Alongside Apple's undeniable success with the iPhone App Store have been the near-constant stories of app rejections for dubious or entirely bogus reasons (to be fair, most rejections are entirely legitimate). But what gives Apple the right to reject or even remove apps? The iPhone Developer Program License Agreement, to which all iPhone developers must agree. The EFF has now acquired copies of the agreement and analyzed some of the more troubling clauses. Would they stand up in court? There's no way to know until someone sues Apple.

 

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Fetch Softworks: Fetch 5.5 has new support for Mac OS X
10.5 Leopard technologies like Quick Look. And you can
upload with the oldest technology of all, Copy and Paste!
Download your free trial version! <http://fetchsoftworks.com/>   Copyright © 2010 Adam C. Engst. TidBITS is copyright © 2010 TidBITS Publishing Inc. If you're reading this article on a Web site other than TidBITS.com, please let us know, because if it was republished without attribution, by a commercial site, or in modified form, it violates our Creative Commons License.

Want to use a text expansion utility to save typing cumbersome phrases but dislike switching programs to create snippets? The new TextExpander 3.0 from SmileOnMyMac adds a hotkey combination that opens a quick entry window for snippet creation, and another hotkey lets you edit the last-expanded snippet, making it easier to update one that's no longer quite right. Other new features in TextExpander include "fill-in" snippets that can prompt you for additional text to be entered manually, new options for finding snippets in your collection, and snippet syncing via both MobileMe and Dropbox. Minor changes include the capability to insert Tab and Return characters in snippets, correction of accidental double-capitalizations at the start of sentences, automatic updates via Sparkle, and more. Finally, TextExpander 3 is now a full-fledged application rather than a preference pane. ($34.95 new, $15 upgrades, free for those who purchased after 1 November 2009, 4.5 MB)

 

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Microsoft's MacBU: Supporting Mac users with Office 2008.
Is your Office up-to-date? Make sure you're running the latest
versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage by choosing
Check for Updates from the Help menu of any Office application!   Copyright © 2010 Adam C. Engst. TidBITS is copyright © 2010 TidBITS Publishing Inc. If you're reading this article on a Web site other than TidBITS.com, please let us know, because if it was republished without attribution, by a commercial site, or in modified form, it violates our Creative Commons License.

snydeq writes "Google has launched the Google Apps Marketplace, providing a venue for third-party, cloud-based applications to supplement Google's own online applications. The program enables integrations with such applications as Google Gmail, Documents, Sites, and Calendar. All told, the effort begins with 50 vendors participating, including Atlassian, NetSuite, Skytap, and Zoho. Participation in Google Apps Marketplace is open to customers of the Premier, Standard, and Education editions of Google Apps. Applications are linked to the marketplace via REST Web services and APIs including OpenID and OAuth."

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Apple was able to achieve dominance in the MP3 player arena by closely marrying hardware and software, a formula that it has extended to its success with the iPhone and the App Store. As the company gets ready to ship the iPad, the next phase in that evolution, Amazon, Dell, and Google are teaming up on the Dell Streak tablet, which will run the Android OS and have access to 300,000-plus e-books in the Kindle store, the more than 11 million songs available in Amazon’s MP3 store, and in excess of 50,000 movies and TV shows for rent or purchase.

alobar72 writes "I have quite a few old maps (several hundreds; 100+ years old, some are already damaged – so time is not on my side). What I want to do is to digitize them and to apply geo-coordinates to them so I can use them as overlays for openstreetmap data or such. Obviously I cannot put those maps onto my €80 scanner and go. Some of them are really large (1.5m x 1.5m roughly, I believe) and they need to be treated with great care because the paper is partly damaged. So firstly I need a method or service provider that can do the digitizing without damaging them. Secondly I need a hint what the best method is to apply geo coordinates to those maps then. The maps are old and landscape and places have changed, it maybe difficult to identify exact spots. So: are there any experiences or tips I could use?"

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ral writes "The human tongue can taste more than sweet, sour, salty, bitter and protein. Researchers have added fat to that list. Dr. Russell Keast, an exercise and nutrition sciences professor at Deakin University in Melbourne, told Slashfood, 'This makes logical sense. We have sweet to identify carbohydrate/sugars, and umami to identify protein/amino acids, so we could expect a taste to identify the other macronutrient: fat.' In the Deakin study, which appears in the latest issue of the British Journal of Nutrition, Dr. Keast and his team gave a group of 33 people fatty acids found in common foods, mixed in with nonfat milk to disguise the telltale fat texture. All 33 could detect the fatty acids to at least a small degree."

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Icarus Studios on Wednesday announced the release of the Mac version of its massively multiplayer online game Fallen Earth, offering a Beta of the software to anyone who wants to download and test it. Gamers without current Fallen Earth subscriptions can sign up for a 10-day trial plan.

