One young designer takes on a hefty hunk of Apple legalese and tries to make it friendly. Meanwhile an old school union boss has a beef with Cupertino, but it’s not all bad news, as an Arizona-based company has dropped its dispute with 1 Infinite Loop. And we hope you like dissecting innocuous photos for clues, because we’ve got our fill of that. The remainders for Wednesday, September 7, 2011 are hot on the trail.
Coming to terms (The Daily)
Gregg Bernstein’s master’s thesis at the Savannah College of Art and Design was a simple, if unconventional one: Redesign iTunes’s Terms of Service into a human-readable format. Thanks to a local law professor, the 4137-word document was condensed into just 381 words, then organized with bullet points, indentation, and clear numbering. A little known fact, discovered during the process? Section IV, sub-section 3, paragraph a, sub-paragraph ii gives Apple limited, non-negotiable rights to your immortal soul. Just FYI.
Union: Obama should attack ‘unpatriotic’ Apple (Washington Examiner)
Teamsters president Jim Hoffa says that Apple should be spending its money here instead of investing in China—to do otherwise is unpatriotic. He’s also suggested that Apple change its logo to something a little more like this.
Arizona company drops iCloud suit, changes name (CNet)
The trademark suit leveled against Apple by iCloud Communications appears to have evaporated, as the company has reportedly decided instead to rebrand as Clear Digital Communications. The company has also dropped the suit it filed in an Arizona U.S. District Court, apparently “without costs or attorneys’ fees to either party.” Perhaps they were swayed by a calm and reasoned argument. Or, perhaps, a few million of them.
iPhone 5 test photo leaked? Update: device sort of visible in reflection (This is my next…)
One site stumbled across a photo supposedly posted by an Apple employee and which bears metadata purporting that it was taken on Apple’s campus by an iPhone 5. So naturally, the folks at This is my next have Zaprudered the living bejeezus out of the image, including trying to isolate and enhance what appears to be a slight reflection showing the person who took the photo. Quick! Someone call Tom Hanks with the silly haircut.
Product News:
WritePad for iPad 5.3 – Version 5.3 of PhatWare’s writing app for iPad adds a command to import unknown words from the calendar, contacts, and the current document to the user dictionary, improving handwriting recognition. Also included are options for disabling the word autocompletion tooltip in keyboard mode, and disabling the recognition of URLs, phone numbers, and email addresses in text documents. $10.
PDF Expert 3.0 for iPad – Readdle has updated its PDF utility for iPad to feature a redesigned annotation toolbar, including new annotations like lines, arrows, rectangles, and circles; page management features such as add, delete, move, and rotate; the ability to copy and paste pages between documents; a Recents menu to quickly switch between PDFs; and more. There were also improvements to WebDAV, sync for FTP/SFTP storage sync, and performance. $10.