Hasta La Gadget!

A legal dispute between Apple and IBM over a former IBM employee hired to serve as Apple’s new senior vice president of Devices Hardware Engineering has been resolved, Apple announced Tuesday.

Mark Papermaster will start work on April 24, reporting to CEO Steve Jobs, who is currently on a six-month health-related hiatus.

IBM sued Papermaster in October, alleging that Papermaster is “in possession of significant and highly confidential IBM trade secrets and know-how, as well as highly sensitive information regarding business strategy and long-term opportunities.”

IBM pointed to non-compete agreement signed by Papermaster in 2006 in which he agreed not to work for an IBM competitor for at least a year if he ever left IBM. In November, a U.S. District court ordered Papermaster to immediately stop work amidst fears that he might disclose IBM trade secrets.

“The litigation between IBM and Mark Papermaster has been resolved,” Apple said in a Tuesday statement.

For this week’s Photoshop Contest, I asked for some iPhone apps that would never survive the approval process. Warning: some of these are NSFW, more are just in poor taste. Hey, I’m just the messenger!

First Place — Peter Telesco
Second Place — El Guapo
Third Place — Jesse Armstrong

It took a couple of days for this to surface, but it looks like Apple was awarded yet another patent last week–a big one. Awarded on January 20, the company scored patent number 7,479,949, which was applied for on April 18 of last year. The patent covers multi-touch functionality like pinch, rotation, and swipe.

World of Apple has the text from the patent titled “Touch screen device, method, and graphical user interface for determining commands by applying heuristics.”

It begins,

A computer-implemented method for use in conjunction with a computing device with a touch screen display comprises: detecting one or more finger contacts with the touch screen display, applying one or more heuristics to the one or more finger contacts to determine a command for the device, and processing the command. The one or more heuristics comprise: a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a one-dimensional vertical screen scrolling command, a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a two-dimensional screen translation command, and a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a command to transition from displaying a respective item in a set of items to displaying a next item in the set of items.

Does this spell disaster for the forthcoming Palm Pre–the device to which most assumed Apple’s temporary CEO, Tim Cook, was referring to when he recently made veiled legal threats?

As our mobile analyst Sascha Segan would (and will no doubt continue to) say, “There. Is. More. Than. One. Multi. Touch. Patent.”

This article was written on June 04, 2008 by CyberNet.

With the WWDC conference quickly approaching, rumors are running rampant about not only the next iPhone, but also when the App Store will launch. News.com is reporting that Apple is ready to launch the first app on Monday and so people are drawing the conclusion that the App Store will launch on Monday as well. Originally it was said that the App Store would launch by the end of June, so is Apple just ahead of the game or will it only be announced on Monday and released later?

There’s so much hype surrounding the App Store because this is the way that people will be able to get their hands on all of the third-party applications that have been developed. Ever since the SDK was made available, developers have been hard at work trying to come up with applications that both iPhone and iPod Touch (assuming they pay the fee to get the update) users will want to use. We already know that an AIM client is in the works, as is a mobile version of Spore, along with hundreds of other applications.

As some of you have probably heard rumored before, the new iPhone is expected to have support for GPS technology. News.com makes a good point and says, “the combination of GPS and faster networking speeds should allow for a whole range of location-aware applications to proliferate on the iPhone, as they have on other competing phones.” Oh the possibilities this brings to the table now!

We’ll be following the WWDC keynote scheduled to start at 10:00 A.M. (Pacific) on Monday, June 9th. It should be an interesting day…

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It is happening again. Once more, the smooth, sultry sounds of Josh, Paul, and Nilay have come to whisk you away to that magical super-land known as the Engadget Podcast. This week, you can hear the editors sound off on a variety of scintillating subjects, including President Obama’s BlackBerry, Apple’s legal threats, Kodak’s new home entertainment ventures, and the (presumed) new HTC G2. So crank up the iTunes visualizer and prepare to be freaked out.

Hosts: Joshua Topolsky, Paul Miller, Nilay Patel
Producer: Trent Wolbe
Song: Never Gonna Give You Up

00:01:10 – Engadget’s Netflix HD streaming shootout
00:18:18 – Kodak’s Theatre HD Player with gyro-based Pointer Remote unboxed and reviewed
00:29:25 – HTC’s G2 “Sapphire 2.0” caught slumming in the wilds
00:40:03 – Apple on smartphone competition: “if others rip off our intellectual property, we will go after them.”
00:54:19 – Confirmed: Obama gets his BlackBerry, no Sectera Edge in sight
01:01:43 – Best Buy Advice

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Engadget Podcast 130 – 01.23.2009: Angry rant edition originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 23 Jan 2009 19:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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