Apple Blasted for "Genius" Ads

Not so Genius Apple's panned ads featured a Genius who helped a Mac owner on a plane make an anniversary film for his wife after forgetting the occasion, helped an expectant father make cards to send to the family while his wife was in labour, and advised a man who bought a PC that's "basically" a Mac.

Apple has removed a series of new Mac ads after they were deemed 'embarrassing', 'cringe-inducing', and `dreadful' by publications and Apple experts.

The three new adverts were broadcast in the US during the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics, and featured an Apple Genius helping various Mac owners in unlikely situations. But, unlike many of Apple's previous ad campaigns such as the Think Different campaign and the Get a Mac series, the new ads were widely criticised. Even former Apple executive Jean-Louis Gass& tweeted: "Ouch! Cringe-inducing new Apple 'Genius' ads for Mac. Put those back in the bottle."

The Mac maker has since pulled the ads from its YouTube channel and the Apple.com website. In what may be a coincidence, Scott Trattner, one of the team behind the ads,
has quit. He was an executive creative director at TBWA/Media Arts Lab, but is moving on to a post at agency 72andSunny.

While Trattner's latest ad campaign hasn't been well received, he had more success with previous Apple promotions, including the I'm a Mac campaign He had worked on commissions for Apple since 2004.

Geofencing Alerts Come to Find My Friends

Soon you won't have to ask your friends: "Are you there yet?" Your iPhone will be able Apple's a to tell 6 overhaul, ! you on their rthebehalf. As part of Apple’s IOS 6 overhaul, the company’s Find My Friends app (free, bit.ly/p4kYb8) is set to add a new geofencing notification system. This will allow you to set up an alert for any of your Find My Friends contacts — when they leave or arrive at a given location, you'll receive an alert.

The app is, however, one part creepy, two parts useful. On the one hand, it's nice to offer people a way to check up on your journeys. For example, when I lived in California, I'd make the drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles to visit my folks. Once Find My Friends came out, I made my mother use the app rather than call me every few hours to check on my progress up or down the coast; with geofencing, she automatically received an alert when I finally reached my apartment. (And it's a lot easier to remember than sending a "Home safely" text message at two in the morning after you've been driving for six hours.)

However, like all location-aware services, this only works if your contacts are people you trust. Once you allow a friend to add you, they have access to your location and geofence alerts unless you remove them; given that, you may not want to allow everyone in your contacts list to follow you on Find My Friends.

Adding a geofence alert may also wear down both your device's battery and your friend's. Sure, it's nice to know when your friend arrives at the pub, but they may prefer sending you a text message to having their phone battery drained.

Potential uses and politics aside, these alerts are in the same vein as iOS 6's call-rejection features: they're yet another way for us to automate messages rather than feel the obligation to text Or Call. — SERENITY CALDWELL

Four Easy-to-Miss iOS 6 Improvements

    Not every new iOS feature gets its fair share of time in the spotlight. We may be focusing on Siri and Maps when it comes to Apple's next mobile operating system, but the update promises a number of smaller changes that are each impressive in their own way. Here are some iOS enhancements that you might have overlooked during Apple's iOS sneak peek at WWDC back in June.

New Share Screen In iOS 5, when you tap to share a photo, you get a long list of sharing actions to choose from — posting to Twitter, sending an email or iMessage, and other options. iOS 6 adds Facebook sharing as an option — part of the systemwide Facebook integration planned for this update, along with sharing to various Chinese social networks. (That's a nod to how important the Chinese market has become to Apple.) But the company has decided against cramming more buttons into that panel. Instead, iOS 6 will present you with a new icon-based sharing screen. It uses these icons to represent the apps and services with which you can share your content.

Spotlight Tweak If you have lots of apps, sometimes it's hard to figure out precisely which home screen they're located on. In iOS 6, Spotlight makes that a smidgen easier by listing the name of the folder in which a particular app is nestled when it appears in the search results.

Reminders Improvements Apple introduced the Reminders app in iOS 5, and it gets some helpful new options in iOS 6. Apple says you can now set location-based reminders from the iPad. Even better, you can manually enter.

