not within Mail) and Game Center. Reminders and Notes help you create and track your to-dos across all your Apple devices. These all sync to iCloud, as does your gaming record in Game Center. More importantly, the arrival of Game Center in OS X means you can play iOS users in the same game. Apple has demoed cross-platform gaming with Reckless Racing - expect many other games to follow suit. OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: iOS terminology One of the most striking things about the new OS is how Apple is renaming everything on its desktop OS to fall in line with iOS. So iCal is now called Calendar, while Addresss Book has become contacts, for example. OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: iCloud integration Apple says Mountain Lion is the first OS X release built with iCloud in mind for easy setup and integration with apps. Whatever that means. Well actually what it means is that Mountain Lion will use your Apple ID to automatically set up Contacts, Mail, Calendar, Messages, FaceTime and Find My Mac. And iCloud will also sync Documents across your devices - any changes are pushed across all your Apple kit so documents are always up to date. Apple has also announced a new API to help developers make document-based apps work with iCloud. OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: iMessage There's also a Messages app that takes the place of iChat, allowing you to continue conversations started on Mac on any iOS device. iMessages will work much as they do on iPad. Again, messaging is unlimited between Macs and iOS devices. This includes high-quality photos and videos, while the Messages app will continue to support AIM, Jabber, Yahoo! Messenger and Google Talk. The continued support for the later is especially pleasing. What's more, any Mac OS X Lion user can get hold of a beta of Messages from apple.com. The final version will be available with Mountain Lion. OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: Notifications Mountain Lion also nicks notifications from iOS. Again there's a Notification Center that provides easy access to alerts from Mail, Calendar, Messages, Reminders, system updates and third party apps. And, just like in iOS, you pull it across from the right of your desktop. Developers will be able to bake in support for this in their own apps. OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: Safari Safari now gets the ability to search right from the address bar, just as you can in Chrome and Firefox. OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: Share Sheets A new feature, called Share Sheets, is supposed to make it easy to share links, photos and videos directly from Apple and third party apps. Sounds like a clipboard to us. However, it enables you to share various types of content with whoever you choose. The interesting thing here is that Apple has partnered with Flickr for photos and Vimeo for video. OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: Twitter integration And, of course, there's Twitter. The service is integrated throughout Mountain Lion so you can sign on once and tweet directly from all your apps including Safari, Quick Look, Photo Booth, Preview and third party apps. OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: AirPlay mirroring Following on from other attempts at computer-based wireless displays, such as Intel's WiDi, Mountain Lion introduces AirPlay Mirroring. You'll be able to mirror your computer screen on a TV wirelessly, though you'll need an Apple TV to connect through. There's 720p HD support (although other systems do support 1080p, Apple TV doesn't) and supposedly amazing realtime response rates for gamers using the mirroring app. OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: Gatekeeper Think there's no need for security software on a Mac? Think again. Apple has introduced a new security feature called Gatekeeper that allows for personalised security settings, working as a kind of safety net for less confident users by offering a setting that allows the Mac to accept only software downloaded from the Mac App Store. OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion for developers Apple says it has created hundreds of new APIs for OS X 10.8. As well as that iCloud Documents API we talked about earlier, the Game Kit APIs tap into the same services as Game Center on iOS, making it possible to create multiplayer games that work across Mac, iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. There's a new graphics infrastructure underpins OpenGL and OpenCL and implements GLKit from iOS 5, to make it easier to create OpenGL apps. What more is there? "Using Core Animation in Cocoa apps is easier than ever, and new video APIs deliver modern 64-bit replacements for low-level QuickTime APIs. Enhanced Multi-Touch APIs give developers double-tap zoom support and access to the system-wide lookup gesture. Kernel ASLR improves security through enhanced mitigation against buffer overflow attacks," says Apple. OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion for Chinese users China is now a massive market for Apple. And as such Mountain Lion introduces new support for Chinese users, "including significant enhancements to the Chinese input method and the option to select Baidu search in Safari." Apple has also announced easy account setup for some of China's biggest email service providers including QQ, 126 and 163. Chinese users can also upload video via Share Sheets directly to video websites Youku and Tudou, and while we like Twitter, there's system-wide support for Sina weibo.

