Icontrolpad Updates!


Dauric said:
Fishbong said:
Maybe Apple could sue craig for "enticing people to jailbreak iphones" :D
Also, what's all this talk about the DMCA?
Do you think your American law is valid worldwide?
Craig, I understand that the controller is able to interface with a variety of devices, but look at your web-page, it's focused almost entirely on the iPhone, and Apple is notorious about being hostile towards third party developers, especially ones that don't pay apple their licensing fees. Test it with other devices, publish about interfacing it with Droid and other devices, Cover Your Ass!

Agreed!
 
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I see what you're saying, but go in to any computer or car accessories shop and you wills see third party add ons.

We probably will add the google phone, but if we keep 'hiding' from apple, where would that stop?
 
craigix said:
I see what you're saying, but go in to any computer or car accessories shop and you wills see third party add ons.

We probably will add the google phone, but if we keep 'hiding' from apple, where would that stop?

Yeah, and most of those accessories are general purpose and predate the iPhone (car chargers, belt pouches, mic/speaker systems, Bluetooth headsets, etc.). Your gaming controller, if their patent is as close to your device as you say, has drawn the attention of their IP lawyers, and it's attention most small businesses don't survive.

And I don't see it as "Hiding" from Apple, I see it as not supporting their line of hardware, and this is nothing new. People build 3rd party accessories for Sony products all the time, Nintendo too. the IBM architecture became Microsoft's 90% market share in no small part because people could freely develop software and hardware without "approval" from IBM. Apple has a habit of starting out with something innovative (like the first floppy drives) but ultimately they end up shooting themselves in the foot by not allowing developers like yourself to create new and interesting peripherals. Their attitude with the iPhone and the iPad is nothing different than they've ever done before, and if they want to chase away developers with new peripherals and software by being pricks, that's their business decision.

As far as them patenting your controller... It sucks but Apple is just taking advantage of the fact that you didn't patent first, and it's not (completely) Apple's fault that the patent system is the way that it is. Again, they've got the budget for the army of IP lawyers, just like any large corporation has, and frankly if you let this one go it wouldn't change squat. there's no 'slippery slope' here, at least not in that direction. If your only product was the iControlpad I'd be of the opinion that you should fight as far as you want to, bankrupt yourself for ideals and whatever no skin off my nose, or really anyone else's.

...however...

You're deeply involved in the Pandora, a far more interesting project, an open-sourced platform that someone could turn in to a phone and your response (I assume) would be "That's Cool!" with plenty of proper attribution, unlike Apple's response. With Microsoft acting more and more like Apple it's my opinion that small-developers building hardware that is independent of a specific OS is a very important thing to support. I preordered a Pandora in part because I want to see where you guys take the concept next. I don't know how the Pandora's specific finances work out, but I suspect that if you had already had to blow a lot of money fighting Apple there's a lot of things that you wouldn't have been able to accomplish that you've had to invest above and beyond what OPLtd. had anticipated in order to get Pandora where it is. Pandora's not in the customer's hands yet, shit can still happen. If you can get the Pandora delivered, and make plans accordingly to keep OPLtd out of the Apple/iControlpad legal -and- financial considerations, then fight the good fight and all that rot.

In short I'm saying: "Pick your battles wisely." Apple prevents you from making yet another snap-on controller system by ganking the patent out from under you, the battle lines will not have changed. If fighting this battle creates 11'th hour difficulties for the Pandora, a fairly unique piece of hardware with a -very- unique background, I find that possibility far more distressing than what is ultimately 'business as usual'.

Of course this is all my own $0.02
 
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craigix said:
[...] but if we keep 'hiding' from apple, where would that stop?
If you do, your business will stay alive. If this was about some human rights or whatever, you could do the David and fight. It's just about money though, so take the path of least resistance ;)
 
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craigix said:
Whatever you run on the iPhone is what makes the ICP work with the iPhone, the ICP does not 'hack the iphone' in any way.