Time to Share iOS 6's sharing screen offers an icon-based view — not unlike the iPhone's home screen — in contrast with the list-based approach of iOS 5. addresses where you want reminders, a feature currently missing from Reminders; at present, you can only set reminders for locations linked to addresses in your existing contacts.

Also new in Reminders is the ability to reorder your tasks as desired. And Apple told developers that iOS 6 includes a new Reminders API, which should make it possible for

third-party apps to integrate with the Reminders database. That means you can use Siri to set reminders, which will in turn appear in your third-party task-management app of choice.

Siri and Twitter We mentioned this in Sit-i's New Tricks (see page 23) but it bears repeating: if you link your friends' Twitter usernames to their Contacts entries, Siri automatically translates their real names into their Twitter handles as you dictate.

So if I say, "Tweet 'Excellent dinner last night with Jason Snell, Dan Moren, and Serenity Caldwell," Siri automatically composes a tweet like "Excellent dinner last night with @jsnell, @dmoren, and @settern."

- LEX FRIEDMAN

Copying Samsung Told to Pay Apple $1bn

A jury in California has found Samsung guilty of willfully copying Apple's iPad and iPhone

    Samsung must pay Apple $1.05bn (about £660m) for infringing several patents in its tablets and smartphones, a California jury has decided. The verdict came after a month-long trial that had grabbed headlines around the globe.

    The verdict ended a trial between the two companies. In most instances, the jury found Samsung products infringed Apple's patents. The case also included claims by Samsung that Apple had infringed its patents, but the jury found none of those claims were valid.
    The case, which ran from Monday 30 July until Friday 24 August, saw Apple try to prove that Samsung had wilfully copied the design of the iPad and iPhone, while the South Korean giant tried to disprove Apple's patents, claiming they were invalid. Highlights include d a damning Samsung email that discussed the impact of the iPhone and a "crisis in design" at Samsung The email said the difference between Samsung and Apple smartphones was like "a difference between Heaven and Earth".
    Samsung's defence rested on proving that Apple's patents were not valid, attempting to use `priOr art' to disqualify the iPhone maker's patents. Apple, unsurprisingly, dismissed these early examples as not identical to its own patents.
    At times, it seemed like Samsung's legal team was grasping at straws, and at other times that they were just inept. For example, it emerged at one stage that one of its lawyers didn't have a licence to practise law in the court.

Lookalike Jurors found that Samsung had willfully copied the design of Apple's iPhone and iPad.

Willful infringement

    The verdict is a huge win for Apple, although the award was less than half of the $2.75bn (£1.73bn) in damages Apple was seeking. However, since the jury found Samsung guilty of wilful infringement of certain patents, Judge Lucy Koh could triple this.
    An Apple spokesperson said: "The mountain of evidence presented during the trial showed that Samsung's copying went far deeper than even we knew." Samsung was quick to fire out a statement claiming Apple is engaging in "outright abuse of patent law, not pursuit of innovation".

Seeing Double Samsung was also found guilty of copying other elements, such as icons.

    In a separate statement, the company argued: "It is unfortunate that patent law can be manipulated to give one company a monopoly over rectangles with rounded corners, or technology that is being improved every day by Samsung and other companies."
    Samsung claims that other trials, in the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and Korea: "Have previously ruled that we did not copy Apple's designs. These courts also recognised our arguments concerning our standards patents."
    While it's true that the simultaneous verdict of a Seoul jury found Apple guilty of copying some Samsung patents, Samsung was also found guilty in that case. The verdict by a UK judge that Apple can't claim that Samsung copied the iPad because "it's not as cool as the iPad" will go to appeal this autumn.
    The trial might be over, but the battle will rumble on for some time. Judge Lucy Koh has scheduled a hearing for 20 September, where the two sides will argue over removing the current injunction against the Galaxy Tab 10.1.
    An Apple request for eight new injunctions isn't due to be heard until 6 December. Apple is also seeking to add the S3 to its list of offending items. Samsung has confirmed that
it will appeal.