Gary Marshall: Are you experiencing Mountain excitement? Posted: Good news! Apple hasn't run out of cats! Mountain Lion, announced today, will ship this summer and make OS X even more iOS-y than ever before. That's bound to annoy some purists, but I think the majority of Mac users will be delighted. Apple promises that there's more fun stuff to come, but what's already been announced ticks some of our wish list boxes, particularly iMessage on the desktop. There's a new Safari, AirPlay mirroring to Apple TVs, Twitter integration and the option to disable non-approved apps - handy if you've got kids - and you get the same Reminders and Notes apps that you get on iOS, enabling Mail and Calendar to concentrate on what they're supposed to be concentrating on. OS X Mountain Lion: what you need to know What's really interesting about it isn't the iOS-ification of OS X, though. That's been obvious since the Back to the Mac event in late 2010. The interesting bits of Mountain Lion are iCloud and Game Center. Mountain Lion's iCloud integration effectively delivers the kind of cloud-based OS Google's been promising for ages with Chrome OS, and it'll do so with user numbers Google's notebook OS can only dream of. It may well beat Windows 8 to market too, in which case the much-heralded SkyDrive integration and Windows Live ID sign-in will look to Mr and Mrs Punter as if Microsoft's been at the photocopier again. I'd imagine Apple finds that quite funny. And then there's Game Center. By bringing it and AirPlay Mirroring to the Mac, Apple's making some interesting gaming-related moves: cross-platform multiplayer, in-game voice chat and display mirroring - not to mention the ability for developers to create titles that work on iOS and on OS X - indicate that Apple's starting to take gaming very seriously indeed. While Mountain Lion is a stand-alone OS, it isn't designed to stand alone: it's a gateway to iCloud and part of the wider Apple ecosystem. The vision here is simple: your stuff, on whatever device you happen to have handy. That device could be a Mac, or it could be an iPod touch, iPhone, iPad or an enormous HDTV with an Apple TV tucked underneath it. It's personal computing with the emphasis on the personal, not the computing.

Apple unveils Mac OS X Mountain Lion Posted: Apple has released details of Mac OS X Mountain Lion, its next generation operating system for Mac computers. Mountain Lion has been released to developers today and should be available for consumers this summer. The new OS incorporates a number of features that jive nicely with iOS, including iCloud sign up and a Messages app that takes the place of iChat, allowing you to continue conversations started on Mac on any iOS device. As well as the iOS-style messaging app, Mountain Lion includes reminders, notifications and Twitter apps that bring the desktop system more in line with mobile products. Extreme Perhaps the most exciting element of the upgrade is AirPlay Mirroring – you'll be able to mirror your computer screen on another TV wirelessly with 720p HD support and supposedly amazing realtime response rates for gamers using the mirroring app. Security-wise, there's a new feature called Gatekeeper that allows for personalised security settings, working as a kind of safety net for less confident users by offering a setting that allows the Mac to accept only software downloaded from the Mac App Store. After Apple's massive success at distributing Lion through the Mac App Store, we're expecting to see it follow suit with Mountain Lion in the summer months.