It's just a controller, it would equally work on the PC if you wrote software for it, or, as has been said, the google phone.

if it does not work with the OS directly so that each games have to explicitly support the ICP specifically (and not any generic controller addon) it'll be really easy for Apple to block your device (at least on non-jailbroken iPhones): refuse ANY apps that support it.

they'll just reject my game saying that the included support for 3rd party add-ons would confuse users and is not compliant with Apple's User Interface Guidelines or some other BS.

Patent or no Patent, if they don't want it they'll block it one way or another. (I hope not)
 
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Dauric said:
No, the jailbreaking issue doesn't change the patent situation, which in the U.S. patent law "is he who patents first wins" with a few limited exceptions, and in recent years the U.S. patent office has been granting patents for things that otherwise should be included in those exceptions (AOL's patenting history as one particularly shining example). Moreover they've been granting them predominantly to large companies, and not to individuals and startups, in no small part because the patenting process has become rather arcane and labyrinthine, and the big companies are the ones that have the money to spend on a small army of patent and IP lawyers*.

The USPTO observes the first-to-invent law, not first-to-patent. It's possibly the only country in the world that follows it; the rest of the world follows the first-to-file law. Not sure if you just meant that the first person to file would probably have an easier time in court. :p

It's the fuzzy gray area that I'm worried about for iControlPad, the part that requires proof that the inventor was diligently working to patent it.

Wiki entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_to_file_and_first_to_invent

The United States uses a first-to-invent system, unlike most other countries in the world. Invention in the U.S. is generally defined to comprise two steps: (1) conception of the invention and (2) reduction to practice of the invention. When an inventor conceives of an invention and diligently reduces the invention to practice (by filing a patent application, by practicing the invention, etc), the inventor's date of invention will be the date of conception. Thus, provided an inventor is diligent in actually reducing an application to practice, he or she will be the first inventor and the inventor entitled to a patent, even if another files a patent application, constructively reducing the invention to practice, before the inventor.[2]

However, the first applicant to file has the prima facie right to the grant of a patent. Should a second patent application be filed for the same invention, the second applicant can institute interference proceedings to determine who was the first inventor (as discussed in the preceding paragraph) and thereby who is entitled to the grant of a patent. Interference can be an expensive and time-consuming process.

The Wiki page also has a bunch of references to some interesting articles for and against the U.S.'s first-to-file law. Having seen how difficult it is to get a patent, what with the cost of it all, I'm all for the first-to-patent system. First-to-file just means "he who has more money and more legal contacts wins."

I've been having a rather 'healthy' debate on facebook regarding all this. My opponent being an Apple proponent who's had the Apple veil pulled over his eyes for a long, long time (not surprising, considering he owns Apple stock). He believes Apple has done no wrong in this, neither legally nor morally.

Craig, I'm with you and your crew all the way. What Apple has done is downright dirty. It annoys me to no end that there are actually people out there that think what they've done is fine just because it could be 'legal', or because they could win this one in court.
 
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Dauric said:
Lockpicks require a license to own, if you're not a registered locksmith you can be arrested just for having them because they have no legal use to anyone that doesn't work on locks for a living, so yes there are cases where that is the situation.
In some countries, this may be the case - however, in most US states, and in most of the EU as far as I'm aware, lockpicks are perfectly legal to own - of course, they tend to make police suspicious if you're caught with them, but just possessing them and in most places carrying them is not a crime.

(The situation with software is probably analogous. It may be possible to prosecute breaking copy protection under the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA, but I'm not aware of any case where a regular user was prosecuted for doing this non-commercially, and certainly possession of tools or software to do this is not necessarily illegal.)
 
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-Tj- said:
Craig, I'm with you and your crew all the way. What Apple has done is downright dirty. It annoys me to no end that there are actually people out there that think what they've done is fine just because it could be 'legal', or because they could win this one in court.

