06.23.11
All Your Fruit Are Belong to Apple
Photo of the Xerox Alto, taken by Martin Pittenauer
“Hey, Steve, just because you broke into Xerox’s store before I did and took the TV doesn’t mean I can’t go in later and steal the stereo.”
–Bill Gates, Microsoft
Summary: Apple’s abusive behaviour (e.g. trademark bullying and patent hoarding) is noted and responded to
LAST night we wrote about Apple's abusive behaviour. With wealth comes Hubris, so it’s time to call Nemesis out again. It came out and nearly bankrupted Apple just over a decade ago.
Continuing the subject we addressed last night, Apple thinks that it owns the name of a fruit and now “Appl” too. As a Microsoft sympathiser put it:
[T]he team has decided to organise a naming contest for the Amahi application store. My personal favourite so far? Appl store. You know, appl, short for application. It’s sad that they have to go through this, but I fully understand them in not being willing to take on Apple in court.
For those who have not paid attention, Apple sent a threat to an open source project for using the “Appl” word. There is also a trademark on “app store”. As Neil Richards put it, “Apple has already sued Amazon.com for using the term for its own Android store. It was not Apple which conceptualized the name AppStore. The name came from former Apple executive Marc Benioff, now head of Salesforce.”
Isn’t that ironic?
In other Apple news, what Apple calls “pro” is actually outright rubbish, based on this report from another Microsoft sympathiser. She writes:
Apple released a completely overhauled version of its Final Cut Pro software yesterday, much to the chagrin of some of its users.
The early response to Final Cut Pro X is at best mixed, with some complaining that the film editing application lacks XML support, and worse still, is bereft of backward compatibility with previous versions of the software.
Others who use Final Cut Pro are saying it’s too early to be moaning about the application, which Apple said yesterday had been “rebuilt from the ground up”.
The complete re-write of the software has left many film and video editors perplexed by the radical changes to Apple’s Final Cut Pro, which competes with Avid in the film editing software market.
A steady stream of insults against and in support of Apple is currently flowing around the blogosphere.
As we stated many time before, Apple had ripped off so many other companies (not just Xerox) and resorted to using its hype machine. It then pretended that it actually invented what was shamelessly lifted. Apple is currently patenting many ideas on which there is clearly prior art, most latterly this patent on touch screens:
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has awarded Apple a key patent for touch screen functionality on portable devices, such as the iPhone and iPad.
For a little bit of context, Xerox had touch screens even in the 1980s. None of this is new and Apple’s alleged invention is probably a little tweak upon existing knowledge. Apple is the Edison of the 21st century–the aggressive patent troll who is mistakenly believed to be an innovator. All Edison did was take other people's ideas, made minor changes to them, and then claimed credit for them (using a patent). He hacked the patent system. Edison was just a businessman, like Bill Gates. To him, technology was just a way of doing business and gaining power/glory. He happens to be the man behind GE, which is a prominent proponent of software patents [1, 2, 3]. █
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Will said,
June 23, 2011 at 11:04 am
As far as video editing goes, I’ve heard quite a few people say that OpenShot is very good these days.
I also heard that Kdenlive may beat out OpenShot a little, but only for the highest-end professional work–and with that comes a higher learning curve.
For most people, it looks like OpenShot is a very capable editor now.
twitter Reply:
June 24th, 2011 at 8:15 am
Kino is easy to use and should work for most people. Apple’s story board presentation and auto segmenting of scenes is nice or average users, but the cost to your software freedom is unacceptable and it is only a matter of time for software like kdenlive to provide these features if it does not already.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz Reply:
June 24th, 2011 at 9:35 am
I struggled a bit with video editors because I lack experience with them. But avidemux kept is simple. kdenlive was hard for me.
twitter Reply:
June 24th, 2011 at 5:59 pm
Everything is easier if you start with the right formats. I use ffmpeg2theora to tame camera videos. From there, they can be dragged and dropped onto the story line of Kino. Kino lacks the audio track editing I see in screenshots of Kenlive but I imagine Kenlive will otherwise act the same. The rest is relatively easy.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz Reply:
June 24th, 2011 at 6:41 pm
Slicing videos was hard enough for me, I eventually found a trick.
twitter Reply:
June 24th, 2011 at 9:14 pm
Yes, I found a trick for that too but that’s not what you would use one of these editors for. Non linear editors are used to crop out and move parts of your story around. Kino has buttons on top for splicing and joining scenes. You use this to edit out fluff, order things appropriately or to make TV shows like Dragnet, where most of the dialog is a head shot and the actors deliver all of their lines in one sitting.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz Reply:
June 25th, 2011 at 3:07 am
Audacity was so much more intuitive, but audio only (which still oughtn’t make much of a difference).