An anonymous reader writes "'Alien' and 'Star Wars' art director Roger Christian was given £25,000 by George Lucas in 1979 to make a 25-minute medieval B-feature called 'Black Angel.' This spiritual tale of a knight on a strange quest was inspired by Christian's near-fatal fever when he fell ill in Mexico making 'Lucky Lady.' 'Black Angel' made a huge impression, not least because it shared the dark tone of 'Empire Strikes Back.' John Boorman showed it to the crew of 'Excalibur' as a template for how he wanted his film to look, and 'Black Angel' went on to influence films such as 'Dragonslayer' and 'Legend' throughout the 1980s and beyond. But it has not been seen by anyone since 'Empire' finished its theatrical run. Two weeks ago Roger Christian unearthed a print of a film that was thought lost forever, and in this interview he talks about 'Black Angel,' and provides the only picture from the film that has ever hit the Internet."

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It appears that the iPad will not support iPhone Internet tethering. How might this affect which iPad (Wi-Fi-only vs. Wi-Fi + 3G) you should buy? What is Internet tethering anyway? How does it work? And why isn't it available yet on your iPhone? For all the answers, read on...

HipToday writes "As posted on the OpenBSD Journal, OpenSSH 5.4 has been released: 'Some highlights of this release are the disabling of protocol 1 by default, certificate authentication, a new "netcat mode," many changes on the sftp front (both client and server) and a collection of assorted bugfixes. The new release can already be found on a large number of mirrors and of course on www.openssh.com.'"

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Stanford University has released the results of a survey of 200 students who own iPhones and found 10 percent characterized themselves as fully addicted to the device, or five on a scale of one to five, while 34 percent rated themselves as fours and only six percent said they were ones.

Zordak writes "Amazon's infamous '1-click' patent has been in reexamination at the USPTO for almost four years. Patently-O now reports that 'the USPTO confirmed the patentability of original claims 6-10 and amended claims 1-5 and 11-26. The approved-of amendment adds the seeming trivial limitation that the one-click system operates as part of a 'shopping cart model.' Thus, to infringe the new version of the patent, an eCommerce retailer must use a shopping cart model (presumably non-1-click) alongside of the 1-click version. Because most retail eCommerce sites still use the shopping cart model, the added limitation appears to have no practical impact on the patent scope.'" Also covered at TechFlash.

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Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which launched last June, saw its share of U.S. search traffic jump from 10.7 percent in January to 11.5 percent in February, according to comScore, while Yahoo’s share dropped from 17 percent to 16.8 percent and Google stayed relatively flat, with 65.4 percent in January and 65.5 percent in February.

Barence writes "A debate that crops up time and again is whether it's better to have a dedicated keyboard on your smartphone or whether an on-screen keyboard with text correction is adequate. Some phones with screen-based keyboards have started to provide tactile feedback, either using an ultra-quick spin of their vibration alert or, like the BlackBerry Storm2, using clever piezo-electric technology to simulate the feel of a button press. But which system works best? PC Pro's Paul Ockendon gathered six of the most popular handsets around and put them through a timed typing test to see which proved quickest and most typo-free."

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52-year-old Anthony Digati was arrested for trying to extort $200,000 from an insurance firm by threatening to spam them with six million emails unless they paid up. Digati said he would use a spam service and his amazing talents as a "huge social networker" to drag the company "through the muddiest waters imaginable" and presumably unfriend everyone. He added that the price would increase to $3 million if they failed to pay up by Monday, according to federal authorities.

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A year after making its public debut at GDC 2009, OnLive announced at this year’s Game Developers Conference that the Mac and PC versions of its cloud gaming service will be available to the general public throughout the 48 contiguous United States on June 17, during E3 2010 in Los Angeles. Pricing will be US$14.95 per month, with plans to announce multi-month pricing and other offers by the start of E3. Purchase and rental of games will require separate fees to be determined by publishers.

kang327 writes "As Java developers we are used to the familiar file-based user interface that is used by all of the major IDEs. A team at Brown University has developed an IDE for Java called Code Bubbles that makes a fairly radical departure from current IDEs — it is based on fragments instead of files. The idea is that you can see many different pieces of code at once. Fragments can form groups, have automatic layout assistance, wrap long lines based on syntax, and exist in a virtual workspace that you can pan. A video shows reading and editing code, opening different kinds of info such as Javadocs, bug reports and notes, annotating and sharing workspaces, and debugging with bubbles. They report on several user studies that show the system increases performance for the tasks studied, and also that professional developers were enthusiastic about using it. There is also a Beta that you can sign up for."

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Verizon is telling its employees that the iPad represents “an opportunity” for the company to encourage customers to buy the WiFi-enabled version of the device, pair it something like the MiFi, and use Verizon’s network, rather than AT&T’s. Engadget was sent a photo of an internal Verizon web page that touts the benefits of going that route, noting that the 3G version of the iPad costs US$130 more, plus the fee for the 3G service plan.

SkinnyGuy writes "The only thing more remarkable than NewEgg shipping fake Core i7 CPUs to customers is getting your hands on one and checking it out. Apparently there are only a couple hundred of these things in existence and Gearlog somehow managed to get and unbox one. The images are fascinating."

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Gas Powered Games’ Chris Taylor and EA DICE’s Karl Magnus Troedsson this week expressed interest in bringing their companies’ games to the Mac via Steam, which Valve is releasing for the Mac next month, along with its entire catalog of games. Gas Powered released the real-time strategy game Supreme Commander 2 last week, and EA DICE is responsible for the Battlefield series of first-person shooters.