I think Apple is full of shit, but they've been that way for a long time. I don't think that what they're doing is "Fine", rather I'd like to see competing devices grind them to dust precisely because Apple engages in this shit. Win or lose in court that's not the problem, and it's rarely the aim of any company that engages in this kind of legal-wrangling. They want to bleed their competition.

If it was just the iControlpad that Craig is working on, then fight on. But he's not just working on a third-party peripheral, He's the head of the Pandora project and I haven't gotten the one I preordered yet. If Apple bleeds Craig -just enough- that he's unable to see the Pandora through there's around 1.6 million dollars ($400 X 4,000, not including accessories) invested by customers in the project that could go up in smoke, and those of us that want an open-sourced portable get to be stuck with systems that need to be jailbroken.

And if it's between -another- third party controller peripheral, and a community supported Linux pocket-portable that is designed with community support, community peripheral development, encourages people to develop software and let that software stand on it's own merits (rather than requiring "approval" from on-high), then I'd rather Craig invests his time and money in the Pandora, and only fight Apple on this if he's absolutely sure Pandora won't get hit.
 
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I hope my quote isn't in there because you thought I thought you were against Craig. :p My quotes regarding patent law in the U.S. and my personal thoughts on the matter of Apple's misdeeds were separate.

I really don't think Craig and Co. would drop Pandora just because they needed the funds to fight Apple, though. If anything, I would think they'd want to sell more Pandoras to bring in more money. Besides, haven't they pretty much invested all that money into making the product already? I was under the impression that pretty much everything was already paid for: the cases, the boards, the screens, etc. If anything, all that seems left to pay for is shipping, but I haven't been following this whole thing from the very beginning.

I'm in the same boat. I have a Pandora on order that I really, really want, mainly because I'm tired of having to continually break the firmware of other platforms just to make it do what I want it to. I wouldn't want to see it go under just because of the iControlPad thing.

... hold up, I just realized something. The patent images that have been floating around don't say "iPhone" or the like specifically. In fact, they say "touch screen" and "portable device." Doesn't that mean that ANY of the add-ons that they've described in their patent that merges with a "touch screen portable device" is at risk of being sued by Apple?
 
So does today's announcement of Multitasking on the iPhone OS4 affect the iCPad at all?

I'd postulated a while back about a background app running that would allow the iCPad to emulate screen presses and accelerometer movements, which would more or less enable it to be used in any game regardless of whether or not the game directly supported the iCPad.

Now that multitasking is a reality for the iPhone, counldn't the devs make something like this as a companion app for the iCPad that runs in the background, submit it to Apple for legitimate download from the App store, thus allowing the iCPad to be usable without a jailbreak?

Cause that would be AWESOME if we didn't have to jailbreak to use the iCPad.

Craig? Care to weigh in on this idea?
 
I read about how the multi-tasking works, from what I gather it's not "true" multi-tasking, it's done through API's programs are only allowed to reach out to other programs; mainly system apps through specific API's the ones demonstrated and listed were the gps, maps, audio, and push notifications and some others.

check under multi-tasking
http://developer.apple.com/technologies/iphone/whats-new.html

anyway, I am fairly certian what you mention still will not be supported
 
Well now the iPhone supports bluetooth keyboards, I can see integrated cases that consist of a D-pad (mapped to the up down left right keys) and some buttons (mapped to whatever keys).
 
Illuminerdi said:
I'd postulated a while back about a background app running that would allow the iCPad to emulate screen presses and accelerometer movements, which would more or less enable it to be used in any game regardless of whether or not the game directly supported the iCPad.
Somehow I don't think Apple / developers of serious-business games would want to let you send fake user-input events to their programs.
I guess they could have something like Qt does where application-generated events are labelled "fake" by the UI system, and you can choose to ignore them, but that sounds like an API change, which I think most Apple and Apple-related developers would dislike.

It would be nice, though.
 
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