In Depth: 10 things we wish Apple would reinvent Posted: 10 things we wish Apple would reinvent Apple's genius isn't in invention - it didn't invent the smartphone, or the tablet PC, or the digital music player - but in reinvention: it saw what other firms were doing and found better ways to do the same thing. That's resulted in some truly terrific bits of kit, but what would happen if Apple's talents got the chance to work on a bigger canvas? Here are ten industries and items we'd love to let Apple loose on. Let us know your nominations in the comments. 1. Mobile phones, again Of course Apple will make the iPhone 5 thinner, cleverer and more useful, but we'd much rather have better data plans than a slightly thinner iPhone. Apple clearly sees the networks as an irritation - it tried and failed to introduce a non-removable, flash-able SIM that would have effectively cut the operators out of iPhone retail - but while that climbdown shows that Apple can't boss the networks around too much, it still has enough muscle to demand more customer-friendly options. Top of our list? Shared data plans that work across multiple bits of Apple kit without unnecessary extra fees, such as charging for tethering. That's the equivalent of ISPs charging you to connect anything to your router. 2. Home automation We've been promised home automation since the 1930s, and we'd love Apple to give it a go; however, we suspect that the future of home automation is third-party apps on Apple (and Android) devices rather than anything Apple-branded. 3. Photography Meeting somebody doesn't mean you'll go into business with them, but Steve Jobs' meeting with Lytro means that Apple has at least considered using the firm's extraordinary shoot-first-focus-later technology in the iPhone. 4. Mobile payments 2011 wasn't quite the year of mobile payments but momentum is building, and Apple's only taken tentative steps into this fast-growing market. US shoppers have the EasyPay option in the Apple Store app for easy mobile purchasing of Apple kit; imagine if EasyPay added NFC technology and worked in other shops too. 5. Power The weak point in mobile devices remains power: if you open up an iPad you'll find that it's largely made of battery. Future Apple kit may dispense with batteries in favour of long-lasting fuel cells - patents show that Apple's certainly experimenting with the idea - but in the meantime the challenge is to make mobile devices slimmer, lighter and longer-lasting, and Apple's working on that too. Apple could also reinvent the humble charger: while wireless charging has been around for years, adoption by Apple could finally make it the default option for gadgets. 6. TV We'd love a single TV to replace our various set-top boxes and media devices, and Apple is apparently working on it: The rumours are becoming more numerous and more frequent. Can Apple really deliver TV with what Steve Jobs called "the simplest user interface you could imagine"? 7. Business computing Steve Jobs famously hated the enterprise market, but unhappy white-collar workers really want Apple kit in their offices. The hot trend in IT these days is "consumerisation", where tech-savvy employees bring their iPads and iPhones to work; a recent study of IT professionals found that 87% of employees were using personal devices for work purposes, with iPhones particularly popular. 8. In-car infotainment It doesn't matter whether you drive a Ford or a Ferrari: in-car infotainment systems are mostly rubbish and crying out for a bit of Apple attention (although BMW's iDrive, Mini Connected and Ford Sync deserve a bit of praise). On Kickstarter the Devium Dash has the right idea: instead of a stereo and sat-nav, there's a bit to stick your iPhone in and some car-friendly apps. 9. Public Transport What's public transport like in your area? If it's anything like ours it's grim, polluting, sits you next to madmen and smells faintly of kebabs and farts. Now imagine something like Heathrow Airport's ULTra Personal Rapid Transit System with an added dose of Apple smarts: futuristic, elegant and hopefully both madman- and whiff-free. [Image Credit: Ultra Global PRT] 10. Manufacturing Is anyone else uncomfortable with Apple's choice of suppliers? We know everybody's outsourcing and Apple's better than many, but Apple has the smarts - and the cash - to do something different. As Kevin Meyer, author of Evolving Excellence, puts it: "How about... sinking a billion or two into developing truly innovative manufacturing methods and systems. Imagine what could happen if the same level of design prowess that was applied to product design was applied to manufacturing design." He adds: "Apple has the unique opportunity to change a global dynamic."

Apps collecting address book data are 'in violation,' says Apple Posted: Apple has released a statement claiming that all apps that collect address book data from iOS users, without explicit permission, are in violation of its policies. The company says it is currently working on a software fix to prevent offending applications, like the Path social network app, from harvesting the data from your smartphone. The statement from Cupertino follows over a week of controversy since it was discovered that Path stored data from the address books of its user base. The company has since apologised and cleaned its servers, but other iOS apps still have the ability to collate the data without asking you first. Violating guidelines Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr said: "Apps that collect or transmit a user's contact data without their prior permission are in violation of our guidelines. "We're working to make this even better for our customers, and as we have done with location services, any app wishing to access contact data will require explicit user approval in a future software release." Apple's insistence that it will fix the problem in a 'future software release' doesn't offer any sort of timeline for users worried about what third party companies may be doing with their data. The company's statement on Wednesday may have resulted from a letter sent to Tim Cook by members of the United States Congress, pushing Apple for answers.

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