Cody Taylor

The Macintosh turned 25 years old this past weekend, and Apple [AAPL] seems to be celebrating the occasion by sicking its blood-lusting attorneys on Palm [PALM] in a potential patent infringement suit. The intellectual property in question is Apple’s multi-touch software, which enables iPhone and iPod Touch users to interact with their devices …

Toe, The writes “Apple’s 358-page patent application for their iPhone interface entitled Touch screen device, method, and graphical user interface for determining commands by applying heuristics has been approved after more than two years of review by the US Patent Office. Apple’s claims include: ‘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.’ As Apple seems eager to defend their intellectual property, what will this mean to other touch developers?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We recently reported the story of the pirated iPhone game ‘Whack em All’, where the developer actually engaged the game’s cracker instead of taking an aggressive stance. The dialogue had a surprising effect. Sales increased 100%, pirates donated and the game is now available free of charge.

Awesome. If it works as well as the auto-brightness on my iPhone I’ll have to stop using my Church’s free wi-fi to catch up on Fleshbot posts during Sunday service.

Palm, whose new Pre handset, though built around a different paradigm than the iPhone, boasts some remarkably iPhone-like features. Palm, a company who’s reinvention is being stewarded by Jon Rubinstein, once Apple’s head of hardware engineering and a guy with an undoubtedly deep knowledge of Cupertino’s R&D process.

Ever since Tim Cook made his non-specific, veiled threats in response to a direct question about how the Palm Pre “almost directly emulates the kind of touch interface” found on the iPhone, the entire tech community has waited for the next move. Now Lynn Fox, a Palm spokesperson has stepped into the fray: “Palm has a long history of innovation…

Spotted during Season 1 Episode 12, the KnightPhone pulls just enough iconography from the iPhone to make people think (oh, it’s an iPhone!) but simultaneously changes enough details so that people subsequently realize (oh wait, it’s not really an iPhone, it’s just kinda sorta an iPhonish thing).

During Apple’s earnings conference call yesterday, Apple COO Tim Cook fielded a wide variety of questions, but two answers in particular helped shed a bit of light on the likelihood that Apple would enter the netbook market or release a lower end iPhone.