Apple was just awarded a 3rd patent for it’s Slide-to-Unlock feature, and while the internet is still abuzz with it, I just fail to see any reason to get excited.

Yes, Apple looks to be greedy and is apparently more than happy competing with HTC and Samsung in courtrooms rather than the open market–but we all knew this already.

Yes, Apple is patenting something so generic it may apply to ALL slide gestures on an unlock screen? – but we all knew the patent system in the US is whacky and open to abuse.

I’m not the biggest fan of Apple, I consistently compare my Galaxy S3 (which is great) to my wifes Iphone 4 (which is not so great). So when I first heard the news that Apple was suing Samsung for a ridiculous amount of money because of things like ‘slide to unlock’, ‘pinch to zoom’  and even ‘bouncing effect while scrolling’, I thought it was just a signal that Apple was afraid of someone stealing it’s dominance in the Smartphone market.

However, out of sheer coincidence I came across the 2007 keynote address for the iPhone by Steve Jobs. This was the original keynote for the original iPhone (5 years before the iPhone 5), and I was astounded. It was like attending a history lesson for one of the most defining moments in technology. One of the great things about the keynote though, is it ’enlightened’ me on the lawsuit, and allowed me to see the lawsuit through Apples–or more specifically Steve Jobs–eyes, and it’s only through his eyes did I understand why Apple was suing Samsung, I still don’t agree with it, but I can definitely see why Apple is going through great lengths to make life miserable for Samsung and Google.

Initially I thought kickstarter was this once off thing, but over time, the great successes of kickstarter continue to pile up, a couple of months back we had the pebble watch–a e-ink display watch that connected to your iOS or Android phone for display and control.  Now we have Ouya an Android based console hoping to compete with the Playstation and XBOX but on a RM300 price-point. This are way cool products, that anyone with even a slight inclination to tech would love to have.

A couple of weeks back, I wrote about a cool card game based on Computer processes, in hindsight the only thing that post proved was that I’m a geek. The card game was funded through a crowdfunded initiative, and that was really what made it cool.

The instagram camera is cool on its own, and the fact that it’s currently  being crowdsourced through Indiegogo (a website similar to Kickstarter) makes the cool factor– cucumber cool.

In fact, as of now, it’s already reached $6,000 dollars from it’s $50,000 target in just one day. I’m willing to bet that this project will eventually reach it’s pretty low target of just $50,000 – easily.

There are however, some copyright concerns surrounding the camera, particularly since Facebook now own Instagram and they don’t even like wordpress developers building themes that ’look’ like facebook, much less an entire camera that is based on a trademark they own.

If you choose to fund the project, you’re promised a discount on the final item, which the creator hopes to price at under $350 (that’s in US Dollars). However, based on the specs, that may be a bit difficult, we’re talking about a:

Adobe is looking to release a cloud version of their creative applications online called creativecloud. From what I gather from their website it looks to be like a office365 version for creatives. This is probably a step in the right direction, Adobe software usually run into the hundreds or thousands of dollars, and buying the licenses for that software usually incur a huge capital expenditure for startups looking use these applications.

A couple of days back, I wrote about how copyright law was preventing a lot of us from listening the entire Martin Luther King “I have a dream” speech because it was protected by copyright, and in order to listen to it you had to pay Martin Luther Kings family royalty. Today I did some searching on pinterest, and found some rather remarkable works of art around Martin Luther King that were pinned in pinterest, these works of art would not be possible if the family had further copyrighted other aspects of MLKs life, and with newer stricter copyright laws that could very well be the case.

Remember for a pinterest invite, just leave a comment on the post and I’ll send one to you as soon as I have the time. For now, enjoy!

From pinterest User Effeluna 

A couple of weeks back, Dreamhost reported a security breach on it’s servers, so I thought for security sake I should change my passwords as well. I’d been using the same password for the past couple of years and it was time for a change anyway.

However, as most of you will notice,  whenever you’ve just changed your password you instinctively try to re-enter the old one on your next login. This obviously prompts and invalid password prompt which should point you in the right direction. If you’re like me though, you end up thinking you typed it wrongly and try again, this can go on for a while and if you’re not careful you could lock yourself out of your account because you entered the ‘old’ password 3 times in a row.

A good piece of design I noticed from Google is that if you’ve changed your password recently, they actually remind you that you changed it and when you changed it. Thereby stoping your automatic response in it’s track and getting you to type the new one. Just a small piece of code and small feature but a rather good piece of design.

Amazon Web Services has formed the IAAS backbone of many corporations IT infrastructure, through it’s various tools and offerings you can do almost everything under the sun on the cloud. You can spin EC2 instances till they merge together to become one giant super-computer, you can host webpages on their Simple Storage Solution (S3) platform which offers nearly limitless storage, you can even host that data on edge servers via CloudFront to reduce load times, and the list of offerings go on and on.

wpCandy reports that Facebook recently sued an Indonesian blogger who created a wordpress theme that could turn your wordpress site to look like Facebook, and the similarities were really striking. For one your post look exactly like status updates on your Facebook profile and comments on those post look exactly like your friends commenting on your status updates in Facebook.

Similarly, TechCrunch reports that Google has gone after a couple of rather confusing typo domains that look remarkably similar to Youtube. Although not so similarly, Google is making a request for control of the domain rather than suing the pants of those cybersquatters (which it probably should), and not so similarly Google has a much stronger case.

Crowdsourcing seems to the buzz these days, with LG crowdsourcing a cellphone design off crowdsourcing website crowdspring and starbucks receiving more than 17,000 coffee ideas of the web from their crowdsourcing platform mystarbucksidea.com. However, as with all new trends there are detractors and with crowdsourcing the number of detractors seems to be growing each day.

Previously I blogged about the wide spectrum of crowdsourcing , from the low end and mundane on Amazons Mechanical Turk, to the high end and niche Crowdspring. However, when a detractor to the term includes wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, then it’s time to study this a bit more in depth. So what is the ugly side of crowdsourcing and what does it strike a nerve with Jimmy Wales…and just about every designer I know.