Slashdot Mirror
LinSpire LPhoto and LSongs: bring on the lawsuits!
Sir Joltalot writes "Over at OSNews they're covering the newly-renamed LinSpire's LSongs and LPhoto apps. Take a look at those screenshots, and you'll notice a striking resemblence to Apple's iTunes and iPhoto. Take a look at this flash presentation and you'll see that LPhoto and iPhoto are almost exactly alike. They look like nifty apps, to be sure, but how long will they last? I would have thought LinSpire might have learned from the whole Lindows name fiasco..."
Yeah its sad. ..because people are so smart..ahem no.
There's no GUI originality these days..
Bu I doubt Apple care, it just assimilates more followers to adopt the MAc GUI paradigm...
There are (horrible) Gnome skins that look just like XP. I doubt M$ really care.
Wow. I've heard imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, but it's hard to find anything flattering in those screenshots.
All ugliness aside, they will be lucky not to get sued by Apple. But I doubt anyone will be confusing these for their Macintosh counterparts.
Granted, Linux could certainly use more entry level apps that are attractive enough to bring in the common home users, but these apps are definitely not going to cut it.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Apple already lost a lawsuit over look and feel, setting a precedent that makes it safe for openoffice to look like ms office.
If you took a look at the screenshots, you'd see they don't really look much like iTunes and iPhoto. If you think they do, you might want to get your eyes checked. The functionality may be similar but the styling and quality of the ui between the apps is worlds apart. The L-apps look like crap, IMHO.
- File/Edit/Controls/Visualizer/Advanced menu system
- "Source" title on playlist/library listing on left
- Expandable browsing area
- Column view of browsing
- Checkboxes on playlist
- Play icon in playlist in same position
- "Selected song" caption for album art and same positioning
- Add/shuffle/repeat/album art toggle buttons in same location
- Equalizer/visualizer/eject buttons in same location
- Play controls / now playing / search / browse in same position, only at bottom of screen
- Exact same play position marker
Nope, no similiarities here. Of course, I wonder if...Just because a product emulates a look and feel doesn't mean it's BAD does it? Since when was there a patent on a GUI?
Ever since Apple got US patent number 2002089529 , titled Media Player Interface. Look at the drawings -- that's iTunes. That probably also explains why LSongs has the player controlls at the bottom of the screen.
Oh no! Open Office doesn't install fonts for you! The horror!
:)
Yes, the onus of putting TT fonts in ~/.fonts... Might as well move back to MS, its obviously unusable
Seriously, I have over 50 fonts avail. to me in OpenOffice.
"This calls for a very special blend of psychology and extreme violence" - Vyvyan "The Young Ones"
Here's some interesting background into Look and Feel lawsuits. I remember in college having long debates that Windows 95 was a ripoff of Apple's System 7. Apple has "Trash" and MSFT has "Recycle Bin". Apple list their icons on the right and MSFT list them on left...so on and so on.
-- ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space!
Actually, it looks almost exactly like that if you switch it into Browse mode and turn on album artwork. The only difference is moving the playback buttons to the bottom, which are otherwise identically arranged. If it wasn't for the app being skinned differently (and that damn ugly), it would be almost completely identical. The iPhoto rip-off is even more similar, only lacking a few extra buttons along the bottom.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
http://biz.yahoo.com/rf/040420/tech_lindows_ipo_1. html
Reuters
Software maker Lindows files to go public
Tuesday April 20, 8:47 am ET
WASHINGTON, April 20 (Reuters) - Software maker Lindows Inc. on Tuesday filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (News - Websites) for an initial public offering of as much as $57.5 million in common stock.
The San Diego, California-based company, which said it was changing the name of its Linux-based operating system after a trademark dispute with Microsoft Corp.(NasdaqNM:MSFT - News), did not provide details as to the size and price of the proposed IPO.
Perhaps a derivative is. But the originals were designed in ~1495 by Claude Garamond. Apple's official corporate typeface was tooled in the '80s and was based on ITC's Garamond Condensed.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
The themes that were pulled didn't just copy the "Aqua" UI, they used the trademarked apple logo. There are quite a few aqua-style themes out there.
0 1 - just my two bits
Apple lost that lawsuit because they licensed the look and feel to Microsoft, not because their case had no merit.
Apple copied point-click from Unix? Umm... no. Apple did use the idea from a (paid for) trip to Xerox-PARC, and then Microsoft copied Apple's work (whether that copying was legal or not was the subject of a now settled-out-of-court series of lawsuits).
I don't know exactly when X11 came out, (and a quick googling didn't net me that information), but I do know that Apple had the first commercial mouse out. There had been drafting devices that were used to input blueprints that were similar, but they did not do anything but designate points.
Indeed, Apple had the first widely accessible commercial computer with a WIMP interface driven by a mouse- the Lisa. The PERC Workstation (not Unix, something weirder) had a GUI and was available commercially around the same time, but was not very available- even to those with the buttload of funds required to buy one.
AFAIK, the first X11 came out aroudn 1985. A year or so after the Lisa, around the same time that MS Windows 1.0 came out. Motif was 1987 IIRC.
And Apple certainly didn't copy Unix, that is laughable. If anything, Apple copied Smalltalk, but as you point out, they bought the engineers behind it and did so more or less with Xerox's approval.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Actually, Apple finally settled that lawsuit out-of-court. That was when Microsoft promised to continue development of Office for Mac for one more round (at least... that was Office v.X), and make an investment in Apple for 2 or three years (non-voting, since sold for a nice profit).
And the first series of the lawsuit was dismissed because Microsoft had worked some wording into a contract with Apple in the agreement to produce the predecessor to Excel (one of the original mac os 1.0 programs) that allowed them to use the MacOS interface ideas... their interpretation was that this meant they could create their own OS with these ideas. The judge agreed.
I just felt the need to mention this, because even as they roll out new applications and names, the "Lin*" people seem to be dropping the ball in other (traditionally strong in the Linux world) areas.
Several months ago, I purchased LindowsOS 2.0 and XandrOS 2.0 Deluxe, both of which use installers based on the old Corel Linux installer. I have several HP Omnibook 4150B (not 4150) laptops, and neither installer would work with my laptops.
The bug itself is known -- the 4150B cannot boot Linux without passing 'NOAGP' to the kernel at boot time -- but neither distribution's installer would pass the parameter correctly.
I contacted both companies with the problem, and the solution.
The Xandros people suggested a few alternative workarounds (that didn't work), then did the sensible thing: they fixed the installer so that the 'NOAGP' parameter can be passed. I use XandrOS almost daily.
The Lin* people suggested a few alternative workarounds (that didn't work), then sent me this note:
"Dear Customer,
I am sorry but with LindowsOS, you cannot change the boot parameters."
End of line. I wrote back, suggesting they change their compatibility listing for the HP Omnibook 4150B to "KNOWN TO BE INCOMPATIBLE", but here it is several months later and they still list it as "Believed to be compatible".
LindowsOS has yet to be installed on any of my computers, even the ones it is compatible with, for this reason.
Just something I thought the Linux community would like to know about.
The shell in Digital's VMS had history and completion. David Cutler was a lead developer of both VMS and the Windows NT kernel.
Actually Steve Jobs is Apples "iCEO" (No joke, interm-CEO, he's doesn't want to be "offical")
I guess Doug Englebart and "The Mother of all Demos" in the mid sixties was just an LSD induced mass hullucination.
No. That was great demo, but it wasn't GUI. It was all text. They had a mouse cursor (called a "bug") moving above the text, but that's all. It wasn't what someone today would call a "GUI", by the popular definition.
(The popular definition is arguably wrong, since onscreen text is actually a subset of graphics)
Actually, I know from personal experience that you're wrong. My computer illiterate girlfriend has an iBook (one of the all-white 2001 models with dual USB ports) and a 15 GB iPod. She routinely imports songs from CDs and then moves them into playlists that are hosted only on the iPod; once there, she deletes them from the iBook's local storage. So her iBook's precious hard drive space is conserved, and the music is put exactly where she needs it. And when she synchronizes, the songs that are only on the iPod stay on the iPod; they don't disappear, as you assert.
So if my girlfriend, who is not in any special way computer savvy, but who knows how to experiment with something until it does what she wants (and who isn't paralyzed by the fear of screwing up), can figure this out... then it can't be that non-obvious.
I have to admit, though, I was pretty surprised when I saw that she could do this. I was incredulous, in fact. But she showed me how she did it, and after she showed me, I smacked my forehead. "Damn, why didn't I think of that?" Well, it's because most people (like myself) don't bother creating iPod-only playlists inside of iTunes.
Like most Apple software, there are a lot of features in iTunes that aren't exactly hidden, but they're not in-your-face either; these little gems are often discovered by accident, or by reading a book of hints and tips. Many of these features are undocumented or poorly documented, something that is IMHO a flaw, but in keeping with Apple's philosophy that one should not need to read documentation to use a product.
(For those who are curious, I just called my SO to ask her, and she says there's a preference, either in iTunes or in iSync, that lets you turn off automatic music synchronization while separately turning on automatic synchronization of other things, such as contacts and calendars. Once you do that, you can manually copy music to your iPod and manually manage what's on your iPod, including creating iPod-only playlists that have songs not on your host computer's hard